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__**The Greek Comparison**__



The architecture of the Ancient Greeks has influenced many of the architecture you see in buildings today, all over the world. One of these features are the columns that you may see outside a building, and sometimes even inside. There are three types of columns. Doric, which has a very simple design, Ionic, which is a column that appears as though it has scrolls at the top of it, and corinthian, which is the most complex of the three and has very detailed carvings at the top of it. These three columns can be compared to buildings in ancient Greece, as well as many buildings in the modern world. The U.S supreme court building can be clearly compared to theTemple of Zeus in Olympia. You might be wondering, how in the world can these two buildings possibly be alike or have the same architecture if they were built in such different time periods? Well I'm going to answer that question in this article.

//The Temple Of Zeus in Olympia, Greece was built in the years 472 BC through 356 BC. It has Corinthian columns and the whole point of building this temple was to worship the greek god Zeus. Zeus was the god of the sky and of thunder. The worshipping of Zeus was a common religion in the Seleucid period in Syria and Palestine. The temple of Zeus was home to the statue of Zeus, created by the sculptor Phidias. It took him about twelve years to complete the statue, and it was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient world. The actual temple itself was constructed by the architect Libon. The main part of the building was made from a local limestone, and that limestone was ugly, and not attractive at all. So the outside of the temple was coated with stucco to give it a look of marble. All of the decoration on the building was made from Parian Marble, and all of the roof tiles were made out Pentelic marble. Which is the same material used to construct the Parthenon at Athens. In 146 BC, the Roman general, Mummius, dedicated twenty-one guilded sheilds, and they were hung up on the columns. In 426 AD, Theodosius the second ordered that the temple be destroyed, and a series of earthquakes in 522 and 551 further crumbled the ruins and left the Temple of Zeus partially buried. The site of the temple was identified in 1766 after being forgotten under landslides and flood siltation. In 1829 a French team uncovered parts of the temple, and took pieces of the pediments to the Musée de Louvre. In 1875, under the supervision and direction of the German Archaeological Institute, teams began to systematically escavate the site, and this escavation has continued to the present time, although there have been some interuptions.//

On May 4th, 1987, the United States Supreme Court Building was declared a national historic landmark. The United States Supreme Court Building is located at 1, First Street, in Washington, D.C., and is the seat of the Supreme Court of the United States. Once the federal government was situated in Washington, the court was housed in a tiny room in the basement of the United States Capitol. That's where it stayed, until 1935. In 1810 the Supreme Court was held in the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol, then in 1860 the court moved to the Old Senate Chamber, because it outgrew its other location. Cheif Justice William Howard Taft argued in 1929 that the Court should have its own building away from Congress, as an independant branch of the government. The Supreme Court Building was designed by architect Cass Gilbert, and it now stretches four stories into the air. The construction began on October 13th, 1932, and was completed in 1935. It cost about 9.74 million dollars, and turned out to be $94,000 below the budget. The building is made of marble from Vermont, and the non-public facing gardens were made of Georgian marble. Much of the inside is lined with Alabama marble, with the exception of the courtroom itself, which is made from Spanish ivory vein marble. The courtrooms 24 columns are made out of ivory buff and golden marble from the Montarrenti quarries near Siena, Italy. Some of the judges weren't thrilled with the new arrangements, particularly in the courtroom. Harlan Fiske Stone complained that it was "almost bombastically pretentious...Wholly inappropriate for a quiet group of old boys such as the Supreme Court." and several other judges complained about it as well.



If these two buildings are so far apart, how can they be even a little alike? Well, to start things off, they both have Corinthian columns on the front of the building,and the columns are made of marble on both buildings. This is a clear fact that the US Supreme Court Building was influenced by the architecture from the ancitent greek time period. So, in conclusion, both of these two buildings were definately influenced by ancien greek architecture, and they both have the same columns made out of the same material. Buildings that have been influenced by ancient greek architecture can be found all over the world, even today. Maybe there's even a building near you that's been influenced by the style of the ancient greeks.