 Today we're going to talk about ancient Rome and as we have in our previous discussions of cultures We're going to initiate our conversation with a brief look at some of the ways the human figure is represented and the way Art begins to set us up for certain expectations. We might have about how Architecture is engaged and developed within the culture This is of course is not Roman. This is a Greek statue the famous deriferous by Polyclitus and I'm simply showing it to remind you of The fact that the Romans conquered the Greeks and in conquering the Greeks They did not simply discard all that was Greek, but rather they brought Greek cultural developments philosophical developments artistic developments to Rome and Continued with some shifts for example when we looked at the deriferous. We noticed that this is a highly Idealized image of a man It is almost as though the figure is more governed by geometry the idea of the oval the idea of the golden proportions embedded within the disposition of parts and some kind of classical demeanor of a type rather than an individual of a calm Universalized passive expression rather than a figure who is deeply engaged with the psychological complexities that one encounters in the world in fact if we compare a Trajectory from Egyptian and this is our old friend Ranifer whom we've discussed before To Greek and here's the good old deriferous to Roman a couple of conclusions would have to be made One obvious conclusion is that the Romans were nowhere near as good-looking as the Greeks and the Egyptians But another would be that a different set of interests is at play People are looking at nature much much more closely to get specific information about specific individuals the Roman bust that we're looking at at the right is not an Idealized description of an idealized man governed by mathematics and Cosmological balance Rather, it's a portrait. This is an individual. This is an individual who is being Observed very closely every little wrinkle every little bulge in his nose is being marked because the Personality and the personal contributions of the individual are beginning to matter more than simply a abstract type and You see it again and again this guy Well, not quite so beat up as the previous room when we looked at nonetheless has a kind of broken nose So that he would be recognizable people would know who he was as opposed to this Greek guy over here who is sort of blank stared staring out blankly with a kind of neutral Repose on his face. This guy looks troubled. This guy looks like he's thinking hard This guy looks like he needs a shave this guy has just come from the beard barber We have here Romulus and Remus the legendary founders of Rome Two little boys who were suckled by the she-wolf and went on to found Rome to establish Rome and this is the diagram of Rome which represents The basic constituent ritualized gestures that Romulus went through to set up the precinct of Rome a Perimeter plowed and the description of a major north-south and east-west axis the statue of the she-wolf by the way is Etruscan and Ancient Etruria the civilization of the Etruscans preceded the Romans on that site So much of what we have that is characteristic of Roman architecture is really a kind of hybrid of things left over from the Etruscans and things borrowed from the Greeks For example, the Etruscans had an architecture which was much more reliant on bearing walls than on columnar structures And as we go forward today, we will see evidence of that in Roman architecture Just something that I think is pretty interesting about this foundation diagram of Rome The perimeter with the cross-axes and here we have an auger a sort of soothsay or fortune teller in the middle Making that ritualized gesture every time a new Roman town or a new Roman camp gets laid out and these are just a couple of similar diagrams If anybody is Chinese and doesn't think this is true, I didn't make this up. I found it in a book Is this a Chinese ideogram for village Chinese people true or false? Never seen it before So we can pretty much assume this is also not an Assyrian Diagrams for village or an Egyptian diagram for village or an Icelandic diagram for village Somebody just made all that stuff up. But if it were true, it's an amazing how that it's amazing how consistent that order extends from civilization to civilization Every Roman camp has two major axes the Cardo running north south and that tends to be the road on which Commerce is organized little shops little vendors and so forth And the decumanus a road running east-west which tends to be the road that organizes civically important structures So this is a little diagram of the Roman town and I've just clarified it by telling you this is the forum the intersection of the Cardo and the decumanus and These are the roads leading out of this wall precinct of the town We spoke last time about a town that is Roman in its layout a Magnificent town on the Great Prairies of the Midwest. What is that town? Sorry Columbus, yes, what's Cardo? Good. What's decumanus? Good. Where's the forum? Right? the Statehouse excellent And we also saw how certain buildings like the Palace of Diocletian and split which is on the coast of Croatia across the Adriatic Now establishes the imprint of Rome Even on these far-flung lands by basically rehearsing the general layout of pieces and we noticed also that the method of execution called crucifixion by the Romans was not simply The only thing they could think of to kill their criminals of state Let's say but it was also a way of re-imprinting the symbol of Rome And using the very symbol of Rome as the tool for the execution. Here's a Roman atrium house This is the atrium or the courtyard around which it's organized and this one is fairly idealized and by idealized I mean the perimeter wrapper is almost as idealized as the center But that's not always the case Here's another example Where the atrium or the