 We're going to continue talking about Rome today, and we're going to pay special attention to the development of urban space in Rome. In the other topics that we discussed, the condition of the city was not so well-preserved that we could talk with any kind of specificity about how the city was laid out, what the fabric of everyday housing was like, how monuments were inserted into the city, and so forth. But in the case of Rome, we have quite a long and solid archaeological record, and we also have lots of ruins. I mean, if you look at Rome, if you walk around present-day Rome, you'll just stumble over things that are just remnants of antiquity, things like the Colosseum, for example, which we see right over here, things like the Circus Maximus, which we see right over here, but even things that don't seem like they're relics of Rome. Has anybody here ever been to Rome? Wow, world travelers. There are things, and you can't see it very well, but let's say off over here, a big plaza called Piazza Navona, which you might think is a really great piece of, I don't know, Renaissance and Baroque Rome, but in fact it's an old Roman horse racing arena. And over medieval times, it was just a lot easier to inhabit the pre-existing walls of Roman constructions than to haul stones in. So the Piazza Navona gives you the footprint of an old Roman horse racing stadium. Before we talk about urban space, let's talk a little bit more about theory, architectural theory, in ancient Rome. And we do have one text written by this architect guy called Vitruvius a long time ago, 27 BCE. And when I call Vitruvius this architect guy, I'm treating him very disrespectfully because people who are scholars in Latin say he's barely literate. He's like some guy, some scrivener who pieced together existing remnants of ancient texts about architecture and made this compendium. So it's valuable because it's the only thing that we have. And it's less valuable because Vitruvius is a terribly thoughtful, contemplative man, but he records things that are pretty interesting. This is Vitruvius presenting architecture to Augustus, great. And the kinds of things in the ten books of architecture by Vitruvius are varied. As you might expect, there's a chunk on architecture where he talks about the orders and he talks about the types. But he also suggests that the architect has as his area of expertise quite a lot of other things. City planning, well that's sort of like architecture, that makes sense. Building materials. But yeah, an architect should know how to build. Temple construction, same thing. Public buildings, okay, private buildings. But then you get on to this whole range of stuff that architects nowadays have completely given up on. Like the making of clocks or hydraulics, waterworks, dams, civic and military engines, you know, fortifications and things like that. In fact, if you think of the word architect, the archie in architect means sort of all encompassing, like Archbishop, you know, the big bishop. The architect is the maker of everything, the master-configurer. He who organizes all built works. And so in Vitruvius' treatise, there are all kinds of different ways of engaging the world of physical objects. So studies on proportion, but also studies on how to make a water screw. The idea of a water screw is you can pull water up in a well by turning this thing and the water gets on each level and up it comes. Or clocks, city plans. Notice that a lot of these things look exactly the same, right? A round thing with radial disposition of parts, water screw. Round thing with radial disposition of parts, clock. Round thing with radial disposition of parts, city. And much of that has to do with the strong connection between Roman thought and Greek thought. And this idea that certain geometrical forms were ideal. Certain geometrical forms carried with them special meanings. And particularly the circle is a kind of diagram of the cosmos. In fact, the radial thing that Vitruvius is probably most famous for is the concept of the man, the Vitruvian man, we call it. And it simply is a description of the correspondence between the disposition of the human body and two basic geometrical figures, the circle and the square. Now this is a sad little early effort of a Renaissance guy, Francesco Giorgi, trying to figure out exactly what is Vitruvius talking about. And he has this little floppy man sort of standing inside a wheel. Tragiconda also tried to get his little guy inside a circle and inside a square. This guy can't quite get to the square. This guy looks really sad because he knows he can't quite get to the circle. And as we earlier mentioned, the circle and the square are not simply geometrical figures, but they're figures loaded with platonic meaning. And by platonic, I mean Plato's description of the cosmos specifically connects the circles to the cosmos, to the heavens. And the square to the earth, to the mundane. So the circle is superlunary above the moon, up in the ether. And the square is sublunary, stuff on earth. The changing, that which is corrupted by time. The circle, unchanging, timeless and eternal. How do you put them together? Tragiconda couldn't. Cesareano is trying every trick in the book, trying to get this description, this literary description in Vitruvius to somehow come together in a drawing. His guy looks like he's stretched on the rack. He has size 16 feet. He has baseball glove hands and cutest of all, actually, in terms of the attempt to get the man to be both the circle and the square. Is the question of the center, how can you center the man in this organization in both the circle and the square? And so I won't even tell you about Cesareano's amusing attempt to reconcile these things. Let me just say, there's a very excited young man in the center of the circle