Elegant Trash

Sometimes, all too rarely for most of us, you have an Eureka! flash of inspiration and a wonderful insight is handed you. One of our favorite watercolors, New York City Trash Basket (created in 2003 for our exhibition Central Park at Didier Aaron, Inc. in Manhattan) was one such moment and we wanted to share the image and the story behind it here—if only to prove that we are after all contemporary artists, despite occasional protestations to the contrary!

We created a number of life-sized elevational watercolors for the Central Park show (here is a link to the NY Times review), the largest among them being well over a yard long or high. The idea behind the show was to make an æsthetic departure from our detailed historical elevations: to render objects and architectural details in the park with our usual attention to realism while presenting them at the scale of contemporary art. (Below, a life-sized one-point perspective of a marble vase at the Mall in the gallery.)

We particularly sought subjects that would translate into graphic images with an immediate visual impact, and when we came across one of these iconic wire-mesh trash baskets while scouting the park—as former New Yorkers, it is as evocative of Manhattan as one of Proust's madeleines—we had one of those ahah! moments.

Measurements and photos were duly taken and back in Paris the drawing was plotted out and rendered and, despite the unanticipated scale of the effort those few words gloss over (it seems always to be the case), the results did not disappoint. (The original watercolor is over a yard high, so do imagine an image exactly as big as the real thing.)

For the gallery etiquette we wrote:

Overlooked and overflowing, bent and abused and often obscured by black plastic liners, the ubiquitous New York City trash basket is found throughout Central Park. The minimalist geometry of its design embodies the dictum that form follows function and strikes the eye particularly by what is absent. The simple wire skein defines the void it surrounds and generates elegant geometry reminiscent both of Paolo Uccello's famed Renaissance explorations of perspective and the Op Art movement. And certainly the Warholian subject also evokes Pop Art. It comes as a slight shock that such beauty harbors Manhattan's refuse.

More prosaically, the watercolor depicts the Standard Expanded Metal Waste Basket, model #MO5539500 black, designed in the early 1980s by Corcraft Products of the NY State Department of Corrections and manufactured by the female inmates of the Albion state prison. Later, vertical re-enforcement bars were added as the mesh had a tendency to squash over time from the baskets being tossed back in place from the backs of sanitation trucks (as New Yorkers with windows facing the street all know, this basket-toss is best done at dawn).

Once we'd hung it among the other watercolors in the gallery, the Trash Basket became the mascot of the exhibition and was purchased by the New-York Historical Society for their permanent collection. In 2009 it was included in their exhibition, Drawn by New York, and we were bowled over to find that it had been hung at the very end of the enfilade of galleries, the culmination point of six centuries of works on paper depicting New York.

Today, this trash basket has been almost entirely replaced by a new, uglier design that nonetheless better survives the rigors of hanging out day and night on NYC street corners. But we are happy to report that new examples this classic design are still to be found within the park itself, the last bastion of elegant trash.

Eco-terrorism alert! The Eiffel Tower, world's largest garden trellis?

A serious project is under development to plant the Eiffel Tower, with work to begin as early as June if the Paris city council votes its approval, reported Le Figaro newspaper and CNN.

600,000 plants, sacks of growing medium and watering tubes together weighing 378 tons would be attached to the 1073-foot tall structure in a $96 million plan overseen by the Ginger engineering firm, Vinci Construction and the architect Claude Bucher.

Apparently the plants are already being raised in nurseries and a reduced-scale model of the tower has been built over a period of two years in a Paris suburb to test the idea's feasibility. The plants would be left to grow on the tower for four years, to be removed in 2016.

That in a nutshell is what is being reported, and it's hard to know where to start when faced with such monumental decadence, but let's begin at the beginning of the radical idea that urban structures can and should be a garden, which takes us, surprisingly, to Vienna in the mid-1980s and the Hundertwasser Haus, designed by the Viennese artist of the same name.

A piebald ode to the romanticized Teutonic vision of das Leben alternativ (or the counterculture) painted in a bright de Stijl palette, the idiosyncratic Viennese apartment block features a literal roof garden, trees planted in living rooms and undulating floors ("an uneven floor is a melody to the feet"). Both urban folly and provocation, the Hundertwasser Haus was a manifesto celebrating rustic handcraft and whimsical impracticality at a time of slick commercial atria sheathed in polarized glass sheltering rows of ficus trees, the iconic Trump Tower (below, the pink marble and polished brass atrium) being the apex—or nadir—of the trend.

