Episode 4: Stone Masonry Perfected: The Greek Temple
Understanding Greek and Roman Technology: From the Catapult to the Parthenon
Dr Stephen Ressler (2013)
Film Review
In ancient Greece, the temple was not only the home of a god but the major structure representing the polis (ie the citizenry under the city-state’s jurisdiction).
Construction of a new temple had to be approved by the popular assembly, at which point a citizen’s committee hired an architektron, who was a combination architect, engineer and master builder.
Temples were usually built on the city’s acropolis (highest point of land) with the entrance facing the rising sun.
Temples had to be set in bedrock, on a foundation up to 15 feet deep. Doric order temples, initially made of wood, were the first Greek temples (10th century BC). Later marble temples featured stylized ornamentation meant to replicate original wood features and reduced the slope of their roofs (to accommodate the increased weight of terracotta tiles).*
Still later Ionian order temples, had thinner columns topped with more ornate capitols decorated with scroll work.
Corinthian columns, appearing during the third century BC, were favored by the Romans.
Ressler has constructed a fascinating model to demonstrate the concept of load bearing and explain how Greek architects addressed this requirement with tabeated** construction. This entailed a series of horizontal beams supported by a regular arrangement of columns. The lower tensile strength of longer marble beams limited the size of Greek temples.
All Greek temples were based standardized mathematical dimensions calculated from the number of columns they used.
*Which replaced thatch used on the earliest temples.
**Trabeated roofs used a prop and lintel system to support the roof load.
Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.
https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/146678/146686
The Most Revolutionary Act 
If ‘as above, so below’, modern “architektron” design is definitely not inspired by ‘The Most High’.
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Too true, Bone Fish.
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Good description of the structural requirements of the ancient Greek temples. The photos also helped visualize the styles, as they changed.
The ancient arts of building structures designed to last attest to the complicated process involved in planning and execution.
Now we presume to have “progressed” beyond such basic requirements, but we have forgotten or ignored what our ancestors knew.
It strikes me that the point at which the sun rises changes, especially in extreme latitudes, and many old structures accounted for the position of the earth in relation to the sun at specific times of the year. The pyramids of Egypt, for instance. It’s almost comical to contemplate the comparative hubris of modern practice.
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