Classical Architecture

Chapter One

Ancient Greece

Starting in Athens

Any building put where the Parthenon is would look important. Held gloriously aloof from the everyday parts of the city, it is on a rocky plateau, the Acropolis, set apart from the rest of the city by cliffs (see Fig. 1). The building itself is a wreck. It can be seen from a great distance because of the lie of the land, and these days it is floodlit at night. From far away it makes a good impression, but when we get closer it is obviously no longer in use. The roof is missing, and so are most of the sculptures that used to embellish it. In the digital reconstruction, an idea of the building's shape is restored, but the life is missing (see Fig. 2). Nevertheless it has a reputation as one of the world's most beautiful buildings. In part that is because it has the status of a classic. Its beauty is not in doubt. If you do not find it beautiful, then it is your judgement that is at fault, not the building. We are educated to appreciate it.

Fig. 1 The view shows the Acropolis with the city of Athens in the background. On the Acropolis the ruined Parthenon is clearly visible on the right. The group of sunlit buildings to the left is the Propylaeion - the gateway building - with the small temple of Athena Nike in front of it. Further away, looking smaller and harder to distinguish, the Erechtheion is also visible.

Fig. 2 The Parthenon, Athens, 447-438BCE. Digital reconstruction of the most prominent classical temple.

The Parthenon is one of quite a small number of classical Greek temples to have survived - no more than fifty - some of them with just part of a single column upstanding in place. They are spread across the region that used to speak Greek, but modern national boundaries put them in different countries - the southern Italian mainland, Sicily and western Turkey, as well as the mainland and islands that are now in modern Greece. There are no surviving classical temples on Crete, although the father of the gods, Zeus, was supposed to have been born there.

Not all temples were classical in style. For example there are caves in the cliffs of the Acropolis that were used as temples. This book is about classical architecture, but not all the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome, which under a different heading might be seen as classical periods. Really we know very little about the everyday architecture of the ancient world because it has vanished, but the monumental buildings were more enduring - as they were intended to be. A classical building has columns, or - later - representations of columns. The façades of the Parthenon have columns going all the way round on all four sides. Within the space marked out by these rows of columns there is a closed building with walls that are solid except for a doorway at the end, the cella.

Fig. 3 The First Temple of Hera, Paestum, c.550BCE. An archaic temple - the oldest one illustrated in this book.

Le Corbusier was the most influential architect of the twentieth century. In his book Toward an Architecture there is a famous double-page spread with four illustrations that show two Greek temples paired with two vintage cars. The captions explain that we are looking at a temple at Paestum 600-550BCE (a Greek temple, built on land that is now in Italy, see Fig. 3) and the Parthenon 447-434BCE, and below them a Humber from 1907 and a Delage 'Grand Sport' of 1921. Le Corbusier's book first came out in 1922 when the second car was brand new and would have looked spectacularly sleek compared with the old Humber, which is a very early car, dating from the year in which Henry Ford produced his first Model T. The idea with the pictures is to notice that the temples differ from one another in the same way as the cars. The older one establishes the type, while the newer one is much more sophisticated and refined.

The temple at Paestum (which the ancient Greeks called Poseidonia) from the early sixth century BCE is now classified as 'archaic'. Its columns are used in the same way as at the Parthenon, going with a steady rhythm right round the building, but their shape is different. They taper much more noticeably as they reach the top, and their capitals spread out very wide. By contrast the Parthenon is called 'classical'. There are other, later buildings in a similar style, but they can be bigger and more ornate, and they are called 'Hellenistic'. The term 'Hellenistic' is used for the period between the death of Alexander the Great (323BCE) and the arrival of the Romans, starting with their conquest of Corinth in 146BCE. There is stylistic development across the 150 years - maybe five or six generations - that separates the temple at Paestum from the Parthenon, but now that another 2,500 years have passed we notice the similarities before we spot the differences.

When Did Architecture Become 'Classical'?

Words keep changing their meaning, so we have to pay attention to when they are being used. At the time when the Parthenon was built, nobody thought of it as either classical or Greek. 'Classical' is a word that was first used by the Romans to refer to the highest class of Roman citizens - it meant the same as 'patrician'. That sense is forgotten in current English, but if we think of 'classical architecture' as originally meaning 'posh architecture' we won't be far wrong. 'Classical architecture' - meaning broadly 'architecture modelled on Greek or Roman style' - was not used in English before the eighteenth century.

'Classical' also has a sense of being the best. Archaic architecture seems to have the right general idea and good intentions; classical architecture is refined and gets it just right; Hellenistic architecture is showy and overdone. I don't want to say that these judgements are right, but to point out that attaching the name 'classical' to a particular period means that we are saying that that period was in some sense the best. The earlier things are finding their way, the later things have lost their way, and the classical works are correct. Other things are judged against them. When we are talking specifically about ancient Greece, 'classical' normally refers to the fifth century BCE, but in a more general conversation it is used to refer to the style of the high-status architecture of that age and everything that has been influenced by it, at any time at all.

'Style' is another word that has changed its meaning. It starts in the Greek word for a column, stele. It is still used in this sense in the specialised language that is used in discussing classical architecture. The row of columns that goes round a temple is called a 'peristyle'. A temple with six columns across its front is called 'hexastyle'. If it has eight, like the Parthenon, it is called 'octostyle'. The temple's base - usually with three steps at its edge going right round the building - is called a 'stylobate', and the columns are placed on it. Buildings without columns are called 'astylar'.

Ancient Greece Was Not a Nation

Another word that has shifted in meaning is 'Greek'. There had been a Greek language from Mycenean times - a thousand years before the Parthenon was built - but never a country with a national border. The word really comes from the Romans, who had the idea of the Greek speakers living in a region (which they called 'Graecia'), but it was not a country with a unified system of government. In the same way, the Romans called the region where German speakers lived 'Germania'.

The Greeks called themselves Hellenes, but other words were used as well. In the Iliad, which dates from maybe two or three hundred years before the Parthenon, Homer calls them Achaeans, and by that he means all the Greeks who came together to lay siege to Troy. But the same word is also used to name one of the four ethnicities that the ancient people recognised in the region: Achaean, Dorian, Ionian and Aeolian. These took their names from the sons of Hellen, whose own name has become that of the modern country - Hellas in Greek - but English persists in using the Roman-derived 'Greece'.

For architecture, the important groups are the Dorians and the Ionians, who were not well defined in geographical or genetic ways, but came to represent a cultural polarity. The Dorians were portrayed as robust and military, with Sparta the city-state most distinctively associated with them. They were broadly associated with the territories of western Greece. The Ionians by contrast were associated with the east and with the idea of refinement and luxury. Athens belonged to that side of things, the culture being seen to have links with the landmass of Asia Minor (or Anatolia) where the modern nation Turkey now lies.

When the Parthenon was built the city-states were independent of one another - though alliances were made - and there was nothing like the modern nation. Athens was not then the capital city and not the most powerful state. Sparta had greater military power, and when Athens went to war with Sparta, Sparta eventually won (in 405BCE). Thucydides, an Athenian, lived through the years of conflict and witnessed some of the events. He wrote a history of the war, in which he comments that if you were to visit Sparta in the region of Lakonia, then you would think it was just a collection of villages, and wouldn't dream that it had been one of the greatest cities in the world. On the other hand, if you were to find the ruins of Athens, you would think it had been at...