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 · Columns · Entablatures · Proportion
The Doric column grew taller and its entablature lighter
Read the age of a Doric order from its proportions: the oldest columns are little more than four diameters high, the finest Greek ones five and a half to six and a half, the Roman seven and a half to eight; as the column rose, the architrave grew lower.
archaic ≈ 4 D → classical 5½–6½ D → Roman 7½–8 D
Mauch draws five Greek Doric orders at one scale and in date order, from the squat columns of the Temple of Ceres at Paestum to the slender Nemea temple, so that the change can be seen at a glance. He puts it down partly to a general refinement of taste and partly to experience of the strength of stone: early architraves were made very deep, about three-quarters of a diameter, and so short that only one triglyph fitted over each bay.
After Pericles, he says, the column rose and the architrave shrank until the order lost its sturdy character, and the Romans carried the process further. Sicilian temples stay heavy and close-set, which he attributes to fear of earthquakes.
Related rules
Plan the principal hall as a long rectangle entered on its short side through a porch with two columns between the side walls and a vestibule, and put a great round hearth in the centre of the hall, ringed by four columns carrying a raised roof.
An arch pushes outward on its supports as well as down. For the same load and span the horizontal push grows as the rise falls: halve the rise and you roughly double the thrust.
H ≈ w·s² ⁄ 8f (uniform load w per metre, span s, rise f)
Make the corner columns thicker than the rest by a fiftieth of their diameter, because, seen against the open sky, they look thinner than they are.
D corner = D × (1 + 1⁄50); Parthenon: 1.95 m against 1.905 m
Set the outer columns so that they incline slightly inward, toward the cella wall, the middle columns of the fronts plumb on their own axes and the corner columns leaning both ways.
Parthenon: lean ≈ 6–7 cm over 10.43 m (≈ 1 : 150); the axes would meet some 2 km above the ground
Give the shaft a continuous convex curve from base to necking, departing from a straight taper by only a few hundredths of a diameter, so that the column seems to flex under its load rather than to pinch.
Parthenon: greatest departure ≈ 1.7 cm on a shaft 9.6 m high (≈ 1⁄110 D)
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The Doric column grew taller and its entablature lighter”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/mauch-doric-growth. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.