courtyards are fairly Clear in their geometric form But the perimeter goes crazy and the reason the perimeter goes crazy is that these are urban buildings They're nested together. You never really experience the perimeter because it's abutting another building with a crazy perimeter. I Want to speak a little bit more about the organization of the atrium house not really in terms of how these different rooms go together but how The center this courtyard or atrium becomes really a strong Way that that irregularities that the perimeter get held together this is a good design device for studio and For those of us who like to speak about food whenever possible. You can call it a fried egg scheme You know what a fried egg is That's a fried egg. We have many different kinds of fried eggs I'm sure all of you have produced some of these a kind of good fried egg a kind of wobbly fried egg a Fried egg from an egg with two yolks. Have you ever had that experience? With industrial farming probably you never get it anymore, but if you get the organic egg sometimes you get it So what's clear about this the reason we know that all of these different organizations are fried eggs Is that the center is so clear the center is so? Knowable that any kind of perimeter idiosyncrasies Collect around the center and can become knowable So if we look at a series of these little atrium houses from Pompeii Where we have a really good collection of domestic architecture that was preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius You can see that these kind of look like my little fried eggs We have a clear center and an irregular perimeter Here we have a couple of double-yoked eggs with absolutely crazy sprawling perimeters and Honestly, this is a great scheme in studio. If you can't figure out what to do if you're absolutely stumped Courtyard courtyard is always a good idea hard to miss with a courtyard. Well You'll do it. You'll make a bad courtyard scheme someday But at least it's a strong organizational device that begins to make possible not only formal relationships But also social and and functional relationships across the space. So now I'm going to go back a little bit to Roman engineering Much of what is particular about Roman architecture has to do with the technology that the Romans Made use of and that allowed them to build in a very different way than the Egyptians Manoans the Mycenaeans the Hellenic Greeks and a lot of that had to do with vaulting Vaulting means the making of arches and if you take an arch and you spin it around on its axis You get a dome take the curvy thing and you spin it and you get a dome So this is a bridge in Spain and the Roman Empire extended all over Europe and North Africa Amazing scale huge thing and it's accomplished by means of Not simply understanding the geometry of the arch and its ability to bear loads But also developing new building materials like concrete. There's a Roman wall for example You've got this kind of rubble Embedded in a concrete mix that's faced with a harder kind of brick on the exterior And these are examples of different ways that the Romans nested the bricks together so that you would get Surfaces that were kind of through gravity self-adherent hard to break down soft material in the middle hard material at the perimeter But what is really characteristic about all this Roman building material is that it's small. It's portable It is not difficult to move to the site so that when the Romans come to Spain and They start building things like the Alicante Bridge or the Segovia aqueduct They can do it with locally available materials And it's easy to hoist up locally available materials to these High elevations because you're not taking giant Megaliths with you the Segovia aqueduct Also represents another aspect of Roman engineering and that is simply the miracle of plumbing or the miracle of introducing water sources an aqueduct Was organized to bring water down from the mountains on an incredibly gradual slope so that it could reappear Fresh cool mountain water in villages that were far away Not only did the Romans bring water to their outposts But they also drained the swamps and if you drain the swamps you reclaim land and you also increase the general health of people You get rid of the pestilence of mosquitoes and the likelihood of cholera by getting rid of the foul standing water And not only did they do that But they also provided a system of roads and bridges that made possible movement of troops across great distances very very easily and Therefore expanded the reach of the Roman Empire and not only did they do that, but they also made plumbing possible They had toilets the Romans had toilets if you if you which I think are a great invention I have to say I don't know what people did without them But if you go to some Roman Settlements, there's one in Sicily called Piazza Armerina and there's a very well-preserved Roman toilet there There's a little channel of water Running beneath and there's a marble bench with three holes cut in the side like on the town street So if you're walking around this little town and you need to go to the bathroom You pick one of the three holes you sit there and the running water carries away Whatever you have chosen to deposit so we spoke about an arch when we were looking at the Aqueducts and the bridges and the logic of the arch has to do with the different stones and These stones are called Voussoirs V-O-U-S-S-O-I-R Not a really important word, but it's worth knowing that an arch is made up of multiple things and They keep they kind of work like the Corvillian that we looked at earlier when we were looking at Minoan civil Mycenaean civilization Because they keep translating their load sideways Here they do it smoothly they don't do it through the displacing of elements They do it in a radial fashion But each of these elements work together to create a structure that can span at great distances The top