The earliest of the five main orders of classical architecture, characterized by a fluted shaft and plain capital. It is subdivided into Greek Doric and Roman Doric, the former having no base, as used for the Parthenon, Athens (447438 BC).
The Doric order was one of the three orders or organizational systems of Ancient Greek or classical architecture; The Greek Doric order was the earliest of these, known from the 7th century BC and reaching its mature form in the 5th century BC.
In their original Greek version, Doric columns stood directly on the flat pavement (the stylobate) of a temple without a base; and they were topped by a smooth capital that flared from the column to meet a square abacus at the intersection with the horizontal beam ("entablature") that they carried.
Pronounced features of both Greek and Roman versions of the Doric order are the triglyph and metopes. A triglyph is centered above every column, with another (or sometimes two) between columns, though the Greeks felt that the corner triglyph should form the corner of the entablature, creating an inharmonious mismatch with the supporting column. Because the metopes are somewhat flexible in their proportions, the modular space between columns ("intercolumniation") can be adjusted by the architect.
Early examples of the Doric order include the temples at Paestum, in southern Italy, a region called Magna Graecia, which was settled by Greek colonists and retained a strongly Hellenic culture.
The Temple of the Delians is a "peripteral" Doric temple, the largest of three dedicated to Apollo on the island of Delos. All the columns are centered under a triglyph in the frieze, except for the corner columns. The plain, unfluted shafts on the columns stand directly on the platform (the stylobate), without bases.
A classic statement of the Greek Doric order is the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens, built about 449 BC. The contemporary Parthenon, the largest temple in classical Athens, is also in the Doric order, although the sculptural enrichment is more familiar in the Ionic order: the Greeks were never as doctrinaire in the use of the Classical vocabulary as Renaissance theorists or neoclassical architects.
In the Roman Doric version (illustration, right), the height of the entablature has been reduced. The endmost triglyph is centered over the column rather than occupying the corner of the architrave. Roman Doric columns also have moldings at their bases and stand on low square pads or are even raised on plinths. In the Roman Doric mode, columns are not invariably fluted.
The Roman architect Vitruvius, following contemporary practice, outlined in his treatise the procedure for laying out constructions based on a module, which he took to be one half a column's diameter, taken at the base.
When Greek Revival architecture was introduced at the beginning of the 19th century, the Greek Doric order had not previously been widely used. The first engraved illustrations of the Greek Doric order dated to the mid-18th century. in a Protestant church a Greek Doric porch promised a return to an untainted early church;
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