The classical temple
Vitruvius’s temple types (Book III–IV), built from any order and intercolumniation.
The rules it illustrates
The column must stand free. Let columns stand free, round and upright, carrying a straight entablature directly; do not engage them in walls, replace them with pilasters, or set them on pedestals.
Firmness, commodity and delight. Every building must satisfy three demands at once: it must stand up (firmitas), serve its purpose (utilitas), and give pleasure to the eye (venustas).
The height of the pediment. Divide the whole front of the cornice into nine parts; give one of them to the height of the tympanum, measured at its centre.
Triglyphs over every column, and square metopes. Set a triglyph over the axis of every column and over the middle of every intercolumniation (or two, in a wider bay); make the metopes between them as wide as they are high.
An anta as wide as the architrave it carries. Where the architrave runs on over the end of a wall, widen the wall’s end into an anta at least as broad as the architrave, so that the beam has a full bearing and the wall looks able to take it, even if the wall itself is thinner.
The three purposes of a portico. Give a portico three jobs: to shelter those who arrive, to mark the main entrance, and to give the building dignity and character with its depth of light and shade; proportion it, as a rule, like a temple front.
Where it appears in the book
In the styles Ancient Greek, Neoclassical.
In the chapters What Is Architecture?, Post and Lintel, The Doric Order, The Ionic Order, The Corinthian Order, The Temple, Enlightenment and Revival.