Why Greek Temples Do Not Have Windows
Fig. 8 and 9. Windows of the main bedrooms. Villa Mairea.
But let us not lose our temporal thread and go back to ancient Greece, to question an absence: Why Greek temples do not have windows?
Marco Vitruvius says of the Doric temples, in the fourth of his ten books on architecture, that "is not possible, as some mistakenly said that the triglyphs represent windows; as triglyphs are placed at the corners of the building over the two quarters of the columns, in which site are not openable windows, because the joints of the angles of the building would be unleashed" .
The Greek temple is not intended for man. It is the house of God, a place of worship. Men meet on the outside, but they must not be inside, nor look from the inside to the outside.
Neither from the outside of the temple should men observe what is happening inside. The temple is not a house and therefore does not need windows. Something so simple, by its absence, helps us to better understand the nature of the window, its biunivocal relationship with man and consequently the specificity that makes it a genuinely human mechanism of architecture.
Although occasionally has been hypothesized that the Greek temples possessed a skylight in the roof to allow the entrance of light, actually, there is no constructive evidence to support it. We need to move to another temple, Agrippa’s Pantheon in Rome, to find this solution that allows the passage of time to penetrate into the architecture through an opening. The oculus of the Pantheon is not really a window but a skylight. The words change but the same origins and meanings reappear: from the Latin roots, oculus and lucerna, we are again visited by the eyes and the lamps that give us light and allow us to see the world. Oculus aside, the building complies perfectly with the configuration attributable to a temple, home of the gods, as it has only one main door and no windows to interact with the city. Also by reduction to the absurd it reminds us that, in fact, a window is only such when it is practiced in a wall, in the vertical limits of the space.
But let us not lose our temporal thread and go back to ancient Greece, to question an absence: Why Greek temples do not have windows?
Marco Vitruvius says of the Doric temples, in the fourth of his ten books on architecture, that "is not possible, as some mistakenly said that the triglyphs represent windows; as triglyphs are placed at the corners of the building over the two quarters of the columns, in which site are not openable windows, because the joints of the angles of the building would be unleashed" .
The Greek temple is not intended for man. It is the house of God, a place of worship. Men meet on the outside, but they must not be inside, nor look from the inside to the outside.
Neither from the outside of the temple should men observe what is happening inside. The temple is not a house and therefore does not need windows. Something so simple, by its absence, helps us to better understand the nature of the window, its biunivocal relationship with man and consequently the specificity that makes it a genuinely human mechanism of architecture.
Although occasionally has been hypothesized that the Greek temples possessed a skylight in the roof to allow the entrance of light, actually, there is no constructive evidence to support it. We need to move to another temple, Agrippa’s Pantheon in Rome, to find this solution that allows the passage of time to penetrate into the architecture through an opening. The oculus of the Pantheon is not really a window but a skylight. The words change but the same origins and meanings reappear: from the Latin roots, oculus and lucerna, we are again visited by the eyes and the lamps that give us light and allow us to see the world. Oculus aside, the building complies perfectly with the configuration attributable to a temple, home of the gods, as it has only one main door and no windows to interact with the city. Also by reduction to the absurd it reminds us that, in fact, a window is only such when it is practiced in a wall, in the vertical limits of the space.