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A study day for sixth-formers:

• what makes ancient Greek architecture distinctive?
• how have others thought about ancient Greek architecture? Why?
• how can studying ancient Greek architecture help us better understand Ancient Greece and later cultures?

Overview

Britain is well known for its fabulous collections of ancient Greek antiquities. Outside of Greece, there really is no better place to encounter fragments of friezes, statues and columns.

Best known, of course, are the remarkable holdings of The British Museum|. Its Parthenon Gallery is a must-see on most tourists’ trips to London.

However, as impressive as this is, the challenge is to somehow make sense from often very little: statues have to be resurrected from limbs, torsos and heads; buildings have to be reconstructed from ruins; modern museum cases and gallery conditions have to somehow disappear: no easy task.

The collections of the RIBA British Architectural Library can help here. Amongst the four million items in the collections, there is a mass of material associated with Ancient Greece. This includes:

• some of the earliest studies of Ancient Greece by Western European travellers, scholars and architects, dating from the 17th century onwards
• extensive information on Greek buildings by later scholars and architects
• countless remarkable photographs and drawings, recording in detail the remains of the great Greek buildings, and documenting the changing state of archaeological sites
• a wealth of material on architecture inspired by Ancient Greece – especially the Greek Revival of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Combining these sources with the British Museum collections can transform understanding of ancient Greek architecture.

Even better is combining this with visits to some of the fascinating Greek Revival buildings in London, like St Pancras New Church (1819-1822), the Great Court of University College London (1829), and the British Museum itself (1823-52).

So why not take up the challenge, try out the study materials, and begin to reconstruct ruins like an expert Greek archaeologist?

Download teachers’ introduction materials

Further Information

For more information on this, and other resources for schools and colleges, please contact Dr Paul Snell, RIBA British Architectural Library Education Curator on (0207) 307 3711 or Library.Education@inst.riba.org|