y eyes . . . The architects of the Doric Order came newly to the use of stone: they had no mason's tradition on which to base their designs and calculations. As a result, for three centuries they underestimated its strength so that the cost of the great temples of the sixth and fifth centuries was enormous in materials and labour. During all this time proportions were changing, perspectives being corrected by the use of a new knowledge of optics, problems were being solved, but always the same features which make up the Doric Order, and which derive directly from the earlier temples of wood and mud-brick, remained: and all this time the Order was flowering, each great temple receiving its god and holding him trapped within its cella so that the purely architectural majesty of the building as increased by the accepted presence of a great unknown.
Only when the economic proposition was resolved, when the structure became as light as the stone would bear, was all the majesty lost, the flowering over (Ayrton 145-6).
Ayrton contrasts the Doric frame with the Egyptian frame in the context of the geography surrounding the temples, for whereas the deserts of Egypt require "exclamations in architecture" for a compelling structural statement to be made, Greek monumental architecture, and particularly the Doric Order, can accommodate and rationalize the rolling hills of Greece that encased it. The barren wastes of Egypt required decisive monuments, and the pyramids provided them. In the more temperate physical environment of Greece, however, monuments such as pyramids would probably not achieve the effect of harmony and cultural integration that the Greek temples did. This point is made in one form or another by all commentators consulted for this research. The implication is that the Doric Order, once it emerged, was far superior aesthetically and architecturally to earlier examples of civilization bound architecture, and one cou...