Deinocrates of Rhodes

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Deinocrates of Rhodes (sometimes spelled Dinocrates; working last quarter of the 4th century BC) was a Greek architect and technical adviser for Alexander the Great. Around 332 BC Alexander appointed him director of surveying and urban planning work for the city of Alexandria, which was laid out on a grid plan that was influential in Hellenistic city planning. He was aided by Cleomenes of Naucratis and by Crates of Olynthus, an esteemed hydraulic engineer who built the waterworks for the city and the sewer system demanded by the low-lying site.

In Babylon he designed the gilded furneral monument to Alexander's general Hephaestion (died in 324), which was described by Diodorus Siculus, Arrian, Strabo and Plutarch and others. It was built of stone (unavailable locally) in imitation of a Babylonian temple, six storeys tall, and entirely gilded.

In 323 he collaborated with Paeonius of Ephesus and Demetrius in reconstructing the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, which had been destroyed on July 21, 356 BC in an act of arson, the night, it was said, that Alexander was born.

He also worked on, among other things, an incompleted funerary monument for Alexander's father, Philip II of Macedon.

Deinocrates is noted by Vitruvius, in the only surviving architectural treatuise from Antiquity, for his plan to sculpt in the flank of Mount Athos a colossal sculture of Alexander, holding a small city in one hand and with the other, emptying a river into the sea.

References

[Technology Museum of Thessaloniki:] Biographical notes

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