there. And Francesco di Giorgio probably has the sweetest of all the different Vitruvian man ideas, where his guy is just kind of relaxing, chilling in the space. But it takes somebody of the caliber of Leonardo da Vinci to give us the diagram by which we know the Vitruvian man the best. And what he's done is center the figure but slip the circle and the square. They're no longer concentric. If you look at the Cesareano diagram, the circle and the square share the same center. But now they share the same baseline, but they're quite different. And in fact, the two centers of the human being, the navel, the center of the soul, you might say, according to philosophies that were current natural philosophies that were current in those days. And reproductive organs, which are the center of the earthly man. And so the earthly man's center organizes the square and the divine man's center organizes the circle. And that's not all that Leonardo has done. Because if you look carefully at the way he draws this figure, he's subdividing it like crazy. Like, it's not sufficient that the human being be graceful, but that the proportions of the human being have to be locked in as rigorously as those of the deriferous by polyclitis. It says though, Leonardo is trying to somehow recover the proportional system of the ancients. And not simply the look or the diagram of ancient theory. So here's just the circle and the square and the two different centers in Leonardo. And this little thing at the bottom, which I think is really interesting. Where Leonardo is really unfolding a golden rectangle progression that is used to describe the different parts of the human figure. By the way, this is Leonardo's famous mirror handwriting. He wrote backwards because he didn't want people to steal his ideas. So you have to hold it up to a mirror in order to understand what he's after. But Trubius also talks to us about the primitive hut, which we discussed briefly in our talk about the origins of the temple. How stone architecture, monumental architecture, arises from very humble origins. From the simple act of twining together trees in the forest. And then Vitruvius talks about things that are very specific to Vitruvius and that have become real guideposts in how we continue to think about architecture today. Vitruvius says architecture is required to do three things. It's required to have three qualities, firmness, commodity, and delight. Which doesn't mean that much, but he says them in Latin. Firmitas, utilitas, venustas. And that basically means strength, functionality, and beauty. So for strength, let's say structural integrity. If an architect is going to build something, he better be able to make it in such a way that it doesn't fall down. An architect should understand structures and construction and materials in such a way that he'll build something solid. Utilitas, functionality, means program more or less. The architect should thoughtfully engage the question of program and given the task, make a building that can accommodate that program. So if the building program is a Roman bath, there better be some water in it. And if the architect has some fabulous concept for a Roman bath that doesn't involve water, the architect has failed. Because the function requires it to have water, and so forth. I mean, the architect can think about the program in a fairly imaginative way and push the type into other terrain. But the architect does have to engage utilitas, function. And the last one is probably the most enigmatic of them all. And that is venustas, beauty. What's that? I mean, we could have a fairly rational conversation about whether or not a building is structurally sound or whether or not a building satisfies the requirements of the program. But when you talk about beauty, what do you mean by beauty? And Vitruvius gives you in this kind of jumbled speech of Vitruvius pulling and choosing from pieces of ancient texts. He kind of throws out a bunch of Greek words that people puzzled over for the next thousand years. But it seems like he's talking about proportion. That architecture has to be governed by proportion. And if you look at this plate, which is a renaissance drawing, trying to figure out illustrations for Vitruvius's text. The illustrator here is trying to figure out something about proportion. Proportion matters, symmetry matters. And symmetry in its conventional meaning means there's some kind of axis of symmetry and conditions unfold on either side that mirror each other. It's possible that in Vitruvius's language, symmetry had a slightly different meaning. The sim means similar basically, metri means measure. So symmetry could mean similar measure. So Vitruvius might not be asking for identical matching along a line of axis. But simply some kind of inflection, some kind of likeness of measure. And that would open up the door for lots of local symmetries. And a local symmetry is a condition that maybe doesn't unfold on both sides of the axis, but nonetheless helps organize part of it. He's looking for rhythm, urythmia, the kind of graceful pattern of the articulated elements within a building. And he's also looking for decorum. And decorum is an interesting term. Decorum means an appropriate response to an architectural task. So it would be inappropriate to build your own house as if it were the pantheon. If you were a really rich Roman guy and you wanted to have a house, it would be crazy, it would be disrespectful, it would be sacrilegious for you to build a pantheon and put your Ikea furniture inside of it or whatever they had in those days. Because the pantheon has a hierarchical connection to a body of meaning and that body of meaning is religious. So decorum means you make something appropriate to its condition. If it's a civic building, make it look like a civic