D is for Doric: A-Z of Historic Buildings
Doric refers to one of the three ‘styles’ of classical architecture. The three styles are named after peoples of Ancient Greece, and the Doric is named after the Dorians. The Doric style is supposedly the earliest of the styles, and it’s fittingly the most ‘robust’, ‘primitive’ and simple of them all. What the styles really refer to in this context is columns, and the other decorative elements which are supposed to match with them.
Classical architecture is founded on myth, with limited written records. Our best source for this architecture is a single written work, written by an otherwise unimportant man called Vitruvius, De architectura (‘On Architecture’). In it, Vitruvius claims that the ‘Doric’ style of architecture is the earliest, and which was based on the ratio of a man’s foot to his height: i.e., one to six. If you look at any real example of a Doric column, you’ll work out that this is a bit of a fib, but it’s a nice story.
Doric is related not just to the human body, but also to ‘primitive’ architecture made of wood. The strange looking panels which you will find at regular intervals, cut into three (the ‘triglyphs’) are supposed to mark where a wooden joist would have cut through the horizontal beam. Scholars have therefore referred to the Doric style as an architecture of ‘petrified wood’: timber transformed into masonry.
The earliest examples of Doric style columns you will find in England date from the late 16th century onwards. Some were introduced by the eccentric Dr John Caius, a medical doctor who spent time in Italy and brought back knowledge of antique design to his homeland. He built a series of folly-like gates in the college (Gonville and Caius) refounded in his honour in Cambridge.
The Euston Arch, public domain photograph ca. late 19th or early 20th century. A masterpiece of stark Greek Doric, demolished in 1962 with justified outrage.
After then, the flood gates are open to classical architecture and you will find Doric columns in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The advent of ‘New Classicism’ under Quinlan Terry and others in the 1980s brought classicism back once again, and with it, Doric. A good example of robust ‘Greek Doric’ can be found at the Maitland Robinson Library, Downing College, which dates to 1993
