Roman Architecture is a course for people who love to travel and want to discover the power of architecture to shape politics, society, and culture.
1.1 Introduction: Roman Urbanism
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Roman Architecture
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Introduction to Roman Architecture
Roman urbanism and introduction to the wide variety of Roman buildings covered in the course.
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Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
Welcome to Roman Architecture.
I'm Professor Kleiner.
And what I'd like to do today, is to give you a sense of some of the great
buildings, and some of the themes that we will be studying together this semester.
I think it's important to note from the outset that Roman architecture is
primarily an architecture of cities.
The Romans structured,
a man made worldwide empire out of architectural forms.
And those architectural forms revolutionized the ancient world, and
exerted a lasting influence on the architecture, and
the architects of post classical times.
This semester we will be concerned,
primarily with urban communities, with urban communities.
And we will, in the first half of the semester,
we will focus on the city of Rome, and in the second, a-,
and, and also central Italy, including Pompeii.
And I wanted to show you at the outset an aerial view of Rome,
you see it over here on the left-hand side of the screen,
that situates us in the very core of the ancient city.
You see the famous Colosseum.
The very icon of Rome.
At the upper right.
You see the Roman Forum as it looks today.
And you see a, a part of the Capitoline Hill transformed by
Michelangelo into the famous Campidoglio,
as well as the Via dei Fori Imperiali of Mussolini, built by Mussolini.
And the Imperial Fora.
So the city of Rome again we'll be concentrating on at the beginning of this
semester, as well as the city of Pompeii. An aerial view of Pompeii as it looks today.
You can see many of the buildings of the city.
Including the houses and the shops and also the entertainment district.
This is the theatre and
the big music hall of ancient Pompeii, the amphitheater is over here.
And you can see, of course, looming up in the background the Mount Vesuvius.
The mountain that caused all that trouble in 79 AD.
So that's the first half of this semester.
The second half of this semester, we are going to be going out into the provinces,
into the Roman provinces.
And that is going to take us, and we're going to look at the provinces both in
the eastern and the western part of the empire, and
that will take us to Roman Greece, it will take us to, Asia Minor.
Asia Minor, which, of course, is modern Turkey, it will take us to North Africa,
it will take us to the Middle East.
In what's now Jordan and Syria and it will also take us to Europe, to western Europe.
To cities like, to cities in France and to cities in Spain.
And let me just show you an example of some of the buildings that we'll look at
as we travel to the provinces.
This is the library of Celsus.
In Ephesus, on the western coast of Turkey.
This, the theater, a spectacularly well preserved theater at
Sabratha you see in the upper right hand side.
And down here a restored view of the masterful Palace of Diocletian,
one of the late Roman Emperors, in a place called Split.
Which is in Croatia along the fabulously gorgeous Dalmatian coast today.
So those are just a sampling of the kinds of buildings that we'll
look at in the provinces.
We're going to be seeing we'll be concentrating on the ways in
which the Romans planned, and built their cities.
And its important to note from the very outset that Rome itself
grew in a very ad hoc way.
And we can tell that.
Here's a Google Earth image showing that core of
Rome with the Colosseum with the famous modern Victor Emmanuel Monument that
looks either like a wedding cake or a typewriter. It's very white and
it's, it's called the wedding cake by a lot of the locals.
You see that here, but it's a landmark in Rome.
and, the Capitoline Hill with the Campidoglio over here,
the forum, the Roman forum, the imperial forum, on, on this side.
But you can see from the relatively crooked and
narrow streets of the city of Rome as they look from above today,
You can see that again, the city grew in a fairly ad hoc way, as I mentioned.
It wasn't planned all at once.
It just grew up over time, beginning in the eighth century B.C..
Now this is interesting.
Because what we know about the Romans is when they were left to
their own devices and they could build the city from scratch,
they didn't let it grow in an ad hoc way.
They, they structured it in a, in a very care-,
very methodical way.
