Practice question · True or false
The orders specify only the shape of the column and its capital.
Hints
- Ask what else an order fixes once the diameter is chosen.
- Every dimension of the building follows by ratio.
Show the answer
False
Why
False. An order fixes the proportions of the whole composition — height, spacing, entablature, and the relationships between them — once the column diameter is set. That is why it survived as a design tool rather than as an ornamental vocabulary.
Practise Architecture II: Reading a Building
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Art History I is free to start.
More questions on Architecture II: Reading a Building
- Why did the orders survive the culture that produced them by two thousand years?
- Which are true of the central-plan church in Renaissance debate?
- An architectural type is a recurring spatial configuration rather than a fixed set of measurements. What…
- A plan is a horizontal cut through the building, so what is drawn solid is what the cut passes through.
- Sort each feature by whether it belongs to a LONGITUDINAL or a CENTRAL plan.
- Complete the vocabulary of reading a building.
- How many orders did Renaissance theory canonise?
- Match each element of a basilican church to its position.
- Arrange these steps for describing an unfamiliar building, in the order that works.