This chapter addresses how temple buildings were created during the Archaic and Classical periods. Moving through the challenges of understanding the processes of creating buildings before the Late Classical period in the fourth century, the following observations and arguments orientate one toward specific concerns of design in both standard and innovative temples. Resulting from this exploration, the present chapter highlights the discordance between natural vision and the abstract notion of ichnography in particular.

REDUCED-SCALE DRAWING

No matter how naturalized the relationship between scale drawing and architecture has become for us, we cannot expect the same case to have existed in Hellenic architecture. For material dating to before the Hellenistic period, there has not been scholarly consensus as to whether Greek buildings were products of scale drawing. Vitruvius' writings reflect an understanding of architectural drawing as held in the Hellenistic world, but beyond nonarchitectural writers like Plato and others, we lack testimony on the methods of planning common to architects of the Classical period and earlier.

Metrological and proportional studies bear out the difficulties in recognizing Classical temples as products of scale drawing. Relatively recent criticism of earlier scholarly assumptions about the design process in (as far as architectural writing goes) the poorly documented fifth century helps us recognize that temples of the Classical period were expressions of an extremely rational process of planning. Yet the method of this rational approach need not have been graphic exploration at the drawing board.