DT: How do columns make a building stronger?

We have been looking closely at Ancient Greek buildings and wanted to understand why they used columns so often. We tested a single column with weight and found the roof we added wouldn’t stay up and it fell over. We then tried 4 columns - one in each corner. This resulted in them all falling over as soon as weight was added. We tried an array of 9 columns and found that we were able to add very heavy weights without the roof failing.

Columns work together to share the weight of the roof. The more columns, the stronger the structure!