In ancient Greece, architecture carried great utility in the demarcation of different buildings’ political, social, and cultural meaning. Architecture was not just a stylistic choice; it imbued each building with unique significance. In “Architecture in City and Sanctuary” by Marina Yeroulanou and “Architectural Sculpture” by Olga Palagia, different architectural methods are analyzed for their historical value. Each work showcases how different symbolism, iconography, and style emerged to form Greek architecture, and they offer invaluable insight into architecture’s importance in Greek history.
“Architecture in City and Sanctuary” focuses on the continuity of Greek architectural styles, starting with the 10th c. BC. Yeroulanou first outlines a large building found at Lefkandi with various tombs for people and horses. She follows with the first Temple of Hera on the island of Samos dated back to the 8th c. BC, and after its destruction, evidence showed the beginning of the usage of limestone blocks in the second Heraion. She then talks about the different forms of architecture, Doric and Ionic, and their characteristics. Each had a cella for the cult statue of the god or goddess to reside within, each had a colonnade surrounding it, and each utilized a triangular roof. Their columns differed, though. While Doric columns had no stone base and a curved capital at the top, the Ionic columns had a molded, stone base and a spiraling capital. The piece then chronicles the continuity of temple styles during different Greek time periods. Doric temples were standardized around the 5th c. BC with the Temple of Aphaia at Aigina and the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Colonnade proportions were standardized to make the length of the temple approximately two times the width plus one unit, and the materials were also generally consistent to be limestone, marble, stucco, and terracotta. Pericles’ reconstruction of the Acropolis codified the Doric order, but the architects on the Acropolis also used some Ionic elements, like in the friezes. After the continuity, she talks about other key buildings in sanctuaries, including altars, propyla, and tholoi, and she connects city planning in ancient Greece to the function of public structures. Following the architecture of the public structures, she ends with a more domestic focus, the study of funerary structures and domiciles.
“Architectural Sculpture” by Olga Palagia also outlines differences in Greek architecture, but it is more sculpturally focused. It starts by showing how sculptures not only were used to symbolically represent the Greek mythos, but occasionally they structurally held up the buildings by means of their integration into columns. Each architectural style used different sculptural representations; Doric ones generally used metopes while Ionic ones generally used friezes. From the chemical analysis of stucco behind sculptures, there is also reason to believe that many sculptures were painted. Palagia then transitions to the examination of pediments, starting with their compositional materials first being limestone and then marble. Pediments depicted Greek battles, Greek religion, and Greek culture, and their styles varied over time. One key challenge to representing scenes on pediments was their triangular shape, complicating the decision to place some figures upright and some laid down based on the scene’s content. Palagia then enumerates different types of sculptures, starting with friezes. Friezes were mainly Ionic, enabling artists to portray scenes to comport edificial meaning on temples until their fade from Greek architecture in the 4th c. BC. Metopes were a segmented representation of a single, Greek scene, and they were a characteristic of Doric architecture. Acroteria were architectural ornaments that were placed on pedestals on top of the temples, and they usually showcased some sort of athletic or religious glorification. On the columns of Ionic temples, columnic drums could be adorned with sculptural representations of religious figures as well. In connection with the rest of Greek military culture, some sculptures imitated the militaristic symbolism of the shield. These were medallion busts, and they were marble, circular portraits meant to imitate the hanging of a shield on a wall. Palagia ends the piece with the literary testimonies of architectural sculpture that range from Herodotus to the records of labor division in temple construction.
Each of the authors employs a variety of evidential standards to cement their claims. Yeroulanou uses an array of images to showcase the architectural styles of Greeks, showing the variation in temples, graves, and altars. She also expertly connects the public areas in Greek cities to the city planning, showing how the plan of a city and the architectural design complemented one another functionally. The agora, a public space for oratory activities, was in the center of Greek administrative buildings, showing how their functions mutually enforced each other in relation to the plan of the architecture. Palagia utilizes a more comprehensive and methodical account of each architectural, sculptural aspect, and she methodically analyzes each individually. The opinions of each author are founded by a large body of archeological, literary, and scientific evidence, which forms a cogent case for each of their postulations around architecture’s function, significance, and meaning.
I thought that it was fascinating to learn about the degree of which Greek architecture was used to inculcate values into wider Greek society. Almost no facet of architecture or sculpture was devoid of meaning; they all comported some sort of religious or virtuous ideal. From the victorious acroteria to the construction and planning of cities, Greek architecture was a symbolic, managerial tool on how to foment certain social situations and instill certain values into their citizens. Because of my affinity for politics, it is obvious that the creation of the agora was my favorite part. Surrounding the agora with porticoes allowed for political actors to be able to take shelter from the elements, and it created a civic, administrative center of the polis. In all, architecture and its elements were used to communicate a variety of religious values, stories, and meaning to the populace, and understanding the significance of architecture in ancient Greece is imperative to understanding the totality of the representation of Greek values in its history.