building. It's a domestic building, make it look like a domestic building. If it's a religious building, make it look like a religious building. So this whole discussion we've been having about typology, that certain types carry with them certain meanings, connect strongly to this whole idea of decorum that people see in Atrium House and they know that decorum makes it an appropriate domestic dwelling. This is not really in vitruvius, but I just want to call out something interesting about Rome and Roman ingenuity, Roman inventiveness. We talked earlier about the transformation of the type of theater in ancient Greek architecture into theater in Roman architecture, where the Greek theater as a construction built into a landscape becomes a freestanding object building densely packed into a city. And that there's a further transformation where two theaters get slammed together and give you an arena like the Colosseum. The Colosseum begins to create a challenge for how do you use the orders? Because when we're talking about the orders and by the orders I mean the columns and their architraves. This system of measuring off and ornamenting and constructing the bays. The Colosseum gives you a challenge because it's not a single story building. Everything that comes down to us from Greek antiquity about how to use the orders is pretty much talking about a one-story building. But if you make a two-story building, hmm, what do you do? If you make a three-story building, hmm, what do you do? And the situation becomes more complex. And so what the Romans do, and this probably isn't resolved well enough for you to see what the Romans do, but they stack the orders. They take the idea that Vitruvius gives us that there's a kind of hierarchy, the orders. The Doric is the most stout. The Doric is masculine. The Ionic is a kind of middle column. It is matronly. The Corinthian is a delegate column. It is maidenly. And he stacks these columns so that you get a kind of Doric Ionic Corinthian stacking up, up, up. Also notice, and this is typical of Rome, that the columns aren't freestanding. The columns are engaged in the wall. So there's a kind of double system going on here in the Colosseum. There's an arcuated system that takes advantage of these heavy masonry structures that the Romans were so expert at building. And really, by arcuated, I mean made of arches, the arcuated structure is doing all the work. On top of the arcuated structure, you have this stacking of the columns. And they're really ornamental. They're not really doing much work. And in fact, if you look at the etymology, and etymology means the history of words, how did this word come into being? If you go far enough back on the etymology of the word the orders, it means ornament. So we're organizing the façade, but we're also ornamenting the façade. The task of the orders in the Colosseum is to call out the relationships, the proportional relationships. Or in the Truby systems, it's all in Venustas, the creation of beauty, delight. Notice here, this is surprising, here's a drawing of the five Roman orders. And many of you are thinking, five, I just learned three Greek orders. I'm tired of the orders. Stop this discussion. And you're correct to think that. But in Roman architecture, you have two more orders. In addition to the three Greek orders, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, you get a minor order, which is the simplest and the smallest and the slenderest, called the Tuscan order. And then you get an even more elaborated and more slender order called the composite order. And the composite order is a kind of commingling of aspects, a composite of aspects of the Ionic with its little volumes, its little curly queues, and the Corinthian with its floral motif of a campus leafs coming up at the top. So just wanted you to pay attention to this stacking of the orders, because the Colosseum becomes a really important precedent for architects as they move forward with new building types. The kinds of types we saw in ancient Greece are pretty unsatisfying for organizing the programs of a complex society. But when you begin to get to Rome, you have, you know, monumentally scaled buildings that set forth strategies that are useful. Just showing you another plate from Le Corbusier's Towards a New Architecture. I think this book is so great, and you're going to be reading it next semester. So you might as well get a few pages into it right now. This is Le Corbusier talking about the Colosseum, talking about a triumphal arch. We'll talk about those later. Talking about a pyramid. Now, I don't think you can probably read what he's talking about here. It says ancient Rome. What do you think his point is here? How does a pyramid and a Colosseum and a triumphal arch, how do those things hang together? And Le Corbusier is certainly not talking about history. He's talking about something extra-historical. He's talking about something about the kind of physical nature of these things. How would you describe these elements? Yes. They're massive. They're really big. And when you put some strong Mediterranean light on them, you get this really powerful play of light and shade. Good. What else? Anybody else? Yeah. Nice. Wow. He said, it looks like they're kind of like platonic solids. I think that's excellent. Pyramid. Wow. That is a simple geometrical form. This is an architect getting away from all the kind of fru-fru additive goofiness and doing something powerful and elemental and platonic. And the same is true for the Colosseum. It is a cylinder. We've been admiring the articulation of the wall. But on another level, it is this basic cylindrical mass bathed in light. If we look at a triumphal arch, and in a moment, we will look at it more carefully and talk about its articulation. But at some fundamental level, it