Natural Stone Pillars - Increase Your House Look & Value

The history of building architecture has passed through significantly five orders. Do you know there is only one architectural feature that is capable of determining a building’s style of construction?

Yes, it is the posts or pillars/columns. 

What Is a Pillar?

By definition, pillars are vertical elements, which may take part in supporting the building structure or simply remain as decorative elements in a design. Pillar mostly attached with other building elements or remains standalone.

If you compare a pillar with the human figure,

1. It has a head/cap known as capital,
2. It has the foot colloquially called the base,
3. It has a vertical body/shaft midst of head/capital and foot/base.

I hope these are sufficient terms to introduce the anatomy of a pillar or column in a general sense.

How to Determine Five Orders of Architecture Based on Columns?

Let’s come back to our original topic.

How pillars or columns help us to determine those five orders or styles of architectural design?

Let me explain it briefly.

• Doric Order – The order or style characterized by short and heavy pillars around the capital.
• Ionic Order – It has thin/slender pillars/columns with a large base and scrolled capitals. 
• Corinthian Order – Again it has a slender shaft but with flutes carved elaborately.
• Tuscan Order – It is the simplest in design, unfluted and a plain base as well as capital.
• Composite Order – It is nothing but a mix of Ionic & Corinthian styles or orders of architecture. 

Please bear in mind the style of a structure’s front columns or pillars helps us to identify the classical order of architecture of a building. 

Fortunately, modern architectural practices have adopted this classical element to contemporary building designs to add visual interests or create visual contrast. 

Why Natural Stone Pillars?

In the prehistoric era, humans were living in stone caves. So, in the historic era, they have begun construction of their homes mostly from natural stones available in their vicinity.

Thus, stone pillars came into existence as the structural element to support the house structure above, be it a roof or a next level. 

Later on, we started living in homes made from woods or a mix of woods and stones. It has given birth to wooden posts or pillars. Perhaps, it is the reason that columns are mostly found in round shape while posts in a square or rectangular shape.

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