Also known as a very private house built by the Minoans, Knossos is a town located on the small island of Crete and is estimated to have been built between 2000 to 1400 B.C. There were columns throughout the building which were usually smooth, and were frequently smaller at the bottom than at the top. As for the materials for the town of  Knossos, a form of usual mud, mud-brick, small stones, etc. were used. Wood was used occasionally in half-timber skeletons and also was worked into the columns.

    One thing that the Minoan style focused on specifically was the attention to aesthetics or looks. They preferred their buildings to be in the linear form, formed in one dimension to run all through the building, notably conspicuous to the eyes, from the main entrances at the northwest and southwest. Even in large rooms there were lines of columns, piers or both. The lines of movement, would have been diverted attention from the shape of the volume.

    Closely related to the linear form in the Minoan buildings was volatile dynamics, or free movement. This resulted partly from the effect of the linear forms themselves and in turn helped to create linear forms. Mobility was created also by the originality of the arrangements.

    The houses in these buildings were small and densely packed. The towns were typically composed of a considerable number of rooms and were often more than one story high. Stairways were an important feature, seeing as how that would be the only way for the people to gain entry to different levels of the house. The ground floor was used as the storage room with no entrance from the outside world. As you went up to the next level, the facade opened to the outside light by windows so that people could see clearly. These buildings' windows had four to six panes which required a transparent cover of some kind, e.g. oiled parchment. Other sources of lighting for these buildings were the lanterns or skylights, which were located throughout the building.

    As for the paths or trails for this city were not straight. The roads twist and some might picturesquely speak of the design of a labyrinth. There are many rooms along the roads and there are also frequent turns and changes of levels.

1. Scranton, Robert L., Greek Architecture George Braziller Publishing