That was basically based on military strategy, military planning.
The Romans they couldn't have conquered the world
without obviously having a masterful military enterprise.
And they everywhere they went on their various campaigns,
their various military campaigns.
They would build, build camps and those camps were always laid out in
a very geometric plan along a grid, usually square or rectangular.
So, when we begin to see the Romans building their ideal Roman city,
they turn to that so called castrum or military camp design.
And they'd build their cities that way.
And I show you here one example,
we're using Google Earth here, again, another example of, alright, a-,
an example of a city, called Timgad, T-I-M-G-A-D, which is in modern Algeria,
and the ancient city, still survives, and if we look at this Google.
Earth image of it.
You can see, there's no later accretions as we have in Rome.
No later civilizations built on top of it.
You can see the ideal Roman plan,
which as I've said is usually either a square or a rectangle.
It has in the center, the two main streets of the city.
The north south street is called the cardo,
C-A-R-D-O, the east-west street is called the decumanus, D-E-C-U-M-A-N-U-S, we'll go
back to all of this in the future, so you don't have to worry about it today.
The cardo and the decumanus, and
you can see that they cross exactly, they intersect exactly at the center.
Of the city.
And then the rest of the city is arraigned in blocks, very regular blocks.
This grid plan that I mentioned before,
and then some of the major monuments, whether it's the theatre or the forum.
You know, are arraigned in different parts of the city.
And then these blocks constitute essentially the housing and
the shops and so on and so forth.
This is a city that was planned in around 100 AD under the emperor Trajan.
And again it gives us an inkling of what the Romans,
when the Romans thought about ideal Roman town planning it was this grid plan.
Not Rome, but this grid plan that they had very much in mind.
Cities like Rome, like Timgad, and
most of the others that we'll look at in the course of this semester.
Were surrounded by defensive walls, as a mass,
as a major military machine in its own right, Rome was only too aware
of the dangers of, of attack from others, and consequently they walled
their cities, and we will look at the two major walls in Rome, as well as walls of
other parts of the Roman world, I promise not to spend too much time on walls.
Because they are essentially piles of stone, but, but they're,
they're important in their own right and I will speak to them on occasion.
And especially the two in Rome, you see them here.
This is the first wall, wall in Rome, the so
called Servian Walls which was built in the Republic,
in the Roman Republic, to, To, to, surround, the city.
The republican city.
Essentially, the Seven Hills, the famous of Seven Hills Rome.
To surround the Seven Hills of Rome in the fourth century,
B.C. You see a section of it here.
This wall.
Any of you who have come to Rome by train.
In the Stazione Termini
See a very extensive section of the Servian walls as you get out,
I don't know if you've noticed it, but you should
see an extensive section of the Serbian walls right outside, the train station.
This is a different section than I, picture I took on the Aventine Hill.
Showing a part of that wall.
And that was eventually replaced by later walls.
The city grew over time.
It needed a, a, a, a more extensive broader wall system.
And in the late 3rd century AD under the emperor Aurelian,
the famous Aurelian Walls were built.
The Aurelian Walls as you know, there's no way you've missed those.
I'm sure if you've been in Rome, you've seen the Aurelian Walls.
They're there, they're very much there.
At least if you've left the city, maybe if you've just gone into the core of the city
and haven't gone beyond that you might not have seen that if you left the city,
you've seen the Aurelian walls the very impressive set of walls that it,
encircled the latest city.
One thing that's apparent to you as you look at these,
even if you have no knowledge whatsoever of Roman architecture is
these are made of very different kinds of materials.
So technical issues come to the fore right away as one analyzes this sort of thing.
In the early period, essentially blocks of stone piled one on top of the other for
the wall.
Here a more sophisticated use later on in the empire of a new
technology that we're going to talk about a lot this semester, and that is concrete.
And what concrete did to revolutionize Roman architecture.
Concrete, in this particular case, faced with brick.
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