Antiquity
The temples of the Greeks and the vaults of the Romans lay the foundation for everything that follows.
It all begins with a wooden temple that the Greeks translated into stone. The Romans added the arch, the vault and concrete – and together they gave Europe a language of form that it still speaks, from the Pantheon in Rome to the temple fronts of banks, museums and churches all over the world.
The Greeks built with columns and straight beams; the Romans with arches, vaults and domes.
The orders – Doric, Ionic, Corinthian – are a system of proportions, not just decoration.
The Parthenon (447–432 BC) is built with small, deliberate curves that make it look straight.
Hellenism after Alexander the Great made architecture larger, richer and more theatrical.
Roman concrete of lime and volcanic ash made large vaulted spaces possible.
The dome of the Pantheon is about 43 metres wide and just as high – and still intact.
Vitruvius’s Ten Books are the only major text on architecture to survive from antiquity.
The Romans built the same building types across the empire – forum, basilica, baths, amphitheatre.
The first churches were basilicas, not temples.
In Nîmes, Trier and Segovia, Roman temples, town gates and aqueducts still stand in the middle of the cities.
The temple. The Greek temple was the house of the god, not a place of assembly. Inside the enclosed cella stood the cult statue; sacrifices took place at an altar outdoors, in front of the temple’s eastern entrance. That is why the exterior is the architecture: a frame of columns on a stepped base, an entablature and a low gable roof with triangular pediments filled with sculpture. The earliest temples, from the 8th century BC, had walls of clay and wood and roofs of thatch or tile. In the 7th century BC people began to build in limestone and marble, and much suggests that the forms were carried over from wood: the triglyphs of the Doric frieze look like the ends of roof beams, and the small drop-shaped pegs beneath them like wooden dowels. The temple was often set freely within a sacred precinct, a temenos, together with treasuries, statues and votive offerings. What identifies a Greek temple is precisely this free-standing ring of columns around an enclosed room, a low roof and a clear horizontal division into base, columns and entablature. Paestum in southern Italy has three well-preserved Doric temples from the 6th and 5th centuries BC that show the type better than almost anything in Greece.
The orders. The Greeks developed three orders. The Doric, from the mainland and southern Italy, is sturdy, has no base and a simple, cushion-like capital; the frieze is divided into triglyphs and metopes. The Ionic, from the coasts of Asia Minor and the islands, is slimmer, stands on a moulded base and has a capital with two spiral volutes. The Corinthian, with a capital of acanthus leaves, emerged in the 5th century BC and was at first used mostly indoors; it was the Romans who made it their favourite. The Romans later added the plain Tuscan order and the Composite order, which combines Ionic volutes with Corinthian leaves. Each order is a complete system in which the lower diameter of the column serves as the module and determines the height, spacing and dimensions of the entablature. That is why you can identify the order from a single column: look first at the capital, then at whether there is a base. And that is why the orders could be moved between buildings and periods for two and a half thousand years, from the Acropolis to Renaissance palaces and the concert halls of the 1920s. For a long time, mastering the orders was the very definition of an architectural education.
Stone and precision. The Greeks built without mortar. The marble blocks were cut so precisely that the joints are barely visible, and they were held together by iron clamps and dowels set in lead. The columns consisted of drums stacked on top of one another and ground against each other on site; the fluting was carved only once the column had been erected. The Parthenon, built in 447–432 BC by the architects Iktinos and Kallikrates with the sculptor Phidias as artistic director, is the best-known example. It is built of marble from Mount Pentelikon outside Athens, and almost no line in it is perfectly straight. The base curves gently upwards towards the middle, the columns lean slightly inwards, the corner columns are a little thicker, and each column swells slightly in the middle, a feature known as entasis. These refinements are usually explained as a way of counteracting optical illusions, so that the building does not look sagging or rigid, but they also give a sense of tension and life. The building was moreover painted: sculptures and ornaments had strong colours that have now almost entirely disappeared. The white antiquity admired by the Renaissance and Neoclassicism is thus partly a later construction. The Parthenon was wrecked in 1687 when a powder magazine kept there by the Ottomans exploded during a Venetian siege.
The Acropolis as a whole. The Parthenon does not stand alone. Under Pericles the whole Acropolis was rebuilt after its destruction by the Persians in 480 BC. The Propylaea, the monumental gateway by Mnesikles, greets the visitor at the top of the steep ascent. To the right, on a projecting bastion, stands the small Ionic Temple of Athena Nike. To the left lies the Erechtheion, an irregular temple that housed several ancient cults on different levels, and whose southern porch is carried by six caryatids, female figures in place of columns. The originals are now in the Acropolis Museum and the British Museum, and copies stand on site. The building works were partly paid for with money from the treasury of the Delian League, which was criticised even at the time. At the Panathenaic festival a procession passed through the city and up through the Propylaea past the Parthenon, whose frieze depicted just such a procession. The buildings are placed so that you see them at an angle, with two façades at once, and seldom straight on – a staging of movement rather than an axis. This distinguishes Greek site planning from that of the Romans and later the Baroque, where symmetry and straight sightlines rule. The Acropolis became a World Heritage Site in 1987 and is still being restored.
