ДЕ КУРТИЛЬ ЖАК (Университет Бордо Монтень, Франция). О новых подходах в исследовании древнегреческой архитектуры

JACQUES DES COURTILS (Bordeaux Montaigne University, France). On a New Approach to Ancient Greek Architecture

Ancient Greek architecture is not a new topic. Greek architects, at least some of them, wrote comments on the buildings they had built. Unfortunately, none of these books have reached us. More than two thousand years ago, Vitruvius inaugurated a new scientific area not only by studying the practice of building but by taking a retrospective look at the creations of the Greeks: Vitruvius quotes several Greek temples and seems to have inquired directly from those Greek architectural treatises now lost. But his descriptions and comments are marred by many flaws, as several modern commentators have pointed out: in particular, he seems to have mixed up his sources, moreover he or his translator did not fully understand the Greek language. Books on architecture after the Decem Libri de Architectura, such as Palladio’s I quattro Libri dell Architettura (1570) or Claude Perrault’s L’ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes selon la méthode des Anciens (1683) were only pale copies of Vitruvius’ work, as the subtitle of the translation of Vitruvius published in 1673 by the same Perrault proves : “corrigés et traduits nouvellement en français”. It wasn’t until the 18th century that the Dilettanti inaugurated the first truly scientific approach to study and measurement of ancient monuments. Since that time, studies and methods have multiplied, accumulating an extraordinary amount of knowledge about many monuments scattered among the ancient world. Still, many specialists limited their goal to the monographic description of the buildings and their stylistic study. Not many scientists ventured to study the building processes and the proportions of the buildings like J. Hambidge, J.J. Coulton, J. Bousquet and a few others. The goal of this paper is to explore some of the modern approaches to ancient architecture, by distinguishing on one hand different ways to plan a building in Antiquity, on the other hand different contemporary approaches to ancient architecture. Planning and building are two logical steps that seem to follow one another naturally but the reality is more complex: observing the hesitations of ancient builders that have left their marks in some of their buildings and new discoveries about the graphic processes they made use of, may lead to reconsidering to some extent our knowledge of ancient Greek architecture.

древнегреческая архитектура, строительство, пропорции, планирование построек

Greek architecture, building processes, proportions, planning