“Love is a burning thing, and it makes a fiery ring” and so we fall into the Temple of Vesta as the flames grow higher in this quest for a comparative architecture by the BIM method.
Two temples to the Goddess whose sacred fire burned in the hearts of Romans in pre-Christian times. They are both circular, to be more specific a Tholos: a cylinder surrounded by a ring of columns. Vesta was rarely represented in human form, instead she was the fire itself, kept burning in the centre of the temple by the vestal virgins.
These two can be found in Bannister Fletcher and they are relatively close to each other in Rome and Tivoli. The one at Tivoli uses a distinctive variant of the Corinthian capital which was John Soane’s favourite. Not much use of parameters here. I did form the columns as a dynamic array. Sources disagree on the original roof structures which collapsed long ago. I have chosen to show one as a dome with a central oculus for the smoke, and the other as a…