Voussoir is called the Keystone Pennsylvania is the Keystone state so if you took the top Voussoir out the whole system would fail That's why Pennsylvania calls themselves the Keystone state a problem with a barrel vault is You're always having these loads kick out sideways. They're always kicking out sideways So you need a pretty hefty mass of wall in order to support the lateral thrust of all these loads kicking out sideways, but Roman architecture Gets a lot of its power from this thick masonry. So it's it's something that you find in Roman architecture, and it's not a problem If you intersect two barrel vaults, you begin to get a more complex vaulting system The cross vault or the groin vault And here you can have a Larger space or you could have an intersection of two spaces And this is just the idea of the arch with the Keystone and the Voussoir If you want more terms, these are spring blocks that the arch comes down and rests on and notice There's a fairly substantial amount of mass here because the loads coming down from the arches are coming down Diagonally, and you have to have enough mass to absorb that thrust the construction of Roman arches and Roman vaults usually relied on the building of timber form work here You can see some form work with some little carpenter guy has built a centering out of wood And then you lay the stuff up and once the mortar has dried the system becomes self-supporting so Roman architecture uses brick and concrete which are cheap and easily available everywhere hence Rome Expands its its domain. This is just a Magnificently drawn description of Roman road work because Rome also had this vast network of rung of roads That were maybe about I don't know eight feet deep the roads So they're still fine you can still find roads like the Appian way or the Aurelian way And they're pretty much as good as any street in Clintonville or better because they're so they're so solidly built and There are different kinds of stones. There are certain flat ones to walk on There are other ones that water drains through layer upon layer upon layer, and these are just some Aspects of Roman technology draining the swamps mining ores making concrete building sewers having aqueducts building bridges making mills that run through water power just so inventive the whole hyper idealization of the Greek world really allowed people to Try to come to a mental and intellectual understanding of the phenomena around them And you might say that the Roman engagement with the world was much more practical that instead of trying to figure out a kind of mathematical Picture that would explain things they would roll up their sleeves and start making things that would would solve their problems Here's another type characteristic of Roman architecture, and that's the temple We saw temples when we looked at Greek architecture, but Roman temples are slightly different slightly different for a number of reasons one reason is They are frontal and they're frontal because they tend to be in a very delimited enclosure a courtyard or a forum So they only have one face that is primarily accessed by the people They're also bearing wall structures And this is a really little temple in Rome called the temple of fortuna virilis or the temple of portunis it has various names and You can see looking at the plan How it's working how the columns are working we see the columns here when we look at the temple But they're working very differently than the columns in a Greek temple. They are engaged columns. They're embedded in the wall so the columns On the porch are freestanding, but the columns adhering to the cella are embedded in the wall there They're almost no longer structure They've taken on the function of ornament or their main function is to articulate the wall So we look at things like the temple of fortuna virilis or we look at things like a much larger Roman temple the Maison carré in neem and You get the rhythm you get the idea of the Greek temple, but a totally different idea about what the interior space is in fact Think about Greek interior space. These are extremely contained hierarchically segregated spaces The interior space in Roman architecture become something that gets expanded and expanded and elaborated on And one reason that that's possible is because of the technology If you can start vaulting structures, you can begin to develop interior space in a much much more complex way So just as a point of comparison here's the Parthenon and here's the Maison carré and the Parthenon is Approached with stairs ringing the style of eight on all sides. The Maison carré is frontal the Parthenon has Timbered trusses as its roof support and and that's a real limit to how big you can get in terms of interior space You know how big is the wood that you're going to get? At a certain point the wood that they were going to find in Greece was Really limited because they cut down their forests to build ships and it takes a while in a southern Mediterranean climate For the forest to build up again by that time a lot of the soils had eroded and washed to the sea so they began to get timber from places like Lebanon which had famous cypress trees and Cut down all of those trees. And so There's a limit to what you can do if you're using wood Spans couldn't get as big as they you might want them to get here the superstructure the roof structure of the Maison carré is a big barrel vault and because it's a barrel vault it can be Quite large and it can give you quite a capacious interior space We approach these two temples in quite different ways obliquely here for our friend the Parthenon and Frontally, this is of course the side for the Maison carré These are probably some words you already know, but what the heck let's introduce them again You know the word pochette perhaps from architecture 200 or if you don't let me tell you about it Pochette is a French word and it means pocket more or less And it's