The city, the agora and the theatre. The Greek city, the polis, was both a place and a political community. Its heart was the agora, an open square for trade, trials and politics, surrounded by stoas – long colonnaded halls with shops and offices that gave shade and shelter. The Stoa of Attalos in the Athenian Agora was reconstructed in the 1950s and shows how they looked. Council houses, law courts and temples stood around the square. Theatres were built into hillsides, with seating in a semicircle around a round dancing floor, the orchestra, and a stage building behind. At Epidaurus, from the 4th century BC, the acoustics are so good that a whisper can be heard high up in the seating. Hippodamus of Miletus, active in the 5th century BC, is associated with the grid plan, in which streets cross at right angles and the blocks are of equal size. It was used in newly founded cities such as Piraeus and Priene, where you can still walk along the old streets today. Houses, by contrast, were simple: rooms around an inner courtyard, with plain walls facing the street. The grid idea recurs in Roman camps, in the ideal cities of the Renaissance and in the newly founded towns of the 17th century.
Hellenism. After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC his vast empire was divided between generals who founded kingdoms of their own in Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor. Greek culture spread as far as India, and architecture changed. It was no longer about the temples of city-states but about the glory of kings. Buildings became larger, richer and more theatrical, and the Corinthian order had its breakthrough. Alexandria in Egypt acquired a famous library and the lighthouse on Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, a gigantic tomb from around 350 BC, gave its name to all later mausoleums. At Pergamon the city was built in terraces on a steep hill, with the theatre cut into the slope and a great altar to Zeus whose frieze shows a violent battle between gods and giants. At the end of the 19th century the altar was moved to Berlin, where the Pergamon Museum was built around it. The Temple of Apollo at Didyma was so large that it was never finished. Hellenism also introduced large planned squares enclosed by colonnades, and architecture began to direct how people moved through the city. This was the Hellenistic world that the Romans encountered and conquered during the last two centuries BC.
Etruscans and Romans. The Romans learned a great deal from their neighbours the Etruscans, who dominated central Italy before the rise of Rome. The Etruscan temple was built of wood and clay on a high base, a podium, with steps only at the front and a deep colonnaded porch in front of the cella. The roof was wide and adorned with painted terracotta figures. The Roman temple type inherited the podium, the frontality and the steps: you see a Roman temple from the front, as a façade facing a square, not from all sides like the Greek one. The Maison Carrée in Nîmes, built around the time of the birth of Christ, is a well-preserved example, and it became the model for Thomas Jefferson’s State Capitol in Virginia in the 1780s. The arch of wedge-shaped stones and expertise in hydraulic engineering probably also came from the Etruscans; Rome’s great sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, goes back to the early days of the city. After the conquest of Greece, with the destruction of Corinth in 146 BC, Greek works of art, craftsmen and ideas flooded into Rome. The Romans then combined the Etruscan temple type, the Greek orders and their own engineering. The result was not a copy of Greece but something new, and it was the Roman version that later ages most often imitated.
Roman vaults. The Romans took over the Greek orders but built in an entirely different way. The key was the round arch, the vault and concrete. Roman concrete, opus caementicium, consisted of lime mortar, volcanic ash and pieces of stone or brick. The ash, pozzolana, named after Pozzuoli near Naples, allowed the concrete to set even under water. Walls were cast between skins of stone or brick, often in a net pattern or regular courses, and then faced with marble or render, so that the structural material is seldom visible. With barrel vaults, groin vaults and domes, large spaces could be covered without internal supports. This made it possible to build baths, basilicas and palaces on a scale the Greeks had never reached. Aqueducts carried water across valleys on arches several storeys high; the Pont du Gard in southern France, from the 1st century AD, is the best-known example. On the Colosseum, inaugurated in AD 80, the columns stand in front of the load-bearing arches, one storey for each order: Tuscan at the bottom, then Ionic and Corinthian. Here the order became decoration and rhythm rather than structure – an idea the Renaissance took up. Anyone who sees an arch framed by half-columns and an entablature is thus looking at a Roman device.
Roman building types. The Romans invented or perfected many of the building types we still use: the forum, basilica, baths, amphitheatre, circus, triumphal arch, aqueduct and apartment block. The forum was the centre of the city, with temples, law courts and trade. The Forum of Trajan in Rome, from the early 2nd century, had a vast basilica, two libraries and the 30-metre-high Trajan’s Column with a spiral frieze of the wars against the Dacians. Next to it Trajan’s Markets were built, a semicircular complex of shops and offices on several floors. The basilica was a large hall for the administration of justice and for business, with a tall nave and lower aisles. The baths, thermae, contained cold, warm and hot baths, exercise yards and libraries; the Baths of Caracalla from the 3rd century are enormous ruins today, and Michelangelo converted part of the Baths of Diocletian into the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. Triumphal arches such as the Arch of Titus and the Arch of Constantine celebrated victories. The same types were built throughout the empire, from Trier on the Moselle to Leptis Magna in Libya, and military camps were laid out with two intersecting main streets. Many European cities, such as Cologne, London and Vienna, still have streets that follow the lines of Roman camps or towns.
