The ancient Greek architecture stands out as the one of the word’s prominent architecture designs which developed in the early 900BC up to around 1BC according to historical sources (Miles, ed). The architecture involved the construction of both private and public buildings consisting of temples, stadiums, theatres, council buildings, monuments, hippodrome, and gymnasium. They did not have a central authority for royalty and thus could not construct buildings such as palaces. Before the Greek designers learnt the art of stones in construction from the Middle East and Egypt, structures were mostly made of wood. Special elements such as pillars and walls were made of limestone, decorations with marble, and roof tile with terracotta.
The transition from using wood and clay resulted in innovation of new building designs or template herein referred to as orders or column orders. There are three Greek column orders; the Doric order, the Ionic order, and the Corinthian order (Miles, ed). The latest design templates involved the improvisation of the previous ones with significant modifications as per architects’ analysis. The most significant structures of a building included openings, pillar and lintel, and roof. The golden section in the Greek architecture consist of the balancing of the roofing triangle section to provide stability to both the building and the roof. In present day architecture, it is calculated as the golden ratio.
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The most prominent ancient Greek structures are the temple, and the open-air theatre. The temples resembled each other and had uniquely constructed pillars, had openings or entrances, stood on a masonry base, and had the entablature and the pediment structures that were supported by pillars. The theatres were open-air in design and consisted of the stage, the audience section and entrances. They were mostly constructed on valleys to give the audience a better view of the stage during performance.
References
Miles, Margaret M., ed. A Companion to Greek Architecture . Vol. 114. John Wiley & Sons, 2016.