actually interesting as a concept because the word pocket or Pochette is used to describe the darkening of a solid if you're looking at it in plan So we know that this is solid because it's been colored in we know that this is void here at the porch because it hasn't been colored in But the word pochette suggests that every wall in fact is a pocket of some sort that a wall is not simply a line But a wall has thickness and with the thickness of a wall you can begin to carve that you can begin to sculpt You can begin to mold space and if you look at the interior of Temple of Fortuna There's a little bit of that kind of sculpting going on through the thickness of the pochette Many years ago. There was a famous moment when the Spanish architect Rafael Moneo gave a lecture and he's this very Sweet man talking about his architecture, which is fine and You're expecting him to just say I wanted the light to be like this I wanted the space to be like this, but he got up there and said I Want you to know that when you do architecture you must always think of two things sickness and death Seekness and death for the world is nothing without sickness and death And everybody in the room was sort of like oh my god This is the creepiest talk I've ever heard And then suddenly one person thought Thickness and depth that's what he said and this whisper went around the room and you could feel people kind of Exhaling with relief because you thought there was a crazy man in the front of the auditorium So thickness and depth is really the story of pochette that a wall is not simply a surface A wall has the potential to be activated spatially with thickness and depth Let me be very clear about how I say that So the temple types that we've been looking at both Greek and Roman have been more or less Boxes more or less Rectangles in plan, but there is a variation on that temple type that also exists in Greece And we have it here in Rome and that is the round temple or tholos This is the temple to the Vesta in Tivoli and it's not so different really from a Rectalinear temple if you think about the pieces that you need to get a temple You need to have a platform or a style of eight got it. You need to have an interior cella Got it. You need to have columns got it and you need to have a porch Not so much unless all of this could be understood to be the porch There are even more elaborate variations on the idea of the Roman temple type and this is an early temple from 80 BC the temple of Fortuna Primogenia in Palestrina on the outskirts of Rome One thing that makes this temple complex so extraordinary is its site Most of the Roman temples at least the imperial the later Roman temples are really densely embedded in an urban context And because this is early it carries with it a little bit of Greek site planning ideas That there's something about the specialness of this site that the architecture will begin to reveal to you So it's processional. It's this Elaborate procession up a hill. This is what it would look like if you were approaching it in its present state of preservation and as you proceed up the hill you are constantly Experiencing the landscape in different ways. This is a of course a reconstruction this axonometric drawing where It shows that you are put into these little pathways that are always inflecting around the axis You want to experience this thing axially You're always being taken off axis and as you're taken off axis your view is redirected to other elements in the landscape Also, the space keeps contracting from the vastness of the plane below To these increasingly narrow spaces. It's kind of nice little rectangular space You pop into a theater space On the axis but experienced by moving off the axis and then you move through the theater space and bang Here's your little temple your little pholos temple organize it the very margin of the whole thing So this is an important building because it is a kind of hinge between attitudes about a landscape But it was also a kind of hinge in the Renaissance when Renaissance architects are thinking about how to build a garden What Roman precedents could they look at for how to build in a landscape? And they looked at this and this idea of the ground plane and this idea of the Scripted procession and the idea of the inflection around the axis were all elements that were used This is this is a description of what that section is that is one heck of a section and Here's a model showing you the different terraces. In fact, even here this first Movement up is in a tunnel So that here you are the landscape is all around you you begin to proceed up toward your destination And you're completely pulled out of that landscape only to come out here and to see it again But having been removed from the landscape you now see it again in a special way If I were a 20th century architect say the Kobuzye I would call this Scripting of movement through a site an architectural promenade or I would say I should take a polo nod because I would be a Swiss guy And that's something to think about in architecture because architecture is not static You as designers will probably make little models and you'll think you're done Think about what it's like to move through the space And I think nollton is a really good example Nollton Hall of what an architectural promenade is because the ramps through nollton are constantly revealing Different experiences to you along the path The temple of Fortuna primigenia is clearly an exceptional idea about how the type of temple is transformed based on specific circumstances But even the most famous of all Roman temples the pantheon in Rome is a bit of an odd man out and By odd man out. I mean it's kind of a temple, but it's kind of a pholos So it's a hybrid it takes together two typologies and transforms them Looking at the plan of the pantheon you really see how powerfully Manipulated the thickness of the wall can be through carving into the pochette