Glossary · O
Order
A column with its entablature (and optionally a pedestal), proportioned and ornamented according to one of the accepted systems: Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian or Composite.
See also: Column, Entablature
Rules that use the word
The two-storey church front. Front a basilican church with two storeys of the order: the lower as wide as nave and chapels, the upper as wide as the nave alone, joined by scrolls and crowned by a pediment.
The giant order. To unify a façade of two or more storeys, run a single order of pilasters or columns through all of them, from the base to the main cornice.
The undulating front. Let the wall of a façade curve in plan (concave, convex, concave) so that the front answers the street, the light and the space within, and the order bends with it.
Proportion is natural, like harmony. Hold that the beauty of the orders comes from fixed proportions that please by nature, as consonances do in music; where the ancients differ, the differences answer to circumstances such as distance and height.
From the atrium to the apse. Order the church as a single path: a colonnaded atrium, a narthex, the long nave drawn toward the altar, and the apse framed by a triumphal arch at the end of the axis.
Both-and, not either-or. Let an element do more than one thing and belong to more than one order at once: a wall that is both inside and outside, a column that is both structure and sign.
Where it appears in the book
In the chapters What Is Architecture?, How to Use This Book, Post and Lintel, Walls and Openings, Vaults, Domes, Proportion and Number, The Anatomy of an Order.
A feature of Ancient Greek, Ancient Roman, Renaissance, Mannerism, Palladian, Rococo, Beaux-Arts architecture.
Nearby in the glossary
Opus reticulatum · Opus testaceum · Orangery · Orchestra · Organic architecture · Oriel · Orthostat · Oval