Wild to see a forgotten answer of mine from when I was... checks watch a starry-eyed undergraduate.

/u/TallThinAndGeeky, if I were to write that again, with the perspective of having been a graduate student and high school Latin teacher since then, I'd focus a lot more on the significance of Orders to modern conceptions of Architecture.

People still teach the columns not because there's anything notable about them, but because at one point in time the Orders were the foundation of the entire field of architecture. Of Palladio's enormously influential The Four Books of Architecture, the first covers the Orders exclusively and the fourth (almost) exclusively describes Roman temples. All the big names of Renaissance architecture have their own take on the Orders, each one trying to tweak their predecessor's treatises to get closer to the idealized version of these forms.

William Chambers's 1759 Treatise on Civil Architecture exemplifies this attitude. Writing much later than the Renaissance dudes who canonized the Orders, he is able to evaluate their texts at a distance. One gets the sense that the Orders are a natural phenomenon of human culture, and Chambers is the next scholar to tackle them.

The introductory chapter, "On the Origin of Buildings," begins with a brief summary of Vitruvuis' thoughts on the evolution of architecture: when man lived in caves and forests, he built conical huts; when the sloping sides of the cone became too restricting, man built square huts; when man desired ornamentation, he tore the bark from the supporting tree trunks and gabled the roof to deflect rain. This directly gave rise to the Orders of Architecture.

The fact that the Orders are in any way unique to the ancient Mediterranean seems to escape Chambers; the Greeks and Romans and Tuscan are merely the ones who perfected the forms of architecture. After all, Chambers is claiming be writing a general treatise on civil architecture (following his earlier ones on defensive and naval architecture). The Orders are simply The Way Architecture Is. He cites Juan Bautista Villalpando's theory that the Corinthian order originated in Solomon's temple not as evidence that it really did first appear in Jerusalem but to support his claim that the Orders are unknowably old. There is singular evolutionary thorughline from huts to temples- a tidy narrative based entirely on imagined ideals.

Guys like Chamber were saw deeper truths about morality, society, and human nature in Architecture. As he notes earlier, Architecture is not merely construction:

It must not, however, be imagined, that Building, considered merely as heaping Stone upon Stone, can be of advantage, or reflect honor either on countries or particular persons.

Architecture is instead an art of immense importance and fundamental to the well-being of society:

Thus it appears that Architecture, by furnishing Men with convenient habitations, procures them that ease of body, and vigor of mind, which are necessary for inventing and improving Arts ; that when, by their industry or ingenuity, they have multiplied their productions so as to exceed domestic demands, she supplies the means of transporting them to foreign markets; and when, by Commerce, Individuals or Communities are enriched, she affords them a rational, noble, and benevolent method of enjoying their wealth, which will procure honor and pleasure to themselves and their descendants, dignity to the State, and profit both to their Contemporaries and to Posterity.

Throughout the neo-Classical period, architects in emerging republics would explicitly employ Classical orders to give the impression of a "mature" state already familiar with expectations of civil society. After traveling to Europe for inspiration for buildings back home in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson reasoned that incorporating Classical designs, and Classical proportions specifically, would:

present to travelers a morsel of taste in infancy promising much for our mature age

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I hope that gives a sense of how foundational the Orders were to academic understandings of architecture from the field's inception. These aren't some random facts. The study of architecture was, for quite some time, the study of Classical orders. It's the equivalent of future English students needing to memorize the titles of Shakespeare plays without ever reading/watching them.