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 megaron: porch, vestibule and hearth hall
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.
At Pylos the throne room is about 12.9 × 11.2 m, with a painted hearth some 4 m across and the throne against the right-hand wall. The four columns were of wood on stone bases and probably carried a lantern or clerestory that let out the smoke. The axial sequence of porch, antechamber and hall, with columns in antis at the front, is the ancestor of the Greek temple’s pronaos and cella.
Related rules
Make the timber column narrower at the foot than at the top, set it on a stone disc, and crown it with a fat cushion capital and a square abacus.
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)
Let one simple ratio govern the whole: at the Parthenon the lower diameter is to the axial spacing, the width of the stylobate to its length, and the height of the order to the width of the front, all very nearly as 4 is to 9.
D : axial spacing ≈ 1.905 : 4.296 ≈ 4 : 9; stylobate 30.88 : 69.50 ≈ 4 : 9
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The megaron: porch, vestibule and hearth hall”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/megaron-plan. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.