Excerpt from the introductory essay:
The Importance of the Parallel in Architectural Studies
by Richard Franklin Sammons

At the time when Professor Georges Gromort published his Parallel of the Orders, it must have been inconceivable that the orders would ever fall from popular use. The orders were so tightly entwined with the warp and woof of theory and practice that not even the nineteenth-century architects of the Gothic Revival, or the idiomatic architects at the beginning of the twentieth century would ever question the relevance of their study. It was universally recognized that the orders contained far more than what is obvious to the casual eye; they were, in fact, the cumulative product of centuries of thought and experimentation. Their artistic refinement has no individual author but is the result of the directed attention of many minds from varied civilizations and times. Even today, after almost a century of neglect, it remains inarguable that a significant percentage of architecture's body of knowledge is contained within these seemingly simple forms—so much so, that any architect who has not carefully studied them cannot be considered educated (although many modern architects seem to be proud of their ignorance). With this reprinting of Gromort's Parallel, we offer a contemporary audience the materials for a course of study once considered to be fundamental to the arts. Gromort's Parallel is not a reliquary of dead forms but a concise and lucid compilation of the immutable principles central to our art now and in the future.

What is an order? An order represents the fusion of tectonic form and aesthetic principles. In one form or another, 'orders" develop in all mature forms of architecture. Within the structure of an order lies the 'genetic" information for the entire mode of architecture. The compositional pattern or scheme, the proportional system, the architectonic parts, and the sequence in which they are assembled and conformed to one another are recapitulated in microcosmic form. With the study of the orders one is simultaneously exposed to the aesthetic concerns noted above, as well as the history, vocabulary, and origins of buildings—architecture being the mnemonic expression of that craft. For these reasons a careful study of the orders continues to be the most fruitful educational endeavor for any erstwhile architect, builder, or designer who recognizes the objective components to any aesthetic work.

The idea of a parallel of the orders—a collection of preeminent examples—is a marked departure from the dogma of High Renaissance texts. The authors of those texts sought to describe an ideal model for each of the species of columns preserved in the writings of Vitruvius. Certainly the ancients did not recognize specific concepts such as 'orders." The canonization of these species into five neat categories was, for the most part, a Renaissance preoccupation. In contrast, a parallel does not propose to present 'The Ideal Doric Order" or 'The Correct Corinthian Order" but instead celebrates the astonishing artistic variety exhibited within the seemingly constrictive boundaries of these types. Oversimplifying these notions of the ideal and the correct has prevented many from understanding classical architecture. The concept of 'the correct" belongs only to the brief period of orthodoxy exhibited by these Renaissance authors who tread cautiously through the remains of the classical tradition, knowing that they were indeed novices.

Roland Fréart de Chambray provided the first 'parallel," dating from 1664. By that time, there was such a diverse collection of paradigms advocated by various theorists that choosing one version or another as 'correct" became an absurd proposition. (Far better to present them all than to censor or omit any.) To give this collection structure, Chambray juxtaposed the orders from the modern authorities with those from the actual remains of antiquity. The fidelity of the plates describing antique examples to the actual archeological remains are, at best, vague—the sources are those same Renaissance authorities who, when confronted with measurements from their known surveys that did not conform with the writings of Vitruvius, often manipulated them to suit their understanding of proportion. The idea of the parallel caught on as a didactic tool. Thomas Jefferson, at the University of Virginia, created a parallel in built form, in the pavilions of the Lawn, which he saw as 'models of taste and good architecture, and of a variety of appearance, no two alike, so as to serve as specimens for the Architectural lecturer." The pavilions on the east side of the Lawn (the side closest to Europe, the Old World), were drawn from antiquity, while those on the opposing west side (representing the New World) exhibited the orders from modern sources, all gleaned from the pages of Chambray's Parallèle.

Reliable measured drawings of works of antiquity began to proliferate with the rise of archeology as an increasingly important component of the architectural discipline, starting with Perrault and coming to an acme with the French during the Napoleonic campaigns. The availability of more accurate source materials prompted the production of the Nouveau Parallèle des Ordres, published by Normand in 1819, and republished in England by A. W. N. Pugin. (This is ironic in view of Pugin's advocacy of the Gothic.) Normand's, however, would not be the last word. The juggernaut of nineteenth-century German archeology and the measurement and remeasurement of monuments, both ancient and modern, by students of the French Academy in Rome and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts continued to produce an immense wealth of useful and accurate documentation. A century after Normand, Gromort published his parallel as the second part of his Choix d'Eléments Empruntés à l'Architecture Classique, taking full advantage of this vast new resource.