Humans love to name things.

In the culturally rich and inventive locales of Classical Greece and Rome, artisans and craftspeople continued to create things needing names. Architects did their share of both designing and labelling a building’s structures, and the individual bits that composed them.

It was an effort to give order to a disordered world. The Orders of Architecture were a result of this continuing categorization. We know of the Orders thanks to Vitruvius, a Roman engineer and architect, who recorded them in his work, “De architectura”.

Male and Female Form

The appearance of columns of the earliest orders, the  Doric and Ionic, were compared by Vitruvius to the male and female form. He saw the manly Doric as stockier: its column averaging seven times taller than the thickness of its base. The more feminine proportioned Ionic looks slender in comparison, with a height composed of eight or nine diameters of the column’s base.

The Doric column takes a little less work to create, in part because it’s plainer in the amount of ornamentation. A simple example of this can be seen, and counted, in the number of its “flutes” -- its shallow, vertical grooves. Doric columns have twenty flutes and Ionic, twenty-four.

The Capital

The topmost portion of the column -- known as the “capital” -- continues this stereotypical male/female contrast. Vitruvius described the Ionic’s capital as “hanging down at the right and left like curly ringlets” of a lady’s hairdo. These curlicued “volutes” are very decorative when compared to the Doric capital’s flattop haircut.

Column Bases

Another distinction between the Doric and Ionic Orders takes place in the columns’ bases. Befitting their stoic appearance, early Doric columns had no base and rested directly on the pavement beneath -- the building’s “stylobate”. Eventually, some Doric columns stood atop a base composed of a “plinth” and “torus”, the formal names for block and donut shapes. Not to be outdone, the Ionic column sat upon two “tori” -- the plural of torus --  separated by a convex ring known as a “scotia”.

Nomenclature

In establishing names and Orders, Vitruvius and his contemporaries laid the groundwork for a language that allowed workers from differing traditions and skill sets to communicate more fluidly.

The next time you’re attending a gala in a turn of the century theatre or watching an episode of Downton Abbey, pause to see what nobody else is looking at: the columns behind and the mouldings above. They were all named and quantified long ago. 

Old is New

Knowing an “egg-and-dart” moulding seems trivial and even pretentious, but, were there such a thing as a time machine, you could travel back two millenia, sit with any dusty, old plaster worker and sketch those same oval and arrow shapes. No doubt, he’d smile and retrieve a clay mold of the same pattern you had just drawn. 

At some point these shapes and patterns have been etched into our cultural genome, their familiarity at once comforting and inspiring. Knowing them connects us with everyone else who knew them.