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.
Rules · Ornament · Proportion
The Greek furniture revived
Make the furniture after the antique: the chair as the Greek klismos, its broad back curved to the sitter and its legs swept out like sabres; the couch with one scrolled end; tables on a central pillar and claws or on lion monopodia; and give each piece the plain, broad surfaces and the ornament of the vases and reliefs it is drawn from.
Hope drew his chairs from the painted vases and grave reliefs of Greece, his tables and candelabra from Roman marbles, and the furniture of his Egyptian room from the antiquities of Egypt. The book was mocked at first, but its forms were taken up by the cabinet-makers, George Smith publishing a popular version of them in 1808, and they are the furniture of the Regency.
Related rules
Divide the inside of a dome into coffers that shrink in step with the meridians as they rise, so that their perspective deepens the dome and draws the eye to the light of the lantern.
Proportion every step so that twice its height plus its depth equals the length of a natural pace on the level: two feet, or 24 pouces.
2 r + g = 24 pouces ≈ 65 cm (modern practice: 60–66 cm)
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.
Make the architrave round a door or window as wide as a sixth part of the opening’s breadth, and dress the openings of the principal floor more richly than those of the storeys above and below, with a frieze and cornice, and on the grandest a pediment.
architrave = ⅙ × width of the light
Light the hall over the front door with a fanlight: a half-round light with bars radiating like the ribs of a fan, or, after 1770, an elliptical one, often with narrow lights at the sides of the door.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The Greek furniture revived”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/hope-grecian-furniture. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.