What you need to build a Greek temple | Hacker News Reader

What you need to build a Greek temple

antigonejournal.com

94 pointshomarp19 comments

I love this sort of discussion because, whilst I'm now an IT consultant, I studied Civ Eng at Plymouth Poly and graduated in 1992 when the UK had a bit of a recession and it all went a bit south. I should have been a Civ Eng but ended up a bit of an IT nerd.

Building anything is quite complicated. Surveying, logistics, material sciences, geotechnics and more.

The old Greeks kicked off some of the modern forms of civilisation (eg demos kratos) but the old Romans ran with it, big style and added to it. The old Romans invented concrete and a modern Civ Eng appreciates the stuff and we have made a few changes to it in the form of additives.

For starters concrete is a chemical reaction, exothermic, and will work underwater.

The Romans also gave us the Roman arch - circular based. They seemed to have lacked a formal analysis of other geometries for arches or even considered them. The "Norman" arch has a point of inflection and can usefully narrow the space required.

Building anything is sodding complicated - try it!

When the Normans conquered England, they apparently tore down every Anglo-Saxon church to be replaced by one in the Romanesque style. How much is known about the Anglo-Saxon style and how they handled things like arches?

The Normans didn't tear down every Anglo-Saxon church, there's still a number of them standing. A surprisingly high number given their age, really.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Standing_Anglo-Saxon_...

Thanks, wouldn't have guessed to search for that list. In the entry for Escomb Church, is says there are "only four complete Anglo-Saxon churches remaining in England, the others being St Lawrence's Church, Bradford-on-Avon, Greensted Church and All Saints' Church, Brixworth."

Looking through the list, it seems that in the Anglo-Saxon portions of all those buildings, any arches were relatively narrow and crudely fashioned compared to subsequent Norman style. So I guess there was quite a gap in sophistication of architectural knowledge between Britain and the Continent in the 11th century.

Yeah, the Anglo-Saxon period was a time of a much less sophisticated building techniques, the UK was an early loss from the Western Rome and the sophistication of the material culture under the Anglo-Saxons there was grim. The Romanesque style of the Normans was largely a continuation and development of late Imperial Roman building traditions (loaded with deliberate callbacks) that grew very sophisticated. That part of the continent had hung onto more of the late Roman engineering traditions that were lost in Britain, so they were able to produce much larger, more impressive buildings, and they had a much richer cultural vocabulary in their iconography and art of their churches as well.

If you are interested in the story of the Norman reconstruction of institutional architecture in England, there is a quick overview in Garnett's The Norman Conquest: A Very Short Introduction. (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/5056609-the-norman-co...)

From the book:

...within fifty years of 1066 every English cathedral church and most major abbeys had been razed to the ground, and rebuilt in a new continental style, known to architects as 'Romanesque'. (p. 10)

...No English cathedral retains any masonry above ground which dates from before the Conquest. (p. 11)

...Old England, in an architectural sense, had been eradicated. (p. 12)

At the other extreme of ancient greek architecture, we have the στοά[0], a relatively cheap building style suitable for multiple (nonresidential) purposes — I like to think of it as the ancient equivalent of a strip mall.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoa

I saw one of these for the first time in Mexico last year! The pillars stood out to me, makes sense it was Greek-inspired. They had a weekly farmers/flea market type thing there. It's the kind of design that only works in warmer climates.

>at Athens this was two drachmas per day in the 4th century BC, the standard daily wage for a skilled craftsman

Assuming that you could safely grant forgiveness for crippling debts, which I have long held responsible, along with property taxes, for wage inflation among my peers, does anyone else think that we might just manage a simple majority in favour of such a egalitarian pay system? I'm thinking there's still remaining enough undiscovered wealth accessible to the entrepreneurial mind regardless of absolutely income.

"What's a Greek urn?

Two drachmas a day"

Good article but he left out the trickery. There were often hydralics, gears, and so forth so that lighting the pryre just outside the door of the temple would cause "the God" to slowly open the temple doors. Dazzled the plebes. Some remnants of these mechanisms survives in other Greek temples.

> Dazzled the plebs.

I like the way you put that. Life is but a dream.

Makes me wonder what city in all the world and all of history up to the present would be the most visually impressive or beautiful.

The present has the challenge of having many orders of magnitude more people, but modern plumbing, electricity, heating/cooling options and underground transport should provide much greater flexibility and potential.

I recommend Assassins Creed Odyssey for anyone who likes Greek architecture. There is a touring mode that allows you to explore ancient Greece without conflict.

1. Secure the blessings of Gravity above the claims of any lesser god, for it is in her honor that all temples are necessarily dedicated, no matter what name is on the door.

Curious! I don't know of any culture that deified gravity. Plenty that deified the sun, wind, sea, etc. It seems like a glaring omission! This mysterious force that pulls everything down and causes so much mischief, and no one in the ancient world sought to blame a god for that.

"This mysterious force that pulls everything down and causes so much mischief"

The mischief of beeing tied to this celestial body and not being able to float in space?

Perhaps the reason is that gravity is so consistently even-handed a deity. No cycles or torments, no regional variation, just the same exact instantaneous acceleration for all mortals and their measurements. Gravity is in that sense, indirectly venerated through its measure as weight.

Don't forget to add the subtle bulge in the temple columns, so that your false perspectives perceive them to be straighter/higher than they actually were - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entasis

Reply on news.ycombinator.com