I just noticed this whilst playing through on my redguard player, Bethesda totally messed up the architecture for oblivion! This is most noticable in Anvil, a place that has very roman-esque architecture (pillars, tiled and pointed roofs, etc.) and right in the middle of it is a Gothic-style cathedral! You know it's gothic by the way it shoots up and that it has flying buttresses. I don't get it, in a town like anvil you should see some Pantheon-esque churches. I think that by giving towns diiferent churches to fit their archetecture the feeling of immersion would be much greater.

A lot of others on this forum agree with you on that.

Since I know next to nothing about architechure, though, I just nod my head politely and move on. There are other, more noticeable mistakes in the game that break the immersion far greater than an architechural dispute does.

But yes, I agree with you on that one.

Nah, pantheon-esque? It should be art deco all over!

it should look like it does in Lore, not like a watered-down Rome/Medieval thing.

This bothered me aswell. I can see they heavily used Roman architecture all around Cyridiil. Yet, the churches are all of the Gothic style, save for the statues and carvings, with a large rose window...
I really don't see any other Gothic architecture exept for the churches. Is there anyting in lore to justify them bieng so? If anything, shouldn't they resemble Roman Temples? After all, the Temple of the one does...

as far as I was aware, they were all interesting and unique, varied depending on the god in question. For example, an Arkay shrine would be a grey, somber building. An Akatosh temple would be large, gold and impossibly curvy, possible looking like an hourglass.
I have nothing concrete on that, just a conclusion I came to after reading the PGEs.

I wish they had done that, it really would have been more impressive when arriving in a new town. Of course it would be more work for them, but one can always wish. How the heck they got gothic catherdrals out of that....I will never know.

Hotels in the Temple district?

That really made me confused, and annoyed.

Hey, some people like to stay close to the Temple of the One.

Regarding the chapels, it's not to different than the similarities between Daedric shrines in Morrowind; they all got the same architecture, but were made for worshipping different Daedra Princes. Not that it justifies either case.

Actually, to me that one made a good bit of sense. Most people going to the temple district would of course be pilgrims, and since in the lore Cyrodiil and the IC are rather large, you would be very tired after making your visit to whatever shrine you where visiting. Enterprising men and women would of course capitalize on that and BAM! Hotels in the temple district.

This is actually true in the case of gothic cathedrals. They were made large, so pilgrims could see them off in the distance, and is where pilgrims stopped and traded. There were monestaries attatched to these, which was the core of staying there ( food, trading goods with monks and others, a place to sleep ). Over time, each Cathedral tried to out due the other, making it more popular, hence why gothic cathedrals are so fancy looking on the outside. Over time, towns build up.

Yet still, they could have had the same effect with the lore temples.

What I find intersting about the archetecture of the Ayleids is that White gold Tower, one of the last remaining fully standing ayleid temples, is very roman on the outside, but the inside of ayleid ruins are very meso-american in nature. Blocky and full of religious decoration.

And at a deeper level, this would be a pilgrimage to the temple of the high god of their religion in the center of the empire. This is where the rich would put themselves on parade as devout worshippers to maintain the public view of them, or improve it. Also the emperor seemed to think highly of the nine, he probably liked it when people paid their dues to the One (Neo) right near him.

Temple district = Phony parade ground

aren't some of the cities suppose to have architecture influences from neighboring provinces? Like Anvil was influenced by hammerfell...bruma by skyrim....and cheydenhall (sp) by Morrowind.

That's what our eyes and the game tells us.

Ever watched The Making Of (documentary comes with the CE)? The art department basically walked around Maryland and environs (including Washington DC) and cribbed off what they saw. Appropriate, given they were designing the decadent capital province of an empire...

Oh, haha, ect, but considering the subject matter why is DC the worst possible choice for looking at when designing the capital of an empire? Physically I mean.

It's a chapel. It doesn't have to mesh with the city's architecture. There could have been more variety with them, but on what basis do you think Anvil's Chapel should have been "Pantheon-style"? I don't see the parallel there. These are called chapels, not temples. The very word chapel evokes a cathedral style. There is one that is called a temple and that is the Temple of the One in the Imperial City, which actually has a Greco-Roman architectural style.

Anvil is decorated in a somewhat shabby pseudo creek-roman style, so to make their temple in style a pantheonesqeu building wouldn't be out of place. A building that looks decidedly Gothic however does.

