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.
Each order has a character
Use the orders according to their character: the Doric for strength and gravity, the Ionic for a middle dignity, the Corinthian for delicacy and splendour.
Vitruvius calls this decor, propriety: temples to Minerva, Mars and Hercules should be Doric, to Venus, Flora and the Nymphs Corinthian, and to Juno, Diana and Bacchus Ionic. Renaissance writers transferred the idea to Christian and civic buildings, and eighteenth-century France developed it into the theory of caractère.
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.
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.
Give the flight of steps before a temple an odd number, so that one who starts with the right foot will also set the right foot first on the top.
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
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Each order has a character”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/orders-character. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.