More recently, the Parisian urban eco-gardener Patrick Blanc has been creating "vertical gardens" and gained great notoriety with his 2005 project at the Quai Branly Museum of First Peoples in Paris (below). Blanc, who obviously knows his plants, perfected the system of growing plants in pouches of planting medium irrigated by nutrient-rich water carried by a skein of drip lines.

Spectacularly lush and visually compelling, Blanc's sensuously cascading plant walls have become enormously popular with corporate clients wanting to make an eco-friendly statement with maximum visual impact. They are beautiful and truly stunning... and oh-so trendy. Affixed to a bare wall, as below, these vertical gardens can make a compelling statement and add immeasurable beauty, and quite simply are wonderful and nearly wondrous additions to most urban spaces, period.

But. Ah yes, there is always that "but," and in this case it's a big one: But the Eiffel Tower?

Is this eco- or ego-gardening? What madness possesses people to want to turn one of the most famous engineering feats of the 19th century, the symbol of France, into the world's largest scaffold for plants, which can after all be grown just about anywhere else? Why isn't this massive investment of time and resources being used to create, say, an innovative garden in Paris, instead of disfiguring and possibly weakening a great historical landmark?

Well, these are all rhetorical questions; you certainly know. That particular madness is of course trendiness. Fashion. Cool. Thinking one is right-thinking. And not a little bit of free-floating arrogance and self-referential decadence (BoBo nombrilisme, or "bohemian bourgeoisie navel staring" as it's known here). A corrosive brew indeed, and it is no surprise that this is occurring in Paris, world capital of fashion and when, for the first time, the younger generations have become bored with their past—a true sea change in France's self conception.

It is also proof that the 20th century's mental stupidity (for it is not even worthy of the word mentality) in treating the great monuments of our ancestors with disdain is alive and well and actually thriving. The poster child for that is of course the late Penn Station in Manhattan. In France, it is le feu Les Halles (below), the grandiose, old central market torn down under Pompidou (who suffered from Manhattan envy) to make way for a massive underground metro and suburban-train hub and a shopping mall with—you guessed it—hideously cheap atria lined with ficus trees. The White Hole, it is unaffectionately called here. Inevitably, it was so awful and so badly constructed that it is now being razed and replaced with a trendy new eco-friendly shopping mall, which will carry it along for another 40 years.

Other, lesser desecrations include Daniel Buren's infamous Two Platforms installation of 1986 in the courtyard of the Palais-Royal, home of the Ministry of Culture, and the more recent wrapping of the handsome beaux-arts-meets-art-deco façade of the old Louvre Department Store in aluminum spaghetti à la Cy Twombly, also perpetrated by the Culture ministry when it purchased and renovated the property to serve as an annex.

But Paris hardly stands alone here. A perfect American example of people-who-should-know-better-but-don't is the staff of Metropolitan Museum of Art, which since the late seventies (under go-go Tom Hoving) has seen fit to use its monumental beaux-arts façade as a banner support, even though there are flag poles in the plazas to either side that would be perfect for the purpose. One can only hope that the Met, trapped in 70s æsthetic amber with its pop-art colored banners, tired M® shopping bags and chunky tubular brass handrails, will bring itself into the 21st century responsibly and not plant its celebrated landmark façade but rather reveal and light it properly. (They might also—though no rush as it's only been a century or so now—finally get around to commissioning someone to carve those stacks of limestone piled atop the cornice into something resembling art, seeing as it is an art museum and not that poor.)

As for the Eiffel Tower, it has been used as a billboard for at least two decades now. First it was bathed with colored lights at night, copying the Empire State Building, then it received a dazzling star-like light-show for the millenium which sparkled for the first ten minutes of every hour (truly inspired, but apparently opening Pandora's box), and in 2008 (below) it became a propaganda poster for the ill-fated EU constitution, reduced to the Lisbon treaty. It has also been decorated to promote other such political ventures.

Now it may well become the world's largest trellis frame and most expensive and inefficient "carbon trap," to go with the French government's dubious obsession with the real carbon trap, carbon taxes.

"To the glory of France!"

