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 · Modules · Entablatures · Proportion
The Doric module
Divide the front of a Doric temple into modules; the column’s thickness is two modules, its height with the capital fourteen, the capital one, the architrave one, and the triglyphs one and a half high and one wide.
M = ½ D; column = 14 M; capital = 1 M; architrave = 1 M; triglyph = 1 × 1½ M; metope = 1½ × 1½ M
The module ties the whole façade together: a tetrastyle front is divided into 27 parts, a hexastyle into 42. Because triglyphs sit over every column axis and midway between, and metopes must be square, the Doric order cannot be spaced freely: its intercolumniations come in steps of 2½ modules.
Related rules
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
A Doric frieze cannot obey all three of its rules at a corner: triglyphs over the column axes, a triglyph turning the corner, and metopes as broad as they are high. One of them must give way.
displacement of the corner triglyph = e − t⁄2 (e = half-depth of the architrave, t = triglyph width)
To end the frieze with a triglyph at the corner and keep every metope square, move the corner column inward: make the last intercolumniation narrower than the others by the amount the corner triglyph is displaced.
contraction c = e − t⁄2; Parthenon: 4.29 m normal, 3.68 m at the corners (c ≈ 0.61 m)
Keep every triglyph centred over a column and every intercolumniation equal, and finish the frieze at the corner with a half-metope half a module wide.
corner semi-metope = ½ M (Vitruvius); equal intercolumniations throughout
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The Doric module”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/vitruvius-doric-module. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.