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There are certain design styles that are eternal. They come back into style over and over again, and one of the most eternal is the Greek columns. You constantly see them brought back whenever a society wants to show they are mature and need to be taken seriously. Look at all of the European capitals and you’ll see columns. Usually Corinthian. But, there is also an architectural reason for that. Columns provide structure, and so for our history lesson, we decided to bring in a science lesson and see just how you would have to design a building to be able to hold up those roofs. It made for a great cross-curricular lesson. I got some great physics learned and some great Ancient History lessons and a lot of fun.
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Let’s talk columns
I first got interested in this back when I took honors World History in freshman history in high school. That’s when my history teacher spent a ridiculously long time talking about architecture and how architecture impacts history.
Think about it, architecture can be a weapon, well-designed architecture can start a war, and it can end a war.
But that is another post. I do not need to be distracted by right now.
Have you ever been in one of those big box stores and noticed that random post in the middle of the store that you walked into because you weren’t paying attention?
Column. It served a purpose, it’s there to help hold up the roof.
That column is load bearing.
It is very carefully planned exactly how few the store can get away with before the roof will cave in.
Huh, I don’t have any videos about columns on my Ancient Greece playlist. How weird.
Note to self, do that and then add them in, and then come back and add them to this post.
Okay, I have now waxed on about columns way too much.
Design a Greek Temple Challenge Supplies
- toilet paper rolls– I find it immensely amusing that you can find empty toilet paper rolls for crafts, I discovered this whole concept when I asked for egg cartons for crafts for my Sunday School class, I knew in theory it existed, but I hadn’t thought about it in reality.
- cardboard
- some form of weight, I used Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, which is about 10 pounds, and then when the kids wanted to see just how much weight it could handle, actual 15 pound dumbbells, I suggest a large book to start because it more accurately simulates a roof as it spreads the weight across the entire area
More Greek History
Let’s look and see some more Greek history lessons.
Designing the Greek Temple
First, we started off by drawing what we thought our Greek temple should look like.
As you can see, the design ends up being very simple, especially since we are using toilet paper rolls and they are rather large and our cardboard is relatively small to the size of the rolls.
There might have been more design involved if we had larger cardboard to work with.
Then we started building our designs. Notice how she is placing it more or less where she drew the elements.
It’s a minor detail, but kind of important if you plan to grade this.
And then we tested our designs. We slowly started piling more and more books on top of our Greek temples. Then we had to pile on dumbbells to see just how much more we could get on there.
It’s quite interesting to see what all we could do.
Eventually, they started playing with the original design of a Greek temple. No Greek temple had multiple levels, but the materials were sturdy enough they wanted to see just how high they could build it, and how much it could hold.
That was fun to see.
It was not in the least bit historical, but it was good science.
It was also interesting to see how everyone was thinking about this. Usually the thought process went, more columns means it is more stable, but since they were not having to think of making it usable, they weren’t thinking in terms of how few they could get away with.
So I challenged them to flip that around. How few can you get away with?
Which led to a whole new round of building and designing.
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