Glossary · D
Doric
The oldest and sturdiest of the Greek orders, with a plain cushion capital and a frieze of triglyphs and metopes; the Greek version has no base.
Rules that use the word
The fluted shaft before the Greeks. Cut a shaft with sixteen shallow flutes or facets, give it a square abacus and a low round base: the “proto-Doric” column of the Middle Kingdom rock tombs at Beni Hasan.
The Doric corner conflict. A Doric frieze cannot obey all three of its rules at a corner: triglyphs over the column axes, a triglyph turning the corner, and metopes as broad as they are high. One of them must give way.
The door from the height of the room. Divide the height from floor to ceiling into three and a half parts and give two and a half to the opening; make a Doric door five and a half twelfths as wide as it is high (an Ionic one two-fifths), and narrow it slightly at the top.
The Doric module. Divide the front of a Doric temple into modules; the column’s thickness is two modules, its height with the capital fourteen, the capital one, the architrave one, and the triglyphs one and a half high and one wide.
Column heights in modules. Make the Tuscan column 14 modules high, the Doric 16, the Ionic 18, and the Corinthian and Composite 20, the module being half the lower diameter.
The five orders as a series. Rank the orders in a sequence from the plainest and strongest to the richest and most slender (Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite), each one diameter taller than the last.
Where it appears in the book
In the chapters What Is Architecture?, Post and Lintel, Walls and Openings, The Anatomy of an Order, The Tuscan Order, The Doric Order, The Ionic Order, The Authorities Compared.
A feature of Ancient Greek, Neoclassical architecture.
Nearby in the glossary
Dolmen · Dom-ino · Dome · Domus · Dormer · Dou · Double coding · Double dome