ATHENS, TOWER OF THE WINDS

The Tower of the Winds, also called Horologium [Greek: Horologion (“Timepiece”); in modern Greek, the structure is called Aéreides ("Winds").] is a building in the Agora of Athens erected about 100–50 BC by Andronicus of Cyrrhus for measuring time. Still standing, it is an octagonal marble structure 12.8 m high and 7.9 m in diameter. Each of the building’s eight sides faces a point of the compass and is decorated with a frieze of figures in relief representing the winds that blow from that direction; below, on the sides facing the sun, are the lines of a sundial. The Horologium was surmounted by a weather vane in the form of a bronze Triton and contained a water clock (clepsydra) to record the time when the sun was not shining.

The Greeks invented the weather vane; the Romans used it in the belief that the wind’s direction could foretell the future. Initially described by the Roman architect Vitruvius (1st century BC), the Tower of the Winds was fancifully reconstructed in the 16th-century editions of his work by Cesare Cesariano and Giovanni Rusconi. Although these fanciful images influenced designs by 17th-century English architects Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor, accurate illustrations were not published until 1762, when they appeared in volume one of James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens.

The Tower of the Winds was subsequently influential in the Greek Revival, notably in the versions of it built by Stuart in the landscaped pairs at Shugborough, Staffordshire, Eng. (c. 1764), and at Mount Stuart, County Down, Ire. (1782), and in James Wyatt’s more imaginative Radcliffe Observatory Tower, Oxford, Eng. (1776).

This post is part of the Outdoor Wednesday meme,
and also part of the Wordless Wednesday meme,
and also part of the ABC Wednesday meme.