Aportico is a porch leading to the entrance of a building, or extended as a colonnade, with a roof structure over a walkway, supported by columns or enclosed by walls. This idea was widely used in ancient Greece and has influenced many cultures, including most Western cultures.
Porticos are sometimes topped with pediments.
Palladio was a pioneer of using temple-fronts for secular buildings. In the UK, the temple-front applied to The Vyne, Hampshire, was the first portico applied to an English country house.
Apronaos (UK: /proʊˈneɪ.ɒs/orUS: /proʊˈneɪ.əs/) is the inner area of the portico of a GreekorRoman temple, situated between the portico's colonnade or walls and the entrance to the cella, or shrine. Roman temples commonly had an open pronaos, usually with only columns and no walls, and the pronaos could be as long as the cella. The word pronaos (πρόναος) is Greek for "before a temple". In Latin, a pronaos is also referred to as an anticumorprodomus. The pronaos of a Greek and Roman temple is typically topped with a pediment.
The different variants of porticos are named by the number of columns they have. The "style" suffix comes from the Greek στῦλος, "column".[1] In Greek and Roman architecture, the pronaos of a temple is typically topped with a pediment.[2]
The tetrastyle has four columns; it was commonly employed by the Greeks and the Etruscans for small structures such as public buildings and amphiprostyles.
Hexastyle buildings had six columns and were the standard façade in canonical Greek Doric architecture between the archaic period 600–550 BCE up to the Age of Pericles 450–430 BCE.
Some well-known examples of classical Doric hexastyle Greek temples:
The group at Paestum comprising the Temple of Hera (c. 550 BCE), the Temple of Apollo (c. 450 BCE), the first Temple of Athena ("Basilica") (c. 500 BCE) and the second Temple of Hera (460–440 BCE)
The Temple of Hephaestus below the Acropolis at Athens, long known as the "Theseum" (449–444 BCE), also one of the most intact Greek temples surviving from antiquity
Octastyle buildings had eight columns; they were considerably rarer than the hexastyle ones in the classical Greek architectural canon. The best-known octastyle buildings surviving from antiquity are the ParthenoninAthens, built during the Age of Pericles (450–430 BCE), and the PantheoninRome (125 CE). The destroyed Temple of Divus Augustus in Rome, the centre of the Augustan cult, is shown on Roman coins of the 2nd century CE as having been built in octastyle.
^Gates, Charles (2013). Ancient Cities: The Archaeology of Urban Life in the Ancient Near East and Egypt, Greece and Rome. New York: Taylor and Francis. p. 209. ISBN9781134676620.
Stierlin, Henri (2002). Silvia Kinkle (ed.). The Roman Empire: From the Etruscans to the Decline of the Roman Empire. Cologne: Taschen. ISBN3-8228-1778-3.