OTHER TECH

Photo by Phillip Ennis

Wrong The face of the pilasters in this Southern California theater was supposed to line up with the face of the architrave above them. It didn't. This is still one of the most common mistakes in facades of buildings or houses that feature columns or pilasters.

MISTAKE NO. 3

Ignoring the ABC's of traditional architecture. I'm guilty of an equally embarrassing mistake in a home theater I designed in Southern California. This particular mistake was inexcusable for someone who was born in Greece, the cradle of classic architecture. It might not sound like a big deal to you, but it was and still is to me. I will try to make it simple: In classical architecture, you have a column (or a pilaster, which is half a column), and on top of it you have a capital that supports an area above it called the architrave. (At the risk of oversimplification, the architrave is more or less the equivalent of what is now called a soffit.)

Well, the rule is that the architrave must always line up with the face of the column while the column's capital must stick past the architrave. I should have known that when I started designing this theater, but I didn't. I guess I was so happy to have discovered that pilasters break up the blandness of a wall and bring dimensionality to the room that I forgot to check the rules that dictate their use. Take a look at the photo of this theater and you'll see what I mean: Not only don't the pilasters line up with the architrave, but the capital itself is pushed entirely under the architrave, which makes matters even worse. The strange thing is that I'd already gotten that right in another theater, in Greenwich, Connecticut, designed a few years earlier. That theater might have had other, early-career issues, but the alignment of the face of the column with the architrave wasn't one of them.

Photo by Phillip Ennis

Right The face of the pilasters in this Connecticut theater lines up perfectly with the architrave above the capitals.