2. Answer the questions:

1. What building materials were used in ancient Egypt?

2. What is Egyptian architecture?

3. Why and how did people decorate tombs?

4. What parts of tombs do you know?

Unit four. Greek and roman architecture Greek architecture

Throughout the history of Greek art, the architect's main role was to design cult buildings, and until the Classical period it was virtually his only concern. The focus of worship in Greek religion was the altar, which for a long time was a simple block and only much later evolved into a monumental form. It stood in the open air, and, if there was a temple, generally the altar was positioned to the east of it. The temple is a house (oikos) for the deity, who was represented there by his cult statue. Temple plans, then, were house plans--one-room buildings with columnar porches. To distinguish the divine house from a mortal one, the early temple was given an elongated plan, with the cult statue placed at the back, viewed distantly beyond a row of central pillar supports. The exterior came to be embellished by a peristyle, an outer colonnade of posts supporting extended eaves. This colonnade provided a covered ambulatory (roofed walkway), and it was also a device to distinguish the building from purely secular architecture. This plan can be seen in buildings on Samos and at Thermum in central Greece. The construction remained simple: well-laid rubble and mud brick, with timbering and a thatched or flat clay roof.

From about 650 on, the Greeks began to visit Egypt regularly, and their observation of the monumental stone buildings there was the genesis of the ultimate development of monumental architecture and sculpture in Greece. The first step in architecture was simply the replacement of wooden pillars with stone ones and the translation of the carpentry and brick structural forms into stone equivalents. This provided an opportunity for the expression of proportion and pattern, an expression that eventually took the form of the invention or evolution of the stone "orders" of architecture. These orders, or arrangements of specific types of columns supporting an upper section called an entablature, defined the pattern of the columnar facades and upperworks that formed the basic decorative shell of the Greek temple building.

The Doric order was invented in the second half of the 7th century, perhaps in Corinth. Its parts - the simple, baseless columns, the spreading capitals, and the triglyph-metope (alternating vertically ridged and plain blocks) frieze above the columns--constitute an aesthetic development in stone incorporating variants on themes used functionally in earlier wood and brick construction. Doric long remained the favourite order of the Greek mainland and western colonies, and it changed little throughout its history. Early examples, such as the temple at Thermum, were not wholly of stone but still used much timber and fired clay.

The Ionic order evolved later, in eastern Greece. About 600 BC, at Smyrna, the first intimation of the style appeared in stone columns with capitals elaborately carved in floral hoops--an Orientalizing pattern familiar mainly on smaller objects and furniture and enlarged for architecture. This pattern was to be the determining factor in the full development of the Ionic order in the 6th century.

By far the most impressive examples of Greek architecture of the high Classical period were the buildings constructed under Pericles for the Athenian Acropolis. The Acropolis architecture, which is in several ways a clear display of civic pride, also exhibits considerable subtlety of design in the use of the Doric and Ionic orders. The ensemble of the major buildings--the Parthenon, a temple to Athena; the Erechtheum, a temple housing several cults; and the monumental gateway to the Acropolis, the Propylaea - shows the orders used in deliberate contrast: the Erechtheum provides a decorative Ionic counterpart to the severe Doric of the Parthenon, which itself has an Ionic frieze; and in the Propylaea, columns of both orders complement each other.