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.
1.2 The Urban Grid and Public Architecture
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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
We talked about regular town planning and the location of the cardo and
the decumanus.
I want to show you just an example of this.
This, this is, you know, of a city in Italy.
In this case the city of Pompeii.
You see it here in plan.
This is a plan of Pompeii as it looked just at the moment that Vesuvius erupted.
So in August of 79 AD this was the way Pompeii was at that particular time.
You can see it's not really a rectangle.
It's kind of an elongated, sort of an oval.
Kind of an oval, an irregular oval.
But it has the sense.
You know, I think it has sense.
It shows you that again even for for it, even though the Romans were thinking with,
to try to create their cities in a very regular way.
You know, it didn't always work out exactly that way,
depending on the terrain.
And so on and so forth.
But this is a rough, it's sort of an irregular rectangle as you can see here.
But if you look very carefully, you sort of say to yourself like,
“where's the card, where's the dec?
You just told us the cardo and the decumanus intersect in the center.
Like where are they?
Why aren't they intersecting in the center?”
Well, surprise, surprise.
Maybe not such a surprise.
If you look over here at the bottom left,
you will actually see the original city of Pompeii.
In the 4th century B.C., the 3rd century B.C.,
the 2nd century B.C., Pompeii didn't look like this.
Pompeii looked like, like this.
And if you look very carefully at just this section, where we have the buildings
and the various colors, you will see, that there is indeed a cardo and
a decumanus that intersect exactly at the at the center of this roughly square.
So this was actually pretty regular originally,
this roughly square city of Pompeii.
At three we find the forum, because the forum is always at the intersection,
the Romans tried, they're very careful about this sort of thing,
tried to put their their forum right at the intersection of the Cardo and
the Decumanus.
You see that here and
then you see a lot of other buildings splayed off to either side.
The law quarter, the Basilica another, a temple here,
here the main temple of Jupiter the senate house or Quorea, and
a series of other religious and comparable structures on the right hand side.
So it began as a quite regular plan, Cardo and
Decumanus intersecting at the section, the center.
Forum right at the intersection of those two.
And then over time, it grew.
It grew and expanded, and the streets, the same street, the Cardo, you know,
expanded although it was no longer exactly at the center of the city.
This is a view from Google Earth that shows you just, pretty much I
tried to angle it in such a way that it looks, that it's exactly the same angle,
close to exactly the same angle, as the plan that we just looked at before.
And you can see over here the amphitheater.
You can see many of the streets, including the the shops and the houses.
And you can see over here the forum as it looks today from the air and
again it shows you how helpful Google.
And of course as, you know, using Google Earth yourselves for other purposes.
You know that you can go way down, I mean, you can find the entire city.
And then you can go and explore each individual building on your own and
in your own time.
In fact, that's what I've done here.
Here you can see a closer view of the Forum in Pompeii as it looks today,
from the air via Google Earth, here at the left.
And I compare it to this plan that comes from your textbook,
one of your two textbooks, the book by JB Ward-Perkins.
which is, of the two, the more, well they're both important, but
then they both do different things.
But one of the two important books that we'll be using this semester.
Here is the plan from that book, and you can see the way in which this forum, and
this forum is very important in Pompeii, because it's very early in date.
And consequently, we will talk about it a fair amount.
We see this, the way Roman forums were usually arranged was to have one general
open rectangular space, open to the sky, surrounded by columns with a temple.
The key, the most important temple,
the chief temple, pushed up against one of the short back walls, and
dominating the space in front of it, this is a Capitolium.
We'll talk about what a Capitolium is in a future lecture.
But it is a temple to Jupiter and others, as we shall see.
The Temple of Apollo over here, the Basilica or law courts over here.
And you can see, interestingly enough,
they have essentially the same shape as the central forum proper.
Rectangular, with a colonnade in the center and then something on one side.
It's not another temple, but rather, a tribunal,
a place from which the judge would try, the cases in the law courts.
We see the senate house over here, and a series of other buildings,
including a market place, and some other buildings here on the right hand side.
So a typical Roman forum at its earliest, this dates very early on,
second century BC, and is therefore an extremely important building for us.
Just so that you get a sense of what some of these look like in actuality.
This is the Basilica, or the law court of the forum of Pompeii, as part of it,
which is part of the forum of Pompeii.
And we see that tribunal that I mentioned before,
a two story tribunal from which the judge would try the cases.
The building isn't as well preserved as we'd like,
although there's quite a bit there, and what is there allows us to
to create this kind of reconstruction drawing where we can get
a very good sense of what this building actually looked like in antiquity.
You see the tribunal over there.
You see that there are double stories with columns on either side.
You see these colossal columns along the aisle.
But most importantly, unlike the forum, which was open to the sky, this is roofed,
and it had a flat roof with what's called a coffered ceiling,
we'll talk about that later in the term.
But then a sloping roof from the outside.
And Basilicas were always roofed and
that's what distinguishes them from a lot of other Roman buildings.
Roman temple architecture.
The temple of, the temples of Jupiter and
Apollo at Pompeii are not that well preserved.
But some Roman temples are magnificently preserved.
I mean, look at this one.
It's pristine.
It's like it was, was created yesterday as a, as a duplicate of what
a Roman temple or a restoration of what a Roman temple might have, have looked like.
You could, you could put this in Memphis, or
somewhere like that, and think that you had a nice replica of a Roman temple.
That's how well preserved it is.
It's an amazing temple.
It just happens to be well-preserved in part because it was re-used over time,
most recently as a small archaeological museum.
This is the famous Maison Carree, or square house, for obvious reasons,
that is in the beautiful French town of Nimes in the south of France.
And you see it here in all its glory.
And think as you look about this, look at this,
how many banks were based on this plan.