The Corinthian Order

In comparison to the intellectual and even spiritual encodings that make the Doric and Ionic orders and their Egyptian forebears so resonant, the origins of the Corinthian order, the last of the three classical orders to emerge from Antiquity, is much more clear and its symbolic meaning much more self-evident.

The oldest known Corinthian column was found in the Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae in Arcadia, built by the architect Iktinos (who with Kallikrates designed the Parthenon) and dated to circa 420 BC. Curiously, the temple itself (above, an old photograph, before it was roofed for restoration) is Doric, with the Ionic employed within the cella, where a single, freestanding Corinthian column held pride of place. This unusual placement indicates that the column was likely meant to be a votive column and also makes the temple unique in that its architecture boasts all three of the Ancient orders.

During the next century, the Corinthian order remains an interior embellishment and its first documented exterior use occurs in Athens, at the famed Choragic Monument of Lysicrates (above and below), erected circa 334 BC. The diminutive cylindrical tempietto, raised on a cubic base, was crowned by a bronze tripod, the prize that the patron Lysicrates' choir had won in a competition in the Theatre of Dionysus.

The Greeks did not much care for the Corinthian order and employed it sparsely but the Romans used it for just about everything, and it is a bit surprising that this most practical of people chose the most ornate of the Greek orders to make their own. Doubtless, it was exactly the Corinthian order's inherent decorative qualities that most appealed to them, as well as it being the last and least-employed of the Greek orders. In a word, the Corinthian's malleability was key to its success in Imperial Rome: it could be adapted and embellished and its proportions revisited to suit any situation. (Below, a rare Greek temple using the Corinthian order, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens.)

Vitruvius credits the Corinthian sculptor and architect Callimachus with the order's invention, recounting the story that he was inspired by a grave marker for a wellborn girl left by her nurse (first illustration). She had set a basket upon the grave with a roof tile placed upon it to protect the offerings inside, the girl's favorite objects. In spring, an acanthus grew around the basket, its young stalks pressed into volutes by the overhanging tile. Callimachus happened to stroll by and had a Eureka! moment and the rest, as they say, is history—though likely mostly story.

Callimachus was famed for his bravura sculptural technique and is credited with being the first sculptor to undercut and drill marble to create greater relief in drapery, foliage and hair. The elaborately undercut acanthus foliage and volutes of the Corinthian capital, which demands just such sculptural virtuosity, does indeed argue for his authorship. (Below: an early capital from the Tholos at Epidarius.)

Admittedly, we do also find distant precursors in Assyrian architecture, following the same trail that we did for the Ionic, but the extreme ornamental complexity of the Corinthian order and its reliance on naturalistic acanthus-leaf decoration are sure signs that we should not bother to look too deeply for hidden meanings: the Corinthian is a decorative order, a product of Greece's 'baroque' period. It is a bravura flourish, a complex and contrived ornamental outburst—a self-conscious creation. Indeed it may well be that one of Vitrivius' mundane explanations finally happens to be true.

The Ionic Order

The Ionic order originated, unsurprisingly, in seafaring Ionia in the early 6th century BC. Culturally, the Ionians were thoroughly Greek and quite naturally they spoke Ionian, a Greek dialect.

Ionia itself was a small but economically and culturally powerful Greek province, actually a ridiculously small coastal enclave (no more than 90 x 55 miles in extent, located near Smyrna in present-day Anatolia, Turkey) that also encompassed the islands of Samos and Chios. Its major city, Miletus, was an important commercial center and Phocaea was a great port. Both cities spawned colonies, spreading Ionian influence throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and with Samos were the backbone of Ionian power and influence.

This loose confederation for a time banded together to form the Ionian League, which was an early and great center of Greek civilization. Its legacies are staggeringly outsized: the foundations of Greek philosophy, geometry and mathematics with the Ionian school of the eminent Thales and his followers Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, Archelaus, and Diogenes of Apollonia; the mystery school founded by Pythagoras of Samos, the great geometer and philosopher; and generations of brilliant artists and architects who deeply influenced the development of Hellenic art. In fact, if Western civilization was born in ancient Greece, then Greek civilization can be said to have been born in Ionia.

