The American Vignola: Part 1:The Five Orders

This work by an Honorary and Corresponding Member, Professor Ware, has been compiled by him to serve as an elementary text-book for the use of architectural students in the United States, and is the outcome of long experience in the classrooms of the schools of architecture which Professor Ware inaugurated in Boston and New York.

Vignola's orders have always been regarded in the French school as embodying the best interpretation of the Roman orders, not only in their general proportions, but in their refinement of mouldings and detail, and we gather from the preface-first, that these orders have also generally been accepted as the standard in the United States, in preference to those of Alberti, Scamozzi, Serlio, Palladio, and Sir William Chambers, of which those by the last two have been followed in England; and, secondly, that when the late Mr. Richard Hunt (the first American student who entered the Ecole des Beans-Arts in Paris, viz. in 1846) returned to Boston he started a studio in Tenth Street to impart to his younger confréres what he had learnt in Paris, and, as Professor Ware says, "setting aside the whole apparatus of modules and minutes, he showed me how to divide the height of my capitals into thirds, and those into thirds, thus getting the sixths, ninths, &c., of a diameter which the rules required without employing any larger divisor than two or three." In the French school, at all events, for sixty years, all the proportions are based on the diameter of the column; and the principal features, such as the architrave, frieze. and cornice, having been set up, they are divided and subdivided by divisors of two or three until the smallest fillet or head has been calculated, it being found easier to recollect, for instance, that the fillet above the cyma in the Doric cornice should be one-third of the cyma than two minutes of the module.

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The American Vignola: Part 1:The Five Orders

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