all of these little Subtractive spaces are niches in the wall that make It possible to have altars or make it possible to have statues and that's necessary because the pantheon Programmatically is quite different from most Roman temples pan means all Theon More or less means the gods all the gods. So the pantheon is a temple to all the gods So if a typical temple needs to have one altar or an exceptional temple like the temple of Venus and Rome that we saw last Time needs to have two altars the pantheon the temple to all the gods has to have a lot of altars Altar for all the gods or at least it has to somehow Symbolize this connection to the cosmos in a way that's much more all-inclusive than a typical temple And it does that in a number of ways First I want to say a little bit more about carving the wall Because when we were talking about vaulting We were talking about how these curved vaults kick out their load sideways and That requires a thick wall to pick up the lateral thrust the sideways thrust of the vault So the pantheon is great because that is one heck of a thick wall But what happens when you begin to carve all these niches into a thick wall? Doesn't that undermine the solidity of the wall? Have have they in their desire to find places for altars and statues Compromise the structural rigidity of the building. Does anybody have any thoughts about that? Yes This is a very practical young man. No because it's still standing true. Does anybody think it makes it better? Is it a hand up? You guys should try never to touch your head during class Yes What it does is it folds the surface it cronolates the surface and that you guys are probably familiar with corrugated cardboard For example the corrugated cardboard is really rigid because there's something about the curvature of the surface that's self-bracing So by doing this, it's actually Allowing the curved geometries to become part of the bracing the columns don't brace themselves because if you push on a Column it fails, but arches are self-bracing. They are self-stabilizing structures so by cutting out niches with Arched openings it becomes like a corrugation and in fact even inside this thing where we don't even experience it They've cut away cavities to take advantage of this notion that certain geometries can enhance the rigidity of the structure the emperor under which the pantheon was constructed was Hadrian and there are two rulers in The history of the world ever who loved architecture and one was Hadrian and the other was Thomas Jefferson And so Hadrian was willing to experiment and willing to take chances And this is a site plan of how the pantheon would have been experienced in Roman times It would have been there would have been a courtyard up here and The back of it would have been really packed in packed in tightly to the fabric because Characteristic of Roman urban space is the idea of the figural void as opposed to the figural object So even when you have something that's Screaming about its figureality like a cylindrical building You think you've got to be able to see this cylindrical building in the city The case was it was packed in tight and the things that you experienced as clear form were the voids The little courtyards or forums in front of the buildings This is Roman space by the way this and this are both views of a model on display in the museum of Roman Civilization in this part of Rome called you are built by mr. Mussolini Mr. Mussolini was quite powerful and one of the ideas of his own Particular contribution to Italian history was that he was creating the third Rome the third moment of great Roman glory The first moment was classical antiquity The second moment was the Renaissance and in Mussolini's mind the third moment was his reign And so he got all the architecture students in Italy to work for free more or less and to build a giant Detailed model of Rome must have been fun being one of those architecture students building the giant model of Rome Particularly when your alternative was to be fighting on the Russian front. I think this this would have been a great job at the time but this model is possibly the size of this room or bigger and You can walk around it and look down on it and it's It's kind of correct and it's kind of invented for the for the parts that they had good archaeological Information about they built it up for the parts that they didn't they kind of winged it But it really begins to allow you to see this sponge like fabric of the densely packed Building edges yielding to these wonderful voids within the city So I said that the pantheon was a hybrid of some sort and if you compare it to something like the temple of Fortuna virilis Which we looked at before you can see ways in which it is hybrid Fortuna virilis is all about one thing Right, it's the cell with the engaged columns that gives you the porch and his frontal So in what ways does the pantheon? Reprise those themes. Well, it's got the porch and its frontal and it's got a cell But it is slamming two different conditions together and it's slamming them together in a way that is not even slightly Disguised in fact, you might say it's slamming three different conditions together because here's a little mr. Temple front beautiful Just like Temple of Fortuna virilis, but much bigger Here's big block of rectangle which is all about the pochette all about this thick Massive material that gets carved to allow these two irreconcilable geometries to come together And then you pop inside and you get this giant domed space When you think about the pantheon or when you look at any building you try to do your analysis of any building Look for the crazy parts your analysis gets better and better and better the more you focus on the crazy parts If you were doing a paper on the pantheon and you said it's all about a circle I'm done that would be boring. You would not have looked deeply enough But something about the union of these