This Ionian cultural and intellectual explosion ignited in the 6th century BC, at the birth of the Ionic order, and Ionic temples began to appear on the Greek mainland in the following century. According to Vitruvius, the architects Rhoikos and Theodorus of Samos built the first of the great Ionic temples at Samos, dedicated to Hera, circa 580-560 BCE (above, its floor plan and a surviving capital). Though it stood but a decade before being leveled by an earthquake, the temple of Hera at Samos was a remarkably ambitious undertaking, famous throughout the Greek world. Quite simply, it was the first great Greek temple, its footprint large as a soccer field, rivaling in scale and architectural ambition the temples of Egypt. (Below, the temple of Artemis at Ephesius, comparable in period and scale.)

Here, at the very birth of the Ionic order, we are confronted with a truly monumental construction that forces us to rethink our notions of the scale of the Greek temple. To give some sense of this temple's massive size, the Parthenon's stylobate or plinth measures approximately 70 x 31 meters, nearly a third smaller. As Nancy Mitford would say, the temple of Hera at Samos put Greece—or more truthfully, tiny Ionia—on the map.

The Ionic Column

Ionic column shafts, more slender than the Doric, usually stand eight to nine column diameters tall and may be fluted or smooth. When fluted, they traditionally carry 24 flutes, as opposed to 20 for the Doric. The flutes are slightly separated, leaving a thin strip of unfluted column between them known as a fillet, as opposed to the Doric, where the flutes abut at an acute angle. Finally, Ionic columns have a ringed base and square pad that raises them off the stylobate, or temple plinth, an element the Doric lacks completely.

Its capital is far and away the Ionic order's most remarkable feature, and the capital's most important characteristic is its bi-fold symmetry, or directional orientation, in contrast to the Doric's radial unity. That the Ionic capital has clearly defined faces and sides is a crucial observation to keep in mind as we go digging through the byways of ancient civilizations looking for its predecessors. If it is a truism that "the lie is different at every level," then it also holds that the truth is also different at every level, and builds accretively, and the Ionic order presents us with a multitude of precedents and influences.

The Ionic capital's volutes, also popularly called "eyes," have led to the painfully simplistic speculation that the Ionic column can be interpreted anthropomorphically, with the fluted shaft depicting a woman's toga-clad body and the capital her head (and, one supposes, the volutes must then depict Princess Leia's hair).

Others have proposed that the spiraling volutes depict rams' horns or nautilus shells, and here we are moving much closer to the truth. The principle underlying both those physical forms is the Fibonacci sequence, a simple arithmetic progression that regulates and balances natural growth, including those rams' horns and nautilus shells and all matter of things from artichokes to tree branches, pine cones, fern heads and so on. You'll also find it topping the neck of classical string instruments such as violins, violas and cellos—the element called, appropriately enough, the scroll.

Fibonacci, otherwise known as Leonardo of Pisa, was the first to publish this arithmetical progression (0; 0+1=1; 1+1=2; 1+2=3; 2+3=5; 3+5=8; 5+8=13...) in 1202, gaining him lasting fame. But alas, like just about every other bit of knowledge of this nature, he was simply publicly disseminating elements of the ancient occult knowledge of the Egyptian mystery schools for the first time. In truth, this formula was part of the Sacred Geometry of ancient Egypt and was also known to the ancient Vedic civilization as well.

Out of Egypt (again)

And how did the occult knowledge of the ancient mysteries, the precious high knowledge of the Egyptian priestly class, escape Egypt to become known to Greece and then to the West? Through those wily, intrepid seafarers, the ancient Greeks, of course. A number of very old, very famous Greeks—among them Thales, Plato and Pythagoras—made quite some names for themselves after traveling to Egypt to become initiates of the mysteries.

These renowned sages were hardly solitary pilgrims. As we mentioned in our earlier post on the Doric, Greeks and Egyptians were carrying on a robust economic and cultural trade in the Archaic period and the Ionians were at its forefront; when the first Ionic temples were being built, Ionia was in the midst of an Egyptian trade boom.

According to Pliny, the very form of the great temple of Hera at Samos, a grid of 8 x 21 columns covering roughly 50 x 100 meters, evokes the Egyptian Labyrinth at Hawara, a vast mortuary complex of twelve courtyards (and according to Heroditus, who had visited) over 3000 rooms built for Pharaoh Amenemhat III, the last great king of the 12th dynasty. The Labyrinth (above, a recent computer-generated reconstruction) was one of the wonders of the Ancient world and far more famous in antiquity than the Great Pyramid. Tragically, the Romans used Hawara as a quarry and with customary thoroughness so completely effaced the complex that, even after major excavations, reconstructions of the Labyrinth are still based almost entirely on ancient descriptions. Nonetheless, Pliny specifically mentions the temple of Hera at Samos, with its dense grid of columns, as one of the world's great labyrinths, comparable to the Egyptian Labyrinth, famed for being so bewildering that one had to visit with a ball of string or a native guide. (Below, a view of the pronaos of the temple of Artemis at Ephesius.)