Houses and villas. Everyday Roman architecture is best preserved at Pompeii and Herculaneum, which were buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. The town houses of the wealthy, the domus, turned a closed façade to the street, often with rented shops on either side. Inside lay the atrium, a hall with an opening in the roof and a basin that collected rainwater, and further in a peristyle, a garden surrounded by colonnades. The walls were painted with illusionistic architecture, landscapes and mythological scenes; art history divides them into four Pompeian styles, and the paintings became a major model for 18th-century interiors once the excavations began. In Rome and the port of Ostia most people lived in apartment blocks, insulae, of up to five or six storeys, with shops on the ground floor and more cramped dwellings the higher up you went. Fires and collapses were common, and emperors tried to limit the height of buildings. In the countryside the rich built villas, both working farms and pleasure retreats. Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli outside Rome, from the 120s and 130s, is an entire small town of pavilions, baths, pools and copies of buildings the emperor had seen on his travels. It became a treasure trove for Renaissance architects and collectors.
The Pantheon and Vitruvius. The Pantheon in Rome gathers Roman engineering into a single space. It was built under the emperor Hadrian, around AD 118–128, but still bears the inscription from Marcus Agrippa’s earlier temple on the site. Behind a classical temple front with columns of Egyptian granite opens a round hall covered by a concrete dome, about 43 metres in diameter and just as high – the space holds an exact imaginary sphere. The dome becomes thinner towards the top, the aggregate lighter, and the sunken panels, the coffers, reduce the weight still further. At the top is an open eye, the oculus, about nine metres across, which is the only source of light. The building was consecrated as a church in 609 and has survived for that reason. Vitruvius was a Roman architect and engineer who, around the 20s BC, dedicated his Ten Books on Architecture to the emperor Augustus. In them he states that good architecture should be durable, useful and beautiful, firmitas, utilitas and venustas, and that the proportions of a building should reflect those of the human body. The text survived in copies through the Middle Ages but gained new life when humanists drew attention to it in the 1410s. It was printed at the end of the 15th century and inspired Leonardo’s famous drawing of a man in a circle and a square.
The first churches. When the emperor Constantine granted Christians the right to practise their faith in 313, they suddenly needed large spaces. Temples would not do – they were the houses of the gods, not of the congregation, and were associated with sacrificial cult. Instead the basilica was chosen, the Roman hall of justice, with a tall nave, lower aisles and a semicircular apse at one end where the judge had once sat and where the bishop and the altar now found their place. In front there was often an open courtyard, an atrium. Constantine had the Lateran Basilica built in Rome, as well as Old St Peter’s, begun in the 320s over the place where the apostle Peter was believed to be buried. It had five aisles and stood for some twelve hundred years before it was demolished for the present St Peter’s. Santa Sabina in Rome, from the 5th century, still gives a sense of what an early basilica was like: light, with long rows of columns leading the eye to the apse. For tombs and baptism, round or octagonal centrally planned buildings were used instead, such as Santa Costanza in Rome. Both types – the long nave and the gathered round space – shaped all of European church architecture thereafter, right down to village parish churches and the domed churches of the Baroque.
Rome in the provinces. The Roman Empire stretched from Scotland to the Euphrates, and everywhere the Romans built the same kind of town: a grid of streets, a forum, temples, baths, a theatre and an amphitheatre, and water brought in by aqueducts. In Nîmes in southern France stands the Maison Carrée, one of the best-preserved Roman temples, and outside the town the Pont du Gard carried water across the river Gardon on three tiers of arches. In Trier, one of the imperial residences, stands the Porta Nigra, a town gate of huge sandstone blocks from the late 2nd century. In Segovia in Spain the aqueduct runs straight through the town on arches of granite blocks laid without mortar. In North Africa and the Middle East whole Roman towns survive, such as Leptis Magna in Libya and Jerash in Jordan. The provincial towns show that Roman architecture was a system that could be exported: the same building types, the same orders and the same techniques, adapted to local stone and local climate. That is why Rome can still be seen today in Provence, on the Moselle and in Castile.
The classical legacy. Antiquity has never entirely disappeared from European architecture. The architects of the Renaissance in Florence and Rome measured the ruins and read Vitruvius, and Palladio turned the temple front into the entrance of country villas in the Veneto. His books spread to England, where Inigo Jones and later Lord Burlington built in the Palladian manner, and on to North America, where Thomas Jefferson took the Maison Carrée in Nîmes as the model for the state capitol of Virginia. In 18th-century Neoclassicism antiquity became the model for churches, museums and gateways, from the Panthéon in Paris to the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. In the 19th century parliaments, banks, courts and universities were given columns and pediments as signs of dignity and reason, and as late as the 1920s and 30s architects were building in a simplified classicism, from Stockholm City Library to the federal buildings of Washington. To recognise antiquity, look for the orders, the pediment and symmetry – on everything from country churches to office blocks.