For Plato, what distinguished the architect was that he did not just work out what should be done, like an accountant, but also gave the necessary orders to the workmen until the building was finished.
Design held a distinct character in ancient Greece. Monumental architecture is easily ruined by mistakes, for what has already been built cannot be modified as corrections are prohibitively expensive. The lack of drawn plans or preliminary design is astounding.
The ancient Greek architects used proportion in the absence of scale drawings. The building process was a technique of applying rules of proportion, and the ‘module’ became the unit whereby all other elements were multiples or fractions of the module. However, much remains unknown on how the rules of proportion were applied. What we can bring from this is that Greek architects used a sense of space in order to construct the temples.