When we seek out the earliest recognizable Archaic precursors to Ionic columns, we first find ourselves on the isles of Lesbos and Troas, birthplace of the Aeolic capital, composed of two robust volutes bracketing a palmette. The Lesvs were great poets and pre-eminent seafarers and colonized the coast of Asia Minor (Anatolia, or contemporary Turkey), and the Aeolian city of Smyrna was admitted to the Ionian league circa 650 BC, unsurprisingly bringing us full circle back to Ionia's doorstep. (Below, an Aeolian capital from Neandria in Troas, an ancient city on the Turkish coast not far from Ionia).

Obviously, this abstracted floral motif is an adaptation of Egyptian lotus and papyrus capitals, and indeed one of the earliest recognizably Ionic capitals, which rotates the Aeolian volutes to link them horizontally, creating a pad, has been found in the Greek enclave of Naukratis in Egypt (below).

Assyrian Roots

Formally, the Ionic capital's directionality indicates that its earliest precursors were cap blocks meant to span and support beams and lintels, a construction technique most elaborated in Assyrian architecture. Egypt had fallen under control of the Assyrian empire in Archaic times, and a simple glance at early Assyrian capitals and particularly those used at Persepolis (both below), indicates that the ultimate inspiration for the Ionic springs from Assyria. (Though Persepolis was begun a century after the appearance of the Ionic, its architecture exhibits an extremely high level of refinement, indicating a long prior tradition.)

In fact direct proof of influence and exchange can be found in the remnants of the temple of Hera at Samos, where one finds sculpted stones bearing much the same doubled volutes as at Persepolis(below).

Clearly, the Assyrian capital holds a welter of meanings—those at Persepolis have three tiers of symbols: bulls, volutes and lotuses, like a triple-scoop ice cream cone. Other Assyrian precursors depict flowers, humans and rolled papyrus or parchment scrolls (below).

The Ionic abstracts and conflates all these symbols, and this was its genius. The horned bull of Taurus of the Assyrians; the Egyptian lotus; the papyrus scroll, symbol of human intellect; the Fibonacci sequence, sacred geometry encoding nature's growth—all these meanings come together in the volutes of the Ionic capital—a great fusion of ancient knowledge and a symbol above all of the glory of ancient Ionia.

Next: the Corinthian order

The Doric Order

The Doric order is the earliest of the classical orders developed by Archaic Greek civilization and was by far the most popular of the three. The eponymous Dorians were the dominant tribe of the four main peoples forming ancient Greece and the Dorian dialect was spoken in a great southward arc stretching across the Aegean from Corfu to the lower Peloponnesian Peninsula and on to the islands of Crete and Rhodes. (Above, the Hephaisteion or Theseion, a remarkably preserved Doric temple located on the north-west side of the Agora of Athens.)

Already well-established in the 7th century BC, the Doric order reached its apotheosis with the stunning achievement of the Parthenon in 438 BC but eventually fell from favor by the end of the 2nd century BC. It would spawn both the Roman Doric, an embellished version with lighter proportions and the addition of the Ionic column base, and much later the highly simplified Tuscan order, developed in 16th century Italy by Serlio and Palladio and employed principally for rural architecture, as embodied by Palladio's villas.

In Di Architectura, Vitruvius, a Roman architect who practiced during the reign of Augustus Caesar, remarked that the Doric was masculine in character and wrote that its fundamental proportion, a column shaft six times its diameter, deliberately mirrored "the proportions, strength and beauty of a man's body." (The length of actual shafts varied between 4½ and 7 column diameters, with the shaft almost uniformly bearing 20 flutes.) He also noted that the Doric was suitable for temples dedicated to such masculine gods as Hercules and Mars, while the Ionic and Corinthian were more feminine.