When it comes to churches there are many styles of them, perhaps the cathedrals are the best known examples but they're expensive and hard to build and even they don't look alike. Compare for example a http://www.kansastravel.org/05cathedral2.JPG to the http://home.planet.nl/~rijke865/reims%20kathedraal.jpg. They share the same features, but due to differences in time, construction material, availability of funds they're different.

That doesn't quite touch on the underlaying silliness of having one temple for only one god in each city. Right now the Nine divine are portrayed as a polytheistic catholic church, where one name can freely be substituted for another.

Yet polytheism doesn't work like that, each god exists for a specific need and each one must be appeased for that need. Building a temple dedicated to one god and only marginally referencing the others, just isn't something they'd do, because it's completely contrary to the idea behind polytheism.

Never the less, if there is to be one temple for each god, the different aspect for each god should also return in the building styles of the temples. This for example is a http://www.kerkderijpeo.nl/Photo/Kerk%20De%20Rijp2_WEB.jpg, if you compare it to the http://www.take-a-trip.eu/uploads/pics_bezienswaardigheden_nl/Kathedraal-van-Barcelona.jpg, you can see that the protestant church has much less decorum and is much simpler, something which matches their outlook on wealth and aesthetics. Or compare both too a http://home.hetnet.nl/~andreavlug/PLAATJESMAP/Jalta14-Alexander%20Nevski%20kathedraal.jpg for a completely different idea.

So with these pictures I hope I showed that the cathedral style is much more varied and placing the same building in nine different cities for nine different gods doesn't it any justice. In fact it's just another area where Oblivion turns out to be rather generic while there was plenty of room to avoid it.

It would have been more believable and interesting if each chapel varied in appearance to fit the city it is in or the god it is dedicated to, as of now, I don't even remember which of the Nine Divines each one is dedicated to, because they are all exactly the same except in name, which is a problem in its own right, even if you look at real world churches, they do not all look the same, that applies to any place of worship, even smaller ones tend to each look unique.

Well, proweler's post just talked about that.

As usual, I edited somewhat heavily after I posted.

It would be way out of place, a thousand years by our timeline. Even moreso, the Pantheon isn't a common building type. If they were going on the older style, they would have picked something like the temple of Mars Ultor or the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. If they wanted a more fitting style to the gothic/romanesque period they would have chosen something like San Miniato al Monte.

And most importantly who builds them and why.

Which the whole system as they present it these days is pretty silly, I blame the Imperial Cult for indocrinating a slew of newbies in Morrowind. The separate temples worked much better.

That's a crazy way to think of polytheism. :nono: Where did you ever come up with it? Just about every temple ever built in a polytheistic society was dedicated to one god! Do you have an example?

Yeah, it depends on who builds them and why. That last one was built during a time when they were building churches of that style everywhere in Russia because Alexander the third was bankrolling it. The second one was under construction for six hundred years, and with all the french influence it isn't even consistent with itself in terms of style, but it works. The first one I haven't seen before.

It's also a fair complaint to make about the churches in Morrowind, Daggerfall, and Arena. They all did the same thing.

And even then, people can't agree on how to worship the same god! We don't have any information who built these chapels though, or why they can't figure out the appropriate construction method for the climate, so we'd have to assume an emperor ordered it done.

I think so. You see, the Chapel is a sacred pace of the nine (Who should hav ehad gothic wayshrines). They are merely put into places the empire controls, almost as a symbol of Imperial rule.
Also: Most places in Cyrodiil steal the architecture of neighboring countries.

The point was that with some sort of shabby roman-greek look alike architecture in Anvil, you need an equally shabby roman-greek temple. If you drop the portal of the Pantheon you're left with a big cylinder that fits nicely with the other big cylinders of Anvil Castle and the Towers.

Perhaps the shabby roman-greek classification is completely off but that's besides the point.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome was dedicated to all roman gods. The name even means something along those lines.

Though that wasn't quite what I was getting at. What we see in Cyrodiil is one temple per city, dedicated to a single god. If they were polytheistic there'd be Eight temples in each city, or some sort of Pantheon housing all of them.

Right now it's just churches dedicated to one god with nine different names.



It's a local one. They're like mushrooms around here, every town build its own.



Morrowind had the Imperial cult, which is something like that preacher for all Religions from M.A.S.H and not really a temple. Arena doesn't count and Daggerfall didn't have allot of stuff fleshed out here.

The Shrine of Kynareth was better in that regard. It was out doors on a large hill and it had a proper philosophy for being out doors on a large hill.