is a rectilinear slab, casting a shadow bathed in light. And in fact, Le Corbusier has as a frontispiece for his treatise on cities, this plate. Here's a little drawing of Rome. And it's an incredibly goofy drawing of Rome because it doesn't seem to be interested in a perspectival rendering of what it might look like from a particular vantage point. Instead, he's calling out all of these objects, a mausoleum, the Pyramid of Caescesus, the Colosseum, these elemental solids that give character to the city. So just bear that in mind. I want to introduce another concept that's very useful for understanding history. And that's the concept of the dialectic. The dialectic is a 19th century idea cooked up, well, let's say, elaborated upon by a German philosopher called Jörg Friedrich Hegel. That's his name. And he also is not a handsome man. He had a lot to live with. The idea of the dialectic is an idea. It's not an absolute truth. It's a theory of how history moves forward or how ideas advance or how styles change. And so it begins with a notion of thesis. It's a proposition. And no sooner does thesis emerge than it's countered by antithesis. Spoon is the best. I can scoop. Fork is the best. I can poke. And what do you get? What is your magnificent synthesis? What do you get, spork? Perhaps the best utensil in the world, where scooping and poking are both possible. And in a more complex way, you can use these ideas to talk about history. You can talk about economical structures in a society. You can talk about artistic style. One other idea about the dialectic, and that is this kind of oppositional relationship between thesis and antithesis that yields synthesis, is that it's not linear. It doesn't just keep moving forward. And it's not cyclical in the sense that it keeps repeating itself and covering the same territory. The Hegelian dialectic is progressive. It's constantly shifting its position. And ideally, it's moving upward. It's moving forward. It's moving toward a kind of higher state of realization. This is a little diagram showing you a kind of thesis, antithesis. And the synthesis displaces the point and moves up. And Hegel has this word aufheben, which is, of course, German. What else is he going to speak? He's German. But aufheben has this nice double meaning. It kind of means overturning, but overturning and lifting up. So you reverse this, and you reverse this, and you lift it up, and you elevate it. So the idea is that progress and art comes from this notion of the aufheben, the resolution of Hegelian dialectics. You can see in Spork's family tree how the dialectic works in multiple iterations. But in its simplest sense, the dialectic is this kind of battle between thesis and antithesis that gives you synthesis. I made a little fun chart for you guys to look at. And it's not that fun, actually. But I thought if I called it fun chart, it would seem really fun. Everybody would be enthusiastic about it. But we've looked at three kinds of architecture fairly closely now, Egyptian, classical Greek, and Roman. So it's possible to begin to look at these things from the perspective of a Hegelian dialectic progression, from matter to spirit. That's one thing that Hegel talks about, that as the dialectic advances, the material is discarded and things become increasingly spiritual. And if you translate that into architectural terms, you might say the massiveness of architecture begins to yield itself into a more purely spatial idea. And we've already been able to see that. We talked about the Egyptian architecture as ponderous and heavy and haptic, and all about these massive constructs. And as we moved into Greek architecture, we saw an architecture that was much, much more spatial, much lighter. But by the time we get to Roman architecture, we suddenly have heaviness reintroduced again, but reintroduced while still adhering to the topology of the Greek temple. And so you get all these different kinds of things, of kind of bouncing back and forth between these different conditions. I wanna show you a more modern discussion of how styles move with a Hegelian dialectic as our armature to hang the ideas on. This is the Paris opera from Charles Garnier. It's a Ecole des Beaux-Arts building, and it's a great building. Buildings don't get much better than the Paris opera. However, realistically speaking, it's covered with glop, right? If the Romans were ornamenting the Colosseum by stacking columns over an arcuated masonry structure, what is Charles Garnier doing? He is just glopping it up to beat the band. This is a building that is just encrusted with all kinds of ornament. And this was the dominant style, the Beaux-Arts style, and that was the name of the School of Architecture in Paris. The School of Fine Arts is what it means. And this is what they taught. They felt that they were extending the lessons of classicism, the lessons of the ancients. You learned about symmetry, you learned about proportion, you learned about rhythm, and you learned about just glopping on the ornament. So the modernists in the 20th century are reacting against buildings like Garnier's opera. This is a huge time leap, 100 years later, we get something like Vise van der Rohe's Crown Hall. And you look at this thing and you would say, whoa, where's the glop? And the answer is no glop, no glop anymore. This thing is a pristine glass box. If over here we have some idea about a box rhythmically articulated by structure, the structure is fake. These are fake columns on a masonry load bearing wall. Here in the case of Mies, we have a box rhythmically articulated by structure, but the structure is real. So you might say that Paris opera's thesis, Mies van der Rohe's Crown Hall is antithesis. And what do you do? How do you put those things together? How do you somehow synthesize those two