The Doric Order

The Doric is the order of the Greek mainland and the Greek colonies of Sicily and southern Italy, and it is the one in which Greek architecture reached its most concentrated perfection. Its column rises directly from the platform without a base; its capital is a plain cushion (echinus) under a square slab (abacus); its frieze is divided into alternating triglyphs and metopes. It is severe, powerful and, because of that frieze, surprisingly difficult to design.

From timber to marble

The earliest Greek temples, of the eighth and seventh centuries BC, were built of mud brick and timber. When they were rebuilt in stone, around 600 BC, the builders seem to have kept the forms of the carpentry: the triglyphs look like the ends of beams, the guttae under them like the wooden pegs that fixed a board, the mutules under the cornice like the sloping ends of rafters. Vitruvius tells the story this way in Book IV, and although modern archaeologists debate the details, the idea that the Doric is petrified carpentry explains why its parts fall where they do.

On finding that, in a man, the foot was one sixth of the height, they applied the same principle to the column, and reared the shaft, including the capital, to a height six times its thickness at its base.

Early Doric columns were squat (five diameters or less), with broad, flattened capitals that spread far beyond the shaft, as at the Temple of Hera at Paestum. Over two centuries they grew more slender and their capitals tauter. The Parthenon’s columns are about 5½ diameters high; Vitruvius, four centuries later, makes the Doric seven; the Renaissance made it eight.

The rhythm of triglyphs

The Doric frieze sets the order its great puzzle. The rule is simple: a triglyph stands over the axis of every column and over the middle of every space between, and the metopes between triglyphs are square. But this ties the spacing of the columns to the dimensions of the frieze. With a triglyph one module wide and a metope one and a half, the columns must be set at intervals of five modules (one triglyph between) or seven and a half (two). The Doric cannot be spaced at will.

The corner conflict

At the corner of a building the rule breaks down. If the last triglyph is centred on the corner column, as the rule requires, the frieze must end with half a metope, an awkward, unfinished-looking fragment. The Greeks disliked this so much that they moved the triglyph to the very corner of the frieze instead. But the corner column is centred under the architrave, and the architrave is narrower than the frieze is long, so the triglyph now stands off the column’s axis. To reconcile the two, they either stretched the last metopes or (the classic solution) moved the corner columns inward, making the corner intercolumniations narrower than the others. This is called corner contraction.

Vitruvius admits the difficulty and uses it as a reason to avoid the Doric for temples altogether. The Romans and the Renaissance generally accepted the half-metope; it is what you see in Vignola and Palladio. Architects have argued about it ever since, and for many the corner conflict is precisely what makes the Doric the most intellectual of the orders: a system whose own logic cannot be satisfied everywhere.

The refinements of the Parthenon

The Parthenon (447–432 BC), built by Iktinos and Kallikrates under the supervision of the sculptor Pheidias, is the most perfect Doric building, and it is almost entirely made of curves. Its platform is not flat but rises by about 11 centimetres at the centre of its long sides; its columns lean slightly inward; the corner columns are a little thicker than the rest, because, as Vitruvius explains, they are seen against the sky and would otherwise look thin. Every column swells with entasis. These refinements were rediscovered by English surveyors in the 1830s and measured precisely by Francis Penrose in 1851.

No one knows for certain why the Greeks went to such trouble. The traditional explanation, going back to Vitruvius, is optical correction: a long straight line appears to sag, a row of vertical columns seems to splay outward. Another is that the curves give the building a subtle life that a mechanically straight structure lacks. Whatever the reason, they required every block of the building to be cut to a slightly different shape, which was an extraordinary feat of craftsmanship.

Doric after the Greeks

The Romans made the Doric lighter and more decorative: they gave it a base, made the capital smaller, and often left the shaft unfluted. The Renaissance followed Rome, and for two centuries the Greek Doric was almost unknown. When travellers such as James Stuart and Nicholas Revett published accurate drawings of Athens in the 1760s, the baseless, massive Greek Doric became a sensation, a symbol of primitive strength and moral seriousness for the architects of the Greek Revival.

℟Each order has a character

Use the orders according to their character: the Doric for strength and gravity, the Ionic for a middle dignity, the Corinthian for delicacy and splendour.