1:1 Drawings

So, I snuck this link to a smithsonian article in the previous post, but thought I really should point out some of the sweetness here:

A few years after the Parthenon restoration began, University of Pennsylvania scholar Lothar Haselberger was on a field trip exploring the Temple of Apollo's innermost sanctuary. He noticed what seemed to be patterns of faint scratches on the marble walls. In the blinding morning sunlight the scratches are all but invisible, as I discovered to my initial frustration when I searched for them. After the sun had swung around and began grazing the surface, however, a delicate web of finely engraved lines started to emerge. Haselberger recalls, "All of a sudden I spotted a series of circles that corresponded precisely to the shape of a column base, the very one at the front of the temple." He realized he had discovered the ancient equivalent of an architect's blueprint.

Then, just above the outline of the column base, Haselberger noticed a pattern of horizontal lines with a sweeping curve inscribed along one side. Could this be related to entasis, also evident in the towering Didyma columns? After carefully plotting the pattern, the answer became clear: it was a profile view of a column with the vertical dimension—the height of the column—reduced by a factor of 16. This scale drawing must have been a key reference for the masons as they carved out one column segment after another. By measuring along the horizontal lines to the edge of the curve, they would know exactly how wide each segment would have to be to create the smooth, bulging profile. Manolis Korres believes that the ancient Athenians probably relied on a carved scale drawing similar to the one at Didyma in building the columns of the Parthenon.

Haselberger also traced a labyrinth of faint scratches covering most of the temple's unfinished surfaces. The lines proved to be reference drawings for everything from the very slight inward lean of the walls to details of the lintel structure supported by the columns. There were even floor plans, drafted conveniently right on the floor. As the temple's stepped platform rose, each floor plan was copied from one layer to the next. On the topmost floor, the builders marked out the positions of columns, walls and doorways.

The discoveries at Didyma suggest that the temple builders operated on a "plan-as-you-go" basis. "Clearly, a lot of advance planning went into a building like the Parthenon," Coulton says. "But it wasn't planning in the sense that we'd recognize today. There's no evidence they relied on a single set of plans and elevations drawn to scale as a modern architect would."

Source [emphasis added]

The Greeks drew their floor plans right on the floor! That's frikkin' awesome!