The Three Orders of Architecture

Capitals of the five classical orders, with a second Ionic variant, from an eighteenth-century plate in the Encyclopédie.

The Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders are systems of design used in classical architecture. An order includes the proportions and treatment of a column and the horizontal structure it supports, called the entablature. The capital is often its most readily recognised feature.

Distinguishing features

Order	Features
Doric	In Greek examples, a fluted column normally stands without a separate base. Its plain capital supports an entablature with alternating triglyphs and metopes in the frieze.
Ionic	Columns stand on bases. The capital has scrolls, called volutes, and the frieze can carry continuous sculptural decoration.
Corinthian	The capital is decorated with acanthus leaves and small volutes. Developed later than the other two Greek orders, it became particularly common in Hellenistic and Roman architecture.

These descriptions summarise Greek forms; details changed as the orders were reused in later buildings.

The familiar system of five orders also includes Tuscan and Composite. Julien Mauclerc's A New Treatise of Architecture, catalogued by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, explicitly treats all five.

Transmission through architectural books

The orders were studied and adapted long after antiquity. Andrea Palladio published I quattro libri dell'architettura in 1570, presenting a system of classical design based on proportion, symmetry and his study of Roman buildings. Translations and later editions helped spread his approach across Europe. Inigo Jones brought Palladian ideas into English architecture in the seventeenth century, and eighteenth-century architects developed them further.

Later Neoclassicism drew renewed attention to Greek as well as Roman models. James Stuart and Nicholas Revett's Antiquities of Athens, first published in 1762, helped make measured studies of Greek buildings available in Britain. These publications form part of the architectural context in which purpose-built Masonic halls appeared.

Classical design in Masonic buildings

Masonic halls provide examples of the later use of classical forms. At Phoenix Hall in Sunderland, built in 1784–1785, Historic England records a neoclassical lodge room with engaged Doric columns and chimney pieces incorporating Doric entablatures.

Redruth Masonic Hall offers another example. Historic England records Ionic and Corinthian pillars in its lodge room, presented in 1888. The building itself, erected in 1876–1878, combines Gothic window forms with classical details. A Masonic hall can therefore contain several architectural vocabularies, and the order of an individual column need not describe the style of the whole building.

See also

• The Five Classical Orders of Architecture
• The Layout of the Craft Lodge
• The Pavement