sambo+and+gavs+Refinements

**REFINEMENTS IN THE PARTHENON** By Sam Power and Gavin Quirke.
To loosen up the harshness and to change the false visual perception of the human eye, a slight curve of the whole building, hardly visible with the naked eye, was introduced. The ancient Greek architects came to the knowldege that from a perspective of the villagers which was that of a distance, they realised that the horizontal pillars, from the perspective of the human eye, slanted towards the centre. To prevent this, the entablature was raised by a few centimetres towards the middle of a building. This avoidance of mathematically straight lines also included the columns, a slight curve to the columns (known as entasis) in the peripteral temple. Also, columns were set with a gentle inclination towards the centre of the building. Curvature and entasis occur around the 6th century BC onwards because of the advancemetns of the greek architects while building the Parthenon.

The Parthenon is the best example to the modern world of the consistency of the both mathematical and architectural knowledgeof the Greek civilization. Its curvature affects all horizontal elements up to the sima, even the cella walls reflect it throughout their height. The inclination of its columns which have a clear entasis, is continued by both the architrave and triglyph frieze, other parts of the Parthenon also reflect this. And also, have you seen how big it is?! Its huge! Any way, not one block of the building, not a single architrave or frieze element could be easily destructed therefore without the resillance of these blocks we would not know nearly as much about Greek civilization as we do. All parts of the architectural structures display slight variations from the right angle, individually correct for each block. Another a effect, each preserved building block from the Parthenon, its columns and statues can be assigned its exact position today. Although we realise the extreme and architecturaly perfect effort gone into this extravagance, the Parthenon, including the spell bounding sculptural decoration, was complete in only 16 years between 447 BCE to 431 BCE