Attempts to guide architectural thought along rational lines come with the Age of Enlightenment. The frontispiece of Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture (1753) shows the ‘rustic cabin’ or primitive man; ‘the model upon which all the magnificence of architecture has been imagined’. Two earlier allusions to the idea of architecture’s primitive origins: a diagram by Bramante in the cloister of S. Ambrogio & Milan. D and a plate from Sir William Chambers’ Treatise of 1759, shows the hypothetical evolution of the Doric order from the primitive hut.

The orders developed as temple architecture, but the temple form itself was never copied till the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was the eloquence of the column with the moulded profiles above it that seized the imagination of the Renaissance. Only when classical antiquity began to be seen in a much wider historical perspective was the temple form revived and then more often as a secular power-symbol than as a religious building. The best preserved of all Roman temples is the Corinthian Maison Carree at Nimes (AD130).

Images and text from:

Summerson, J. N. (1963). The classical language of architecture. London: Thames and Hudson.

NZ grown radiata pine is fabricated by a local cross laminated timber (CLT) process to form a robust, highly insulated sustainable ‘container’ for a transportable workplace for contemplation (and enlightenment). This timber abstraction of a temple for startup entrepreneur Crispstart alludes to the power of thinking and mankind’s progression from the primitiveness of the ‘rustic cabin’ to a nomadic universal space fabricated from sustainable timber and assembled by an industrial/digital process.

...and indeed if we consider this beautiful machine of the world, and how the heavens, by their continual revolutions change the seasons according as nature requires, we cannot doubt that the little temples we make ought to resemble this very great one.

Palladio, A. (1965). The four books of architecture. New York: Dover Publications.