Building the Tivoli corner columns

- Throughout the course of this chapter we're going to build a complete Corinthian column. But not necessarily this Corinthian column, which is the more typical Corinthian column that you probably see in a lot of buildings. But we're going to do a very specific Corinthian column, one based on the one that Soane actually used at the Bank of England. Now Soane was very fond of the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, and he based his columns at the Bank on the columns and did very faithful recreations of those columns. And so that's what we can see there on the right-hand side. Now, I outlined a process in Renaissance Revit to go through the steps that are required to build all of the orders, but the Corinthian order, in specific, in detailed steps in Revit. And so we're going to follow that process here over the course of the next several movies. Now if you want to see kind of a complete overview of the process that I outline in Renaissance Revit, you can actually go to my YouTube channel and watch this video. Now, it is fast. It's actually four times fast. So you might want to watch it a couple times, but it gives you the complete process from start to finish of how the Corinthian capital goes together. Right now, I'm just showing you a little snippet of building the leaves at the base of the capital, but I invite you to watch that entire video when you get a few moments. Now, the primary source material that I used in Renaissance Revit to help me get all the proportions and the sizes of the Corinthian capital correct was a book called The Classical Orders of Architecture by Robert Chitham. I highly recommend this book. It's a fantastic book, so if you can get ahold of a copy, I do recommend it. Now here's an example of one of the plates, and this is specifically the Corinthian capital plate within that book. And you can see the rulers over on the left-hand side and in a few other places in the plate that give all the detailed dimensions and proportions for all the parts and pieces of the Corinthian capital. Now this was invaluable for me in figuring out all the parts and pieces of the Revit family. Well, the trouble is that Soane didn't use the more traditional Corinthian capital. He used a very stylized version in the one based on the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli. So there's another wonderful book that I used as source material called The Architectural Orders of the Greeks and Romans by J.M. Mauch. Now it is in German, and it's a rather old book. I think it was published around 1910 so it might be difficult to get a copy of this. You'd have to find it in secondhand stores. I actually did find one in a secondhand store. And you can see there that it's this wonderful folio-style book. So all of the plates are these oversized plates on card stock that are loose plates. So it makes it really easy for you to hold them in your hand and look in close. And, it just so happens that one of the hundred plates that are in this book was a look at the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli. So Mauch went around Europe and surveyed all these ancient ruins and came back and documented all of the proportions. And Vesta at Tivoli just happens to be one of them. And so, here's a close-up of that. And I've scanned that plate and included it with the exercise files. And this gives us all the numbers and the proportions that we're going to need to go ahead and create those elements in the Family Editor in Revit. So here's just a quick comparison of the two columns directly in Revit. I'm just going to zoom in here at the top. And you can see, the more traditional Corinthian column on the right-hand side and Soane's rendition from the Temple of Vesta on the left-hand side. Clearly, the proportions are very different. The heights of the two columns vary. And if you look carefully at the capitals, you'll notice that even the capitals are different proportions. So the Soane version is a little bit squatter and it's more compressed. And the more traditional version is scaled-up and a little bit taller. Notice that the flutes on the column are different. Here they have rounded channels at the top but here they're cut across square. And then, the base is also quite different as well. You can see that the base from the more traditional Corinthian column is a little more detailed. It has a few more mouldings, and it sits on a square plinth, where the one that's used at the Bank of England and from the Temple of Vesta is a little bit shorter and squatter and has these really, almost bizarre, sloped channels at the bottom. So there's a lot of variation in the details. And so, this is the one that we're going to be building over the course of the next several chapters. And in addition to building that very detailed version that you just saw there in Revit, we're also going to create a coarse detail version and a medium detail version so that when we look at the family at different scales and at different levels of detail, it'll be easier for us to work with because it'll require less processing power when we're using the coarse and the medium detail version. So with that overview of the approach that we're going to take over the course of the next several movies, we're going to go ahead and build the Corinthian capital based on Soane's design at the Bank of England.