things? Maybe like this. This is a post-modern building by a Italian architect called Alorossi. And he is reacting against high modernism about this stripping away of memory, stripping away of history, stripping away of culture in favor of these pristine intellectual constructs like a Miesian glass box building. And so he's kind of dreaming an architecture, architecture that children might draw. It's a little fairy castle with a little tower. Windows are little punched windows like a child might draw. And while many things about Alorossi's Tatrino del Mondo seem backward-looking, retrograde, nostalgic, trapped in history, this is highly abstracted. This is not the kind of modeled surface that we saw at the Paris opera house. Instead, it is a stripped-down, flat-as-a-pan cake, simple box. Alorossi is, in a sense, making a dialectic synthesis between an architecture that carries a memory of history, a memory of place with it, and an architecture of abstraction indebted to Mies. And Alorossi was a very important teacher. He taught at a school called the ETH in Zurich. And his most distinguished students were Jacques Herzog and Pierre Desmerins. And this is their response to the teaching of Alorossi. This is one of their early buildings from 1992, a museum in Munich. It's like they're sticking it to the man, right? It's like, you like that stuff? I'll show you what we can do. And they're kind of going back to this Miesian sensibility of stripping stuff away, of getting rid of all the fussiness and reprising the notion of the perfect clear glass box. But not quite. Because if Crown Hall was all about total dematerialization of the building envelope, at the Goetz Foundation, Herzog and Desmerins are playing a kind of jokie game. There's this kind of big, travertine area, the material of the Paris Opera, the material of Roman buildings. But it's suspended between two plenums of glass. So you're both having the glass box and the materially present building. And you can look at the work of Herzog and Desmerins as some kind of fight to try to sort out the dialectic of how do you deal with modernism? How do you deal with postmodernism? So this is 1992. Several years later, they come up with this, which is even crazier in many ways. The entire skin is this kind of hung thing on a steel frame. I'm gonna show you a detail of what this skin looks like. It is all ornament. It is more ornament than you get in the Paris Opera. There are these images of reclining ladies, but also images from the newspaper. The glass and the concrete have been imprinted with ornamental images. So there's a dialectic. You've taken the fussiness of the Paris Opera and the simplicity of the Misey and Box and you've somehow made a Misey and Box encrusted with ornament. Seemed impossible. But just one more step, one more dialectical twist in the work of Herzog and Desmerins. Here we are, 2004. Here's a project from 2009, The Vitra House. Crazy. It's like they're taking Aldo Rossi's goofy, little dream houses from his childhood scrawlings, this kind of authentic architecture of the city and of the people and of the region. And they're combining it together in radically different ways. So it's not simply a reconciliation with their late work and the work of their teacher, Aldo Rossi, but it's also somehow an acknowledgement of materiality and surface and the plasticity of surface that had been discarded as long ago as the École des Beaux-Arts and buildings like the Paris Opera House. We look at the Paris Opera House and we see this complex entanglement of form and we look at Herzog and Desmerins' Vitra House and it is almost as if they have three dimensionalized the idea of ornamental detail and made it become the point of departure for their entire building. So the syntax is the syntax of Ormalu, of decorative pattern making. The type is the type of Aldo Rossi's oneric memory of the dreamed city, the city of childhood and the materiality and the construction is mesian in its glass and in its lightness and in its thinness. So, dialectic. Conventional form is conserved, but the syntax, the method of putting the form together is disrupted in a violent way and that's how style moves forward and I say this because this is how you can become the coolest new avant-garde architect. Pay attention to what's going on and do the opposite. If you do what is current, you will be forever slave to your teachers and when I say do the opposite, don't do it right now. Right now, do what you're supposed to do. Or your teachers will get you and you can learn from your teachers. So right now, subject yourself to the discipline but a few years down the line, dare to be subversive because interesting things happen. So there's our dialectic again. Let's go further and more specifically into our discussion of Roman architecture. This is just one more type that's really important and this type is the triumphal arch. Triumphal arches were erected after great battles by various emperors. They would have their names carved in inscriptions and the minute they died, the next emperor would chisel it away and put their name up there. So you cannot live forever. But this is the arch of Settimus Severus, just one of the many triumphal arches in Rome and spread across the Roman Empire. Some of the things we were saying about the double structural system in the Colosseum are also apparent here. We have two ways of making surface. There's an arcuated system, arch, arch, arch and there's a traviated system. Column, column, column, column and tablature. And they're superimposed on top of each other. And one nice thing about the superposition of the arcuated and the traviated structure is that the building begins to operate on two different scales and with two different ground planes. For example, we have these blocks or plinths and a plinth