Read Columns & the Classical Orders: A Complete History

The column is the oldest portrait architecture has of itself: a support shaped like a body, standing for the tree trunk, the tent pole and the human bearer all at once. The classical orders turned that support into a grammar — a small set of columns and entablatures, each with fixed parts, proportions and character, that builders could speak in for two and a half thousand years. This complete history follows the column from the engaged stone ribs of Djoser's Saqqara and the cedar-tall capitals of Persepolis through the Greek perfection of Doric, Ionic and Corinthian, Rome's adoption, ornament and theory of the orders, their Renaissance codification into five, their Baroque bending, their archaeological revival, and their survival — quoted, ironised and reinvented — in the modern age. It teaches the reader to name any order in the street from its capital, and to judge what the column is really doing there.