By Nathan McCabe

Me
1. Introduction

2. Doric Style

3. Ionic Style

4. Corinthian Style

5. Examples of Greek
Architecture

6. My Scrapbook

7. Bibliography
 The building styles of the Ancient Greeks still
influence architecture today. The Greeks built lots
of beautiful buildings, but the best ones were the
temples. The ruins are actually still there! In all
the ruins you can see three different building
styles.

Doric Style Ionic Style Corinthian Style

The earliest building style was called the Doric
style. It is really plain, but very strong.

A Doric column does not have a base. It stands

on the floor or on a little section of the floor
that is higher than the rest of the floor. It has
fluted sides (that means that it has lines carved
down the side.) The capital (that means the top
bit) looks like a plain saucer, with a big block of
stone on top of it.
Above the capital there is the architrave. This is a
piece of wall above all the columns. It has
triglyphs and metopes on it. A triglyph is a
design; a kind of pattern (wavy lines or straight
lines.) A metope is a picture or a plain piece of
stone in between the triglyphs.
The Greeks started using the ionic building style
around 500 BC. This style is more fancy than the
Doric style. The columns stand on a base, unlike
the Doric columns which stand straight on the
floor. Ionic columns were used by far more than
any other type of column. They had big scrolls at
the top of them and were also fluted, just with
more flutes down them than the Doric columns.
Instead of having triglyphs and metopes on the
architrave, the Ionic style had a big frieze going
round the sides of the temple. A frieze is a big,
continuous picture. The friezes on these temples
normally showed a long line of people, some
having horse races, some sacrificing animals and
some even had beauty contests on them!
Around 400 BC another building style came into
fashion. It was called the Corinthian style (after
the city of Corinth.) This new style was the
fanciest of all the styles. The columns
had magnificent, huge leaves on
them, called acanthus leaves. These
carvings of leaves are above the
column, but below the architrave.
The Corinthian style was not actually used SO
much by the Greeks. The Romans used it the
most. This style also had a frieze, just like the
Ionic style, except on Corinthian temples the
frieze had more people on it.
 Corinthian columns are by far the
fanciest, covered in leaves and ivy;
they have lots of twirls and spikes.
You would find Corinthian
columns at big temples and
acropolises.

Ionic columns are very famous

because of their big scrolls and
twists. These are the most used
columns of the ancient Greeks,
you can find them ANYWHERE!

Doric columns are SO boring, they just have a few

lines going down them and that’s about it. If you turn
them over they could be dumbbells from the gym!
Acropolis means upper city. Many of the cities of ancient
Greece were built around an acropolis where the
inhabitants could go as a place of refuge when there
was an invasion. It's for this reason that the most sacred
buildings are usually on the acropolis. It's the safest,
most secure place in town.
The Acropolis in Athens is perhaps the most famous. In
Athens, as in other Greek city-states, the ancient
Athenians built temples and monuments on the
Acropolis, dedicated to Athena and other ancient Greek
gods. Pericles built the Parthenon. The Parthenon is the
biggest temple on the acropolis.
Epidaurus is a city state on the coast of Greece. At Epidaurus
there are lots of awesome things to see! There is a huge temple,
where Greeks went to worship Dionysus. There is a shrine to
Aphrodite, and also a beautiful statue of Athena.

The temple of Dionysus has some of the most beautiful and

biggest Corinthian columns people have ever found.

The shrine to Aphrodite has carvings on the side, in a crazy

language that no one has ever seen before. The building around it
(the temple) has 12-metre columns and stairs leading into the
main room decorated with pictures of Aphrodite looking at three
people killing goats to please her.

The statue of Athena is the 5th biggest statue anyone has found. It
is 78.7 metres tall on its own. It stands on a massive slab of
marble, 4 metres thick!

More inland, there is a very famous ruin of an amphitheatre and

you can still see plays there today. I actually have seen a play
there when I was 2! It was a Greek tragedy, and at the end
everyone was dead….
http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Epidaurus

http://www.ancientgreece.co.uk/menu.html

http://www.ancientgreece.co.uk/acropolis/challenge/cha_s
et.html

http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/greeks/architecture/
doric.htm

http://www.woodlands-
junior.kent.sch.uk/Homework/greece.html

Daniel McCabe’s scrap books of our family trip around

Europe in 2002