I mean, you can go to almost any small city in America, and
see a bank that looks something like this.
Which just gives you some sense of again,
how influential Roman architecture has been over time.
It's a quite traditional temple.
We'll talk about the difference between traditional temple architecture, and
more innovative temple architecture in the course of this semester.
And as innovative as it gets is what is one of the key buildings of
Roman architecture, which is of course, the famous Pantheon in Rome.
I'm sure there's none of you whose been in Rome who hasn't been inside the Pantheon.
It is an incredible building.
This is a Google map.
It was done during the the building was put up during the reign of
the very important, from the architectural standpoint and many other standpoints, but
very important, Emperor Hadrian.
And we see this is again, one of the wonderful things about Google Earth
because you're seeing here the modern city.
But you're also seeing in 3-D. The building still stands and
it's in incredible condition.
But you're also seeing the building almost as it would have been in
ancient time surrounded by its modern environment.
[COUGH] It's a temple, it's a very distinctive and
innovative temple, because when you look at it from the front,
you see it has a kind of traditional porch that is not unlike the one in
the Maison Carrée with columns that support a pediment.
It looks like earlier Greek or Etruscan architecture.
But what's very innovative about it is that once you go into the building you
see that this is not about, this is all about an interior space, an extraordinary
interior space that is shaped by light that is shaped by genius essentially.
And this, this image is actually one of those, it gives you a sense of,
of the kind of thing that I've been able to incorporate into this course.
That I didn't always use before, which includes, many, many,
many of my own images and this one, I'm particularly proud of.
It's a very atmospheric view of the of the dome of the pantheon and
I think really gives you almost more than anything else, gives you a sense
almost more than anything else that I can show you today of, of Rome at its best.
Of the power and glory of, of Rome, and of Roman architecture.
I'm very biased.
But as far as I'm concerned, this is the greatest building ever conceived by,
by [LAUGH] man.
So, there you are.
We'll see by the end of this semester whether you agree with me or
you think I'm absolutely wrong about that.
This is another extraordinary structure, and
one that enables me to say something that you'll hear me say more than once.
And, I know I'm biased.
But, say more than once in the course of this semester, and
that is that there isn't much that the Romans didn't discover, didn't create.
And not just in architecture, in all kinds of ways.
And this is a good example of that.
This is the so-called, the famous Markets of Trajan in Rome.
Part of the great forum of the emperor Trajan in Rome.
And you can see that what the Romans have done is taken a hill,
one of the famous seven hills, the Quirinal hill.
Taken that hill, cut it back, poured concrete on it,
and created this incredible shopping center on the side of the hill.
If this isn't the beginning of mall architecture, I don't know what is.
Shopping mall architecture.
It's right here already.
You can shop, there are over 150 shops.
You can shop on a variety of levels.
You can shop in the hemicycle.
You can shop along the Via Biberatica.
You can shop, you know, shop 'til you drop.
In this, in this incredible mall and
as one looks at it in detail, one sees amazing things.
This is a view of one of the shopping streets.
You can see the typical polygonal masonry that is so
characteristic of Roman street design here, along it.
Some of the individual shops, we think that way at the top, that was added later.
But you see some of the individual shops here.
And look how, how ingenious the Romans had been to provide not only a ramp, but
also a series of, of stairs.
>> [COUGH].
>> Flat areas, stairs, and so on.
This has all been very, very carefully orchestrated by
the designers in a way that is not only utilitarian, but also very attractive.
And then there's this.
This is the Great Hall of the of the Markets of Trajan and Rome.
A kind of bazaar which also has a series of shops and
also attic windows as you can see above.
But then the, the, the particular marvel of this space is,
look what they've done above.
They have taken, using concrete once again.
And this gives you some sense of the miracle of Roman concrete.
Using concrete, they have created a new kind of vault,
which we call the groin vault, which is a ribbed vault.
And you can see the ribs very clearly here.
And they have lifted that ribbed vault on top of piers that have,
that have been attenuated, narrowed, to the point to a very,
very sophisticated way, much more than was true up until this moment.
So they have been able to lift these groin vaults in a way that always reminds me,
it's as if you went and opened a series of umbrellas over a space, you know,
lifted the space up in a truly miraculous way.
And as an example again of the fact that the Romans,
there's nothing the Romans didn't do or didn't invent.
Here you see the well-known marketplace in San Francisco where
you see essentially the same idea.
A series of shops down below and
then this, this magnificently lifted ceiling up above.
So Roman architecture, as I said,
in the very beginning really had a huge impact on later architecture.
The Markets of Trajan were part of the forum complex,
the Forum of Trajan which you see a part of here.
The forum itself was really quite conventional.
This is an interesting building because we have a fairly convent, traditional
approach to the forum itself, and then an innovative approach, to the markets.
This is a restored view of the Basilica, or law court of the forum of Trajan.
You see that it's very traditional with columns and marble, and this flat ceiling
with coffers, and, that's what most of the, most of the forum looks like.
The markets are done in a very different style as we saw.
And this particular forum was not only a meeting and
a market place or a place where cases could be tried but
was also a a monument in stone to the military victories of Trajan.
Trajan was the emperor who extended the borders of the empire to
their furthest reaches.
And the monument is a testament to what his accomplishments were militarily.
And the famous Column of Trajan, which still stands, and
is in magnificent condition as you can see here.
Is a monument that is wrapped with a spiral freeze that that
purports to describe, from bottom to top, all of the exploits,
all of the military exploits of Trajan's two military campaigns in Dacia.
It also served as the emperor's tomb.
It was a burial chamber down below for urns of Trajan and his wife Plotina.
So it served not only as a,
as a commemoration of his military victory over Daica which by the way is modern
Romania today but also to victory over death for the emperor.
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