ABSTRACT
In some instances the Greeks’ solution was merely to put the ‘round peg’ into the ‘square hole’, as in the council chamber at Miletus (top right). Here the circular theatre is enclosed in a quadrilateral cell, leaving corner spaces unused except for stairs back down to ground level. The columns needed as intermediate supports for the roof have been kept to a minimum; the two at the front are to some extent used to help frame the focal space of the chamber but the other two are awkwardly intrusive. A minor concession to the geometry of the seating is made in the way the column bases take their alignment from the seats rather than from the orthogonal geometry of the structure. Almost exactly the same relationship between spatial and structural organisation, but on a smaller scale, is found in the ‘New’ (late fifth century BCE) council chamber built in Athens (middle right). Presumably the two pairs of columns together with the external walls supported principal structural beams along the lines shown in the plan, which then divided the long dimension of the roof into three smaller, manageable, spans.
