Remembering The Five Orders of Architecture

The goal of the Struggling Student's Memory Guide is to show some of my ideas and develop other ways for students to use associative memory techniques instead of using rote memorization. By using association and mnemonics I believe we can speed the memory process up and hopefully create educational memories that will last a lifetime.

Posting the word part -acanth- today reminded me of a memory story I created to recall the five orders of architecture about twenty years ago. The five orders are: Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite.

The mnemonic I came up with is not really an acronym but a composite of the beginnings of all the words. Tudor In Corn Compost and of course I tried to make it more visual and memorable by wrapping a memory story around it.

Memory story: You're watching a Tudor (Queen Elizabeth I or Henry VIII [both Tudors]) struggling to climb up an architectural column to get out of the huge stinking pile of corn compost they're in. Or, if you're not into Tudors. Your two door (Tudor) car is piled up on an architectural column of a Southern mansion after you lost control and went into a pile of corn compost. The damn revenuers were chasing down the fellows who created the corn compost pile for some reason.