The "half-crumbling, half-restored palace still gleams with brilliance after thousands of years." As an artist, I visualized this building but noticed the rest of my class was bored seeing only ruins and floor plans. I thought if I could build a scale model, they would better appreciate the 4,500 year old civilization dominated by females"...reigning with imagination, grace, and the free play of man's creative power." This building was so large, so different that the subsequent Hellenes could only explain it with the myth of the labyrinth. It is not the balanced, geometric architecture of Greece. "This palace grew and proliferated in the course of time, slowly, like a living organism, a tree. It was not built once and for all with a fixed, premeditated plan; it grew by additions, playing and harmonizing with the ever-renewed necessities of the times...not guided here by inflexible, untrickable logic. The intellect was useful, but as a servant, not a master...this is why landscape, palace, paintings, and sea have such a faultless harmony and unity." The architecture is not experienced in a linear progression (straight and symmetrical). It is a gestalt. Space was a palpable entity to the Minoans, every bit as important as the walls that contained it, possibly more so.

The model has 423 rooms but the original palace has been estimated between 700 and 1000 rooms. There are two versions of the model: the Early Palace before a strong earthquake destroyed the front entrance system and the Late Palace with additions and subtractions. The model is coated with the same plaster of Paris mixture used on the palace. The interior was decorated with color: patterns and murals everywhere. The west side was used for ceremony and ritual. It had 3 impressive public entry systems, a tripartite shrine area, throne room, cult rooms and 2 sunken areas called lustral basins. The private, domestic east side was filled with all the amenities for comforable living with 6 light wells plus adjoining open-air patios and courtyards. Folding doors could isolate certain rooms in case of chilly weather or hot, humid winds. There was a bathtub complete with built-in soap dish and a flush toilet using water poured into a drainage system of conical shaped clay pipes that fitted into each other so that one jet of water cleared out the next (more that I can say for my own sewer drains). All light wells (open to the sky) had drainage channels running under the floors. They were able to channel rainwater alongside steps turning at right anglers, use sediment pools to clear the water that was fed into a large basin at the bottom of the East Bastion. They created a small fountain in the Courtyard of the Stone Spout. The next 3 sets of pictures will show you some of this--enjoy!