Earls Court Living

The ancient Greeks loved columns. The Romans loved whatever the Greeks loved. But ancient architects were not free to invent their own columns. There were accepted types or orders which had to be adhered to.

Our knowledge of the orders comes from De Architectura, written by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio in the 1st century BC. It is the only complete architectural work to survive from antiquity. The orders he detailed were the Doric, Tuscan, Ionic, Corinthian and Italic. In 1537 Sebastiano Serlio (1475

– 1554), an Italian architect, published L’Architettura which codified the five orders. The Italic order was a late-Roman combination of elements from the Ionic and Corinthian orders, and Serlio renamed it the Composite.

An order is not merely a column. It is the whole of the column and the structure it supports. Both have to comply with the rules of the particular order they belong to. The rules specify the parts and also the proportions they must have to each other.

There are two main parts of every order: the column and the entablature. The column is fairly obvious. The entablature is what lies on top of the column. Both break down into smaller components.

Column

Plinth. It’s a disc of stone placed on the ground. The rest of the column sits on top of it. All the orders have a plinth, except the Doric. The Doric shaft stands directly on the ground. An elongated plinth (or two plinths with a narrower shaft in between) is a pedestal used as the base to support an object, like a statue.

Base. This is the base of the column which is wider than the shaft and is usually curved. It can include the following elements. The torus which is convex semi-circular beading round the column nearest the plinth. Above that is a concave recess right round the column called the scotia. On top of that is another torus. (Then the shaft). Like the plinth, the base does not appear in the Doric order.

Shaft. The shaft is the main part of the column. The Greek orders have fluting running down the shaft as decoration. The Roman forms do not. Tuscan is the only purely Roman form, but there is also a Roman form of the Doric. In both cases the shaft is simply cylinders of stone one on top of another to form a column without carved decoration.

Capital. The capital comes in two parts and sits between the shaft and the entablature. Structurally it distributes the load of the entablature to prevent the column splitting.

Abacus. The Abacus is just a slice of cylinder, like a round biscuit tin, directly under the entablature.

Echinus. The Echinus is equally boring in the Doric and Tuscan orders, just another biscuit tin, but this time underneath the first biscuit tin. But in the Ionic, Corinthian and Composite orders, the echinus is large, carved and elaborate. In the Ionic order the echinus is like the side view of a sleeping bag rolled up from each end to the centre and turned upside down and it’s called a Volute. The Corinthian echinus is like a carved bowl of flowers. The Composite echinus is a carved bowl of flowers with a wrapped sleeping bag on top.

Entablature

The entablature looks like a single carved beam, but the carving divides into three elements. From bottom to top, the elements are:

Architrave. The part of the beam nearest the column. It usually looks like a normal rectangular beam with a bit jutting out at the top edge like the eaves of a roof. Under the jutting bit, there is sometimes a band of decoration.

Frieze. The middle part. Perversely this is the one item where the Doric order is decorative and the rest are plain. The Doric can have two decorative elements: triglyph and metope. Triglyphs are stips of vertical fluting grouped together. Metopes are the rectangular blank spaces on the surface between groups of triglyphs. Under the triglyphs there may be little guttae, which are drop-like projections.

Cornice. The top of the whole structure. It is structured like a series of ledges on top of each other. The bottom of it may have dentils, like a row of embedded teeth.

 

IN THIS SECTION

Baroque
Palladianism
Classicism
Orders and columns
Neo-Classicism
Greek Revival
Domestic Revival
Gothic Revival
Italianate
Picturesque
Queen Anne Revival

(Columns and orders in the British Museum from 1753 to Norman Foster's roof)

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