is just an artificial elevated ground plane. These columns are not set on the ground but on plinths and they relate to the entablature. And then there are little columns engaged with the arches that stand directly on the ground and there's this kind of shifting. And what's nice about that is that you get lots and lots of different scales being registered within the system. The columns are ornamental. The columns are not structural. So this is Settimus Severus. This is the arch of Titus. Poor Titus had a little runt of an arch. And this is the arch of Constantine, very late, really toward the very end of the Roman Empire but still plugging away on triumphal arches. So I had promised you a discussion of urban space in Rome. I shall not disappoint. We'll talk about the Forum. But before we talk specifically about the Forum, it's probably worth looking at what Rome is. Rome is built on seven hills, just like Cincinnati. And there is a kind of low ground between all the hills, a kind of valley between the hills. And in the earliest Etruscan days when Rome was first settled by non-Roman people, each of these little hills had its own village and its own colony. And the low land, which was less easily protected, was a kind of common ground where people would come and trade. And so this low ground between the seven hills became the Forum. And the Forum is a kind of marketplace. It's like the Agora in Greece, but it's the Forum in Rome. If we look at the early days of the Forum, we see that which is called the Roman Forum. And that really relates to Republican Rome. Republican Rome was a period between 509 to 27 BCE, so the BCE days of Rome. And this was really a time when Rome considered itself to be governed by equal citizens. And whoever was the ruler was just a citizen among citizens. This is a famous moment in the history of Republican Rome where Sincenatus is called to lead the country. Is anybody from the town named after Sincenatus? You are? Yes? So do you honor Sincenatus? Do you have a little picture of him in your house? Sincenatus was just plowing. He's minding his own business. He's a farmer. And people say, Sincenatus, we know you're a good general. We know you're a good administrator. Rome needs you. Put down your plow. So Sincenatus puts down his plow and he's made dictator. That was the title they gave him. And etymologically dictator is simply he who says things. And so he was the one to give command. He was the one to give order. He fought the battle that needed to be fought. And when the battle was over, he put down his plow. So that's very democratic really. That's very kind of willing to embrace lots of different personalities, lots of different contingencies. And you can kind of see that looseness of address when you look at the space of the Roman Forum. There's an open space in here and it's flanked by a number of civic buildings. These long civic buildings with columnar halls are called basilicas and they're meeting halls, halls for debate. And if you have a republic like Republican Rome, you wanna have these meetings where people discuss what to do, how to do things. You have a little place where speeches are given. You have a couple of temples. Here's the Temple of Venus in Rome that we looked at before. Up here on higher ground is the Capitoline Hill. That's where the Jupiter Temple is located. That's the most sacred site in Rome. But one thing that's distinctive about the Roman Forum is how the edges don't quite come together. It's a leaky space. And by leaky, I mean you get these views off in every direction because the space doesn't close down. And it's really quite wonderful in the way it kind of flexes to its landscape and gestures toward buildings and elements that are remote from it. Oh, let me say one more thing about basilica. So we know what the plan type is. The plan type is big hall in the middle and lower space aisles along the side. Sectionally, a basilica might have light coming in, high arms in, and this upper level light is called clear story light. The word basilica has come into use in Christian architecture. And you might think, well, why is that? Why would Christians have taken a Roman building type for churches? But it's a meeting hall. That's the original purpose of a basilica. And in its original sense, the Christian church was a meeting hall. Certainly the early Christians weren't going to have the Minerva Temple as the place of their sanctuary. So these meeting halls typologically lent themselves very well as well as in terms of their meaning to transformation into Christian churches. There's another forum or a series of forums that begins to peel off to the right. And those fora are the imperial fora. Here's our friend, the Roman forum, all leaky, all loose, all about the individual buildings and their autonomy. Imperial forum becomes incredibly axial, incredibly locked into these hierarchies. And in fact, they even become a kind of battle among emperors where you get a movement from one forum to another to another. And a lot of that has to do with the shift in the political system in Rome. Julius Caesar became dictator in 46 to 44 BCE and eventually declared himself to be emperor. And shortly thereafter, rulers were no longer citizens among citizens, but absolute rulers. This statue of Augustus, Caesar Augustus, at the beginning of the Roman emperor, exemplifies a very different kind of character than Cincinnati, soon we looked at before. He has a baby hanging from his skirt, which is scary, but he's dressed in kind of a pompous way and an imperial way. So let's look for a moment closely at what's going on with the imperial fora. The Roman fora are peeling down here, the imperial fora are here, and there's this sequence from the fairly modest early fora. They keep getting bigger, they keep getting more elaborate. And