Though in truth the Romans used the Corinthian order for just about everything, Vitruvius's comments reflect the Doric order's thicker, squatter proportions, its traditional lack of naturalistic or floral ornament and its underlying static, rectilinear æsthetic logic. There is no point in cataloguing Doric elements here for the umpteenth time, rather we will examine the Doric column and its all-important capital and attempt to discern greater meaning than the ancient tidbit Vitruvius has tossed us—and also something beyond the obvious modern observation that many of its rectilinear elements (triglyphs, abacus, mutules, and so on) almost certainly are inspired from earlier timber-frame construction techniques, translated into stone decoration.

The first things to remark about the Doric capital (above and below, examples from the Parthenon) are its remarkable simplicity and unity. In contrast to the elegant, complex bifold geometry of the Ionic and the florid outburst that is the Corinthian, the Doric capital is composed of two visually balanced elemental elements: a thick, squared slab called the abacus and a flaring, circular pillow beneath named the echinus. Usually, but not always, three concentric fillets transition the echinus to the shaft, known as annulets.

Even more so than the Ionic order, the origin of the Doric is too diffuse to pinpoint, but the Archaic Greek impetus to erect monumental dressed stone temples to their gods obviously sprang from the example of the sacred architecture of ancient Egypt, a civilization then already in terminal decline. In the late Archaic period the Greeks and Egypt were carrying out extensive trade and by the 7th century BC Greek neighborhoods and trading centers had become established in Egypt's most important cities.

The general influence of Egypt is clear, as is the direct precedent of the colonnade at Saqqara (above). We find fluting, inverted from the bowed ribs at Saqqara , and the same æsthetic/geometric/volumetric rigor, elegance and abstraction. What is so fascinating with the Doric is exactly this deliberate abstraction, this remarkable renunciation of naturalistic ornament—exactly as we find at Saqqara. In fact, the Doric appears deliberately conceived to embody austere geometry and clear, rectilinear volumetrics.

A circular echinus supporting a square abacus. (Above, a capital at the Temple of Zeus at Olympia.) The circle and the square: Heaven and Earth. The ancient Egyptian principle of "as above, so below" has been purified and abstracted and, I believe, a unity of opposites is being expressed. The Egyptian duality is transformed into a single, fusional idea, most clearly palpable in the overarching æsthetic sense—this volumetric, geometric, abstract rigor I keep referring to—that is the glue that bonds these constituent ideograms together: the concept of consciousness itself. Man, the abstract thinker.

It is no coincidence that the Doric temple makes its appearance in the midst of the intellectual ferment that also sees philosophy's tandem birth. In a nutshell, the Doric order expresses, quite self-consciously and deliberately, the celebration of man's conscious rationality, the blossoming of Greek thought. In fact a parallel to the first recorded Western cosmology, that of Anaximander of Miletus (an Ionian, about which we'll have more to say in our next post on the Ionic), can and indeed has been drawn, but I'm not in agreement with Robert Hahn that Anaximander's vision of the earth as a thick, cylindrical wafer suspended in space finds a literal equivalent in the actual cylindrical stone blocks, or "drums" that make up a Greek column—first of all, because they are construction components and not the column itself. This is like some future archeo-anthropologist concluding that skeletons from our era exhumed with polyester clothing were doubtless acolytes of string theory, because their garments are composed of a complex interweaving of imperishable threads. Columns were conceived to be—and were preferably executed as—monoliths; assembling them from stacked drums was an expedient, a quite-literal "short-cut" never meant to bring attention to itself, let alone be celebrated as a metaphor for the divine order of creation!

But Hahn's thesis isn't totally wrong, though misplaced (and mostly irrelevant as Anaximander was born too late to have any decisive influence on the development of either the Doric or Ionic orders): Anaximander's cosmology is congruent with the column's symbolism, as both share the idea of a centered infinity and, just as importantly, an axiality that can be linked to the cosmic axis of earth and the zodiac. Vitruvius is much closer to the nub of things in symbolically equating the Doric column with man, and thus the capital with man's head, the locus of consciousness. The columns (humanity) support the roof (heaven) which shelters the sanctuary (the abode of the gods). This is the fundamental cosmology being expressed in any Greco-Roman temple. Not by accident is the word pediment, denoting the triangularly shaped wall found between the cornice and the sloping roof ends of a Greek temple, a workman's corruption of the word pyramid.

Vitruvius was certainly correct, the Doric order is the measure of man, but not in the literal sense: What is being measured is not man's body but his mind.

Coming soon: the Ionic order.