three elements The temple the big lumpy masonry block and the cylinder becomes really really interesting Temple to all the gods pantheon Hmm. This is the little diagram of Roman town planning the Roman town the foundational myth of the civilization and when you look at The dome of the pantheon It's almost as though in a different way. This image is again being imprinted and The image is being imprinted in a double fashion. That is to say in plan. We have the circle But we also have the circle in section the space of the pantheon is Spherical and at the very top We have an opening called an oculus Oculus kind of means big eye eye to the sky that There's nothing up here. It's not a window if it's raining the rain can come into the pantheon And you might say How is it possible to put a hole on the top of the dome just doesn't that undermine the structural stability of the dome? Seems like it would wouldn't it like if we took our roof and we put a hole in it It would become a much worse roof than if it didn't have a hole in it But the logic of building this dome and you can kind of see this little steppy steppy things over here Has to do with stacking compressive rings. So it's kind of like building a arch but building it sideways So each of these compressive rings these flat rings of stones become self-stabilizing They lock together gravity holds them together You can slightly displace through a kind of porvelling technique the next ring and And so forth so that you can keep stepping forward with these compressive rings and there you have a dome You kind of see how that's working because it's much thicker here toward the springing of the domes and much thinner here toward the Oculus and if the architects had wanted to keep building they probably could have but it wasn't necessary the thing Stabilizes and this is the source of light The idea that it is a circle or rather the idea that it's a spherical space is Loaded with meaning loaded with meaning because the Romans borrowed lavishly from the Philosophy of the ancient Greeks the technique and this is probably another reason why the Romans were so successful in their conquests of foreign lands Because they gave people plumbing and fresh water and bridges and roads But they allowed the cultures to continue their own traditions and they borrowed the best aspects of those traditions So from the Greeks they took a lot of the architecture and a lot of philosophy and in Greek Cosmology as described by Plato in one of his books called the Timaeus The cosmos are spherical the heavens are spherical different geometrical shapes Adhere Very closely to different important elements So the earth is rectilinear The earth is a square the cosmos are a circle and this slamming together of two Irreconcilable types and two irreconcilable geometries in many ways is making visible the reconciliation of the earth and the heavens and when you're inside this space Looking up at the big light filled disc coming in from the oculus this notion of a connection with the heavens becomes Subjectively something that you could experience It's like there's another axis introduced to the space not simply the Horizontal axis and the cross axis but a vertical axis and axis up to the sky and a word for that axis up to the sky is Axis Mundi MUN DI axis through the earth The Elaboration and the articulation of the vault of the pantheon You see that it is something that seems to be cheating in terms of its thickness and its material presence You'd think you'd want to have this thing be as thick as possible Because then it would be more solid Sir, you're not in your head What do you think yeah exactly right you want to make it way less if you can make it way less Then you don't have to have walls that are quite as thick because the load is not coming down quite so heavily So one of the tasks in the design is to reduce the weight of the thing But how can you reduce the weight of a thing without reducing the solidity of the thing and the answer is Geometry has become self-bracing. It's just like corrugation or bubble wrap where something because of the internal cellular Structure begins to brace itself. So not only is this lighter But it's also more rigid than it would be otherwise and it has one more aspect, which is kind of great Because of the geometry of the dome, it's smaller up here than it is down here And so these rectilinear cells, which are called coffers COFFER These rectilinear cells keep getting smaller and smaller and smaller and The result of that is a kind of trick of your eye a kind of perspective trick You look at this thing and you maybe think the dome is going much higher than it is going Because this element that you think is one size keeps reappearing in diminishing sizes like perspective So it's a clever clever building Looking at how Greek types get transformed into Roman architecture is is a theme that constantly comes back to this notion of different technologies different ideas of urban space different ideas of interiority And so forth and so here we're looking at the Greek theater of Epidaurus and like so many Greek sites It seems to be all about revealing a landscape. This is another view of the theater Epidaurus sacred mountains in the distance and a very clear geometry here, but a geometry that Allows you to understand that you're in a specific place There would have been a little kind of stage screen here called a proscenium But it would have been low enough that if you were sitting in the stands You would see the backdrop of the actors, but you would also see the hills beyond This is a Roman theater Built by Mussolini's architecture students during the fascist period very diligent kids so typologically it conserves quite a lot of the things that we saw in the Greek example like this circle with the steps on it, but the proscenium the architectural edge closes the space off also instead of being an object Embedded in a landscape where the natural