typologically, they're mostly all about a temple that gets inserted into a colonnaded courtyard. And you move to gradually more and more complex ones, like poor little Nerva, all squished out. Caesar can get a better one. Uh-oh, watch out for Augustus. Augustus has elaborated the type of forum. Not only does he have the courtyard, but he also has these giant exedras, these curved spaces that allow a kind of amplification of the space. Look at Trajan's Forum. Trajan's Forum is huge. Trajan's Forum not only has exedras, but the exedras dig into the side of the hill and begin to organize markets. And Trajan's Forum has a big basilica as well as a temple. But what's important about these things is how very differently the space is organized with respect to the space of the Roman fora. These are all about axes. These are all about symmetries. And these are all about local symmetries. They're also all about poche, and the ability of poche to act as a kind of hinge within complex organizations in the city. And by that, I mean, look at the big exedra here by the Augustus Forum. It's kind of glopped in here, but it makes possible the readjustment of the Forum of Trajan. And when I say local symmetry, I mean, this is symmetrical on this axis, but it doesn't govern everything. Here's a local symmetry, the Augustus Forum. Here's a local symmetry, the Nereva Forum. Here's a local symmetry, the Caesar Forum. But as you can see from the model, these are all these kind of wonderful, sponge-like openings within the city that are organized processually. Just some views, the Augustus Forum. And this, I think, exemplifies very clearly how the Roman temple in its site organization differs from the Greek temple, how it is frontal, how it is addressing a very specific space and a very specific point of approach. And this model gives you a sense of the incredible density of Rome and how you really did experience this as a series of figural spaces really cut from the thickness of this continuous fabric. So Circus Maximus, a horse racing stadium big, Colosseum big, everything else densely tangled, except for the courtyards. It's funny because we really began our discussion of Rome talking about the ideality of Roman town planning, that you have your auger, mystical gesture of the cross axes, and the city organizes itself that way. And that's true about almost every Roman town except for Rome, because the hills and the pre-existing conditions of habitation made that impossible. But if we look at Pompeii over here, you can begin to see ideas about how, even with a kind of distorted perimeter wall, the idea of the decumanus and the cardo and the forum become consistent. You can also see the density of the fabric here. This is not even the capital. This is just a little town near Naples and it's packed in with these domestic buildings and narrow, narrow little streets. Here's another Roman town, Columbus, Ohio. We have our cardo and our decumanus and our forum. And here's a detailed view of the forum in Pompeii. Kind of like the forum, the fora that we looked at in Rome, where there's a temple addressing a long space. But here you can see this kind of interesting collection of other buildings that clip onto the side. A basilica, another basilica, a number of little temples, and even the condition of edge here is pretty interesting in that this is a hard edge. And by hard edge, I mean there's a row of columns holding the edge fairly rigidly. And this edge begins to soften. Things begin to pull away. There's a row of columns that kind of hold the edge, but the buildings themselves shift away so that there's a idea of a symmetry but then difference unfolded on either side of that symmetry. Hadrian, I mentioned earlier, was the emperor under which the pantheon was constructed, and that Hadrian was a great lover of architecture. So Hadrian's villa becomes a real study case for interesting ideas about architecture or transformations about the idea of how architecture can operate. It's on the outskirts of Rome, on hilly terrain, in the town of Tivoli. An aerial view doesn't show you much, and this plan might seem crazy and hard to read, but a lot of that has to do with this negotiation of the topography, that you wanna put things on the topography in a certain way to take advantage of that, but you also wanna make adjustments. And so he's using Pochet really effectively, and he's using these figural pieces, like little round pieces, really effectively to begin to foster the realignment of pieces within this terrain. It's really great, let me just say that, and one thing that's so great about Hadrian's villa is the way these pieces insert themselves into the landscape. For example, this big pool here is called the Poichile, and there's a long retaining wall here. So you start up here on high ground, and you're more or less able to join the terrace of the Poichile, and then it extends with retaining walls way out here. So you get this view of the wall of the Poichile down toward the horizon. This is a sketch Le Corbusier did of the Poichile. He thought this big edge, the idea of edge, the idea of edge as datum is something you can get a lot of mileage out of, and he was correct. And here's the model where you can see how the Poichile cuts down and negotiates the low ground as well as the high ground. This piece, this little round piece, is called the Maritime Theater. This piece over here is called the Canopus. There's a Roman bath in through here, and it's almost as if Hadrian was trying to build in his villa little reminders of different conditions that you would find throughout the Roman Empire. Because at this point, Rome is in control of Egypt, Rome is in control of Greece. So the Canopus, this thing over here, represents the causeway that funerary barges would go on. And you could