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INTRODUCTION
Of the three principal Greek columnar types, the Doric was the earliest to emerge and it remained essentially unchanged after the first stone temples were erected in the sixth century BC. It is also the most "tectonic," i.e., suggestive of the work of the tékton, or carpenter; its rows of guttae, triglyphs, mutules, and other characteristic details of the entablature seeming to evoke earlier wooden structures. However, modern attempts to reconstruct the original forms (figs. 1, 3) fall short of providing a convincing explanation of the system to which they appear to have belonged, and which is conjured even today by classical architects when they employ the Doric order.
As we learn in Vitruvius's De Architectura, the difficulty of interpreting Doric forms goes back at least to Hellenistic times, and the Roman author himself describes the system as inherently problematic.1 While some progress has been made in the archaeological research of temples from before the period of "petrification" (i.e., when the forms of the presumed original wooden buildings were translated into stone), the exact purpose of many components of the Doric system remains uncertain. Modern scholarship has tended to assume that the builders of the first stone temples were content to imitate carpentry merely in general terms, fudging details and overlooking formal and conceptual incongruities, pursuing effect rather than substance. In other words, they asked the viewer to acknowledge an origin of the forms in timber construction, but to carry the thought no further. This viewpoint, which belies the fastidiousness with which the Greeks applied themselves in the arts and sciences, is epitomized in the writings of archaeologist J. J. Coulton, who concluded that "there is no reason to believe that (the Doric order) represents a coherent structural system in any material." 2
Coulton's frustration-expressed nearly four decades ago but still felt by scholars today3 -is understandable when one considers that many of the details in question are difficult to explain in terms of contemporary carpentry, and in some cases even seem counterintuitive. The difficulty has given rise to the alternate view that Greek Doric forms did not arise out of carpentry, but instead from stone prototypes that did not originally include a frieze of triglyphs,4 which traditionally has been understood to represent...