Declivity of the hill begins to give geometry to the space. It's an architectural construct It's another one of these megastructures that the Romans have no trouble putting up with their arches and their concrete and Because it's a freestanding megastructure. It could be absolutely right in the city So this is the theater of Marcellus Teatro di Marcello, we say in Italian which is right in the middle of Rome right behind the Colosseum If you ever saw the movie la dolce vita, it's a great Fellini film The actress the kind of blonde bombshells love interest of Marcello Mastriani has an apartment over here and The two characters have dinner looking at the theater. It's a classic film. You should all see it Here's another Roman theater This one's in a better state of preservation than the Teatro di Marcello because like so many relics of Roman antiquity People in the Middle Ages just moved into the theater of Marcellus and it is now apartment blocks Somebody like the blonde bombshell really could have had an apartment in there And this is in a park of antiquities in Merida, Spain Typologically a theater is open-ended giving you a view toward the stage giving you a view toward a landscape coming to you from Greece The Romans of course are tinkerers. They're always transforming. They're always playing with typology They're always making hybrids and so you get the type of arena This is the Flavian arena Flavius was one of the emperors It's a really big arena and if something is really big you might call it colossal And if you were a Roman you might use the Latin word colosseum to mean the really big thing so it's essentially two theaters slapped together but Quite a different presence than the gently folding into the landscape Of a Greek theater. It becomes really a giant object in the city of Rome Against which other elements organize themselves Old Roman forum slams into it. This is the temple of Venus and Rome that we looked at before and the rest of the City kind of unhinges around it Probably all know what goes on inside of Colosseum Part of the Roman propaganda machine to subjugate and delight at the same time the people of Rome so there would be entertainment the Concept of bread and circus was one way the Romans kept people in line You make sure that they're fed and you make sure that they're entertained So you could have all kinds of activities going on here. You could get Russell Crow Sometimes to to fight lions or other gladiators And I'll and you could flood the thing and have boat battles There were many astonishing entertainment and another one of the astonishing Methods of entertaining the people of Rome led to another great kind of architectural monument, and that's the Roman bath the vast deployment of interior space vast volts and cross volts and barrel volts and domes at Just an enormous scale and this is what the baths of caracalla look like in the Roman model so they're sort of at the edge of the town and they They were available not only to the noble class But all the citizens of Rome had an opportunity to go in here and experience this astonishing ritual These are yards for sporting activities and within the baths themselves It's not as simple as just taking a dip in the pool There are all of these different ritual stages of cleansing you go through you come in and you might First go into one of these little rooms where with a comb of a sword you comb your sweat away Very nice. You guys should try that for skin care ritual Then you might go and you know wrestle a little bit with one of your friends or enemies and Then you have this whole system of different baths from the caldarium Which is boiling hot waters to the Tepidarium which is tepid water to the frigidarium which is cold cold cold water So you have these different temperatures that you immerse yourself in in at different stages of your bathing This is a beautiful plan by the way in its embedding of different geometries and also in its idea of Marking multiple centers of interest within the complex and one level you look at this thing and you say hmm more or less a square hmm More or less a center to the whole complex So that's kind of interesting because if you look at the baths of Karakala, and you think it's just this building you would say Well the caldarium doesn't sit very well within the space Kind of popping out in a funny way, but if you look at it as something in the overall complex of things It begins to make a lot more sense similarly over here we have these two large Vaulted spaces these curved bends in a wall are called exedras exe DRA They become places that are habitable the pochette Thickness in depth and you could begin to observe sporting activities over here Lots of things that are screwy in terms of the local circumstance become understandable in terms of the overall circumstance We were to divide this in half The exedras begin to become a major axis of the overall complex although slightly askew with respect to the yard Here's a reconstruction of what the vaulting might have looked like and to give you a sense of what the scale is These are people down here and these are these great cross vaults with Coffering of course you want to have coffering you want to reduce the weight You want to articulate the surface to break it up into a system of parts that relate to the whole you want it to be Incredibly beautiful so to just recapitulate the major theme Roman interior space is probably the aspect of Roman architecture that sets it off most distinctly from the architecture of Greece Which at a superficial level it resembles very strongly in terms of the typology of the temple Even the idea of the Roman atrium house kind of looking like a medron but when you begin to think about Interior space and the and the advantages of vaulting a space over building a space in a more conventional Traviated system Many opportunities are available. So next time we'll talk a little bit more about urban space in Rome