have a kind of wonderful time on a barge pretending to be a pharaoh, pretending to be Egyptian. And lining the water are a series of cariotids. And this is a Reption porch that we looked at before. He's sort of quoting the cariotids. It's very eclectic because he's putting together pieces of different histories and combining them in a way to create a new whole. Hadrian had a personal friend called Antinous. He was a young slave boy. And sometimes Hadrian would dress him up in a toga. And sometimes he would dress him up in a pharaoh outfit. And they would often have picnics in this little piece called the Maritime Theater. Oh, Hadrian. The Maritime Theater in plan becomes this really essential piece toward fostering the rotation and the renegotiation of topography. So there's a little water cause way that you have to get across. And then on this little island, you have your picnics. And this is what it looks like now. There are a lot of these pieces in Hadrian's villa that are pretty surprising because we've been talking a lot about type and typology as ways that architecture is organized and knowable and how architecture carries meaning with it. But when you look at some specific works, particularly works in Hadrian's villa or later Roman architecture, you can see a lot of playfulness with the type. Like this is another condition, the piazzadora it's called. And there's a little sanctuary piece here which is very strange looking. It seems to be a kind of play of concave and convex forms. It seems as though Hadrian is really more interested in playing with the spatial envelope of the building than in rehearsing a set type. And even over here at the opposite end, you get something that begins to bow out like a little daisy and the vault of which is not a conventional dome or barrel vault, but something called an umbrella vault that responds to that form. So in fact, there are a lot of Roman sites that are pushing the boundaries sites begin to become increasingly playful and imaginative about how things get organized. The site we see here is the Eskilepion in Pergamon, now in Turkey. And again, it kind of reminds you of the piazzadora over here where there's a clearly defined space, clearly defined courtyard and around the edges of the courtyard, almost anything can happen. It's a kind of larger scale version of the fried egg scheme that we identified when talking about the atrium house. And the same things going on here. We have a courtyard with junk in the middle of it, but pretend the junk's not there. A courtyard with all kinds of stuff adhering to the perimeter. And it's interesting, the whole progression of how these objects at the perimeter begin to liberate themselves. Like we have this bent stowa piece here, wrapping the edge. And a pavilion pops out, a temple pops out. It almost looks like the stowa broke and a piece got free. This is kind of like the progression we saw when we were looking at other sites in Pergamon. And so here we have a little solid temple piece. Here we have a courtyard piece, the void of which is kind of like the temple piece. Here we have a little pantheonic piece. And as these things pull away from the courtyard, they become more and more explicitly figural. So that the final piece, the little daisy piece, becomes emphatically figural. And here, and this is one of my favorite Roman sites. This is Piazza Armerina in Sicily. Again, you have a really clear idea of courtyard, clear idea of courtyard, little fountain in the middle of it, and this agglomeration of different conditions all over the perimeter. And again, the more things pull away from the courtyard, the more they're liberated to become figural and eccentric. The one reason I really like the Piazza Armerina is that there are crazy things there, like some of the mosaics on the floor, these little tile-encrusted pattern things, show you things like the volleyball team, the beach volleyball team. Who knows? These are women doing gymnastics in ancient Rome. Spinning plates, who knows what she's doing. So not only do you have the beach volleyball team of ancient Rome displayed on the mosaics, but you also have in Piazza Armerina toilets. The toilet I'm showing you here is a magnificent, fancy toilet, and this is not the kind of toilet you get in Piazza Armerina. In Piazza Armerina, you get this toilet. So let's say you're just shopping, you're buying olives, you're buying a little bit of, I don't know, wine, but you gotta go. So you just go to the side of the road, find a spot, talk to your friends. You can look at the little horse mosaic down here. It's quite nice. And you find these in lots of towns. This is a Roman town built over Ephesus. These are poor people from the internet who posted it, so I'm going with it. This is, I think, very conversational. You have this little conversation pit here in Ephesus. I think it's nicer than the system that we had in Piazza Armerina. And I guess the last town plan I wanna show you, again, is quite a late one, and this is the Palace of Diocletian in Split. We're coming very close to the end of the Roman Empire here. Off on the coast of the Adriatic, the plan of the palace really is the plan of the four-square grid, Roma Quadrata, with all of these different inflections happening. As the building faces the water, there's a thickening of the edge. As the building moves away toward the more vulnerable edge, you have the barracks and the soldiers quartered, and in this middle terrain, you have a kind of extended forum with two monuments, a temple and a mausoleum. Temple facing west, mausoleum facing east, but it's sort of wonderful the way this wrapper begins to carve out figural spaces that allow these little perfect object buildings to be seen and appreciated. So next time, we will talk about Constantine and the end of the Roman Empire.