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study of what are likely to be the usual wants of those who are likely to be his employers, and the greater or less success with which those wants have been supplied by others than himself.
The third section of the subject which should engage the architect's attention is, according to the Greeks, what Vitruvius calls Order. By that term I consider we may most rightly understand what we call style.
To proceed to design, without determining style, is to waste both time and invention; since, as it is obvious that an expression of unity of thought should be manifested in the completed work, unless a certain definite mode of using materials, which we understand as style, is determined upon and adopted as a rule throughout our subsequent operations of thought, the work will be but a medley, "a thing of shreds and patches."
Where an art like architecture was, as, amongst the Greeks, in the comparative absence of written laws, an art taught by oral communication and practice only, what they understood as order became a much more coherent and imperative principle than anything equivalent to what we can understand as style.
To build in the Doric mode, or in the Ionic, or in the Corinthian, with them meant distinctly that a certain series of parts would require to be used, essentially different from each other in form, proportion and aspect. We now speak of the Grecian style as a coherent thing, whereas in truth there was very nearly as much difference then, between building in either of the three modes usually adopted by the Greeks, as there is now in our building in the classical or Gothic styles.
With the exceptions that Doric and Ionic temples minister to something like the same wants, and that they were both constructed of similar materials, they represent two absolutely distinct and different styles, in all parts and forms.