Greekomania

The advent of the republic in our little nation has begotten an interesting architectural trend here. Or is it the other way around? Goddamned chicken and egg! Anyways, today we see reinforced concrete houses adorned with fluted columns of the Corinthian order. We also see triangular pediments at the front end of an otherwise flat roof, and of course those beautiful dentils and renaissance windows. We finally caught up with you Mr. Plato.

Before we start going around in togas, one might point out that ancient Greece was a democratic entity consisting of several hundred independent poleis and that the Roman Republic was an oligarchic institution at the best of times. Is that what we are going for? But that is not my point. Let’s just stick to architecture.

The beautiful fluted columns originally began life in a tree trunk. Before stone architecture, columns were made of, well, tree trunks. And when you strip the bark off a tree trunk you are left with erratic little vertical fissures which is unpalatable to the human sense of pattern and order, ergo it was carved with regular vertical concave indentations. Obviously why still use them when stone rather than wood is used for the columns? Ritualisation? Not so soon. Stone columns didn’t come in one piece obviously. Hence many huge stones were stacked on top of another to make those mammoth columns. Those vertical indentations now served the purpose of making the horizontal clefts between the massive stones less visible. It probably also served the purpose of making the buildings look larger and the man looking at it smaller. Now the question is why do we still have fluted columns with fruity capitals when we have concrete? It’s a tough one. I think I will pass on that.

The pediments are an easy nut to crack. A gable roof will necessarily have a triangular front. Hence, we get the pediments. And some snob had an idea to make an inevitable feature look like an intelligent addition. Hence, we get those highly ornate pediments. Lord they are beautiful! So beautiful that even people with flat roofs can’t keep their hands off of them.

The dentils are even easier. When you make a house out of wood, you need rafters or long pieces of wood to hold the roof and the ceiling. And these rafters jut out of the main structure, for if they didn’t, they along with the roof and the ceiling would come tumbling down the rabbit-hole. Hence we have the real dentils of a wooden building, an inevitability and a necessity and the fake dentils of a stone building, an urge well to swing from the trees.

Besides the negativities, there is one little positive thing in this article. And that is the suggestion that we shift our architectural gaze to Egypt. Now I hope you asked "why?" this time as opposed to when you let them put up that Corinthian column at your home. Look if there ever was a stable man-made structure, it is the pyramid. It has 4500 years to testify to that. And it is not a question of if but when we’ll be hit by a 7 on the Richter scale.