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3.2 The First Experiments in Roman Concrete Construction
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來自 Yale University 的課程
Roman Architecture
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Technology and Revolution in Roman Architecture
The Revolution in Roman Architecture through the widespread adoption of opus caementicium (concrete) used for expressive as well as practical purposes.
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Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
I want to show you today a series of these concrete constructions,
concrete experiments we might call them, that begin to turn up
not only in Rome itself, but also in some of the
cities close to Rome that we saw Rome began to colonize.
In the Republic and into the age of Augustus cities that either
are the same or very close to the ones that we looked
at last time, and I'll show you a map momentarily.
I just want to begin with one in Rome itself.
This is the so-called Porticus Aemilia in Rome.
The Porticus Aemilia was a warehouse, a very
large warehouse on the banks of the Tiber river.
The Porticus Aemilia was built as you can see from the dates on your monument
list, very early on, 193 B.C., and then restored in 174 B.C..
Only a small fragment of the Porticus Aemilia survives today, but we
have a lot of evidence, a lot of clues, that we can
piece together through detective, through scholarly
detective work, to determine what this
building looked like in antiquity, and we can get a quite accurate sense.
We have, for example, the words of the great Roman
historian, Livy, Livy who was writing in the age of Augustus.
He tells us that the Porticus Aemilia,
he describes it, he mentions the Porticus Aemilia.
And he tells us it was located on the east bank of the Tiber River,
and that it was south, southwest of one of Rome's Seven Hills,
the Aventine Hill.
Southwest of the Aventine Hill, which is
enormously helpful because it gives archaeologists and so
on a clue, as to where they might look for remains of this particular structure.
So we have that.
We also have a fragment of the building, we
believe, because it's located just in the right place.
And I show it to you here.
It's not much, it's a piece [LAUGH] it's essentially a hunk of concrete that
includes a, an arched doorway and some arched windows.
But it's very important in terms of allowing us
to reconstruct what this structure looked like in antiquity.
But most significant of all we have a fragment
from what is known as the Marble Map of Rome.
The Marble Map of Rome called the Forma Urbis and I've put that
word on the monument list, that title on the monument list for you.
The Forma Urbis-- the Forma Urbis
was a great marble map that was made of Rome
in the early third century A.D., under the emperorship of
Septimius Severus, and put up on a wall in Rome,
and we'll talk about its location later on in the semester.
But it purported to represent all the buildings that were standing in Rome in
the early third century, B, in the early, in the early third century A.D..
It is fragmentary
today, but there are a fair number of fragments, and fortunately a couple of
those fragments, or several of those fragments,
are fragments that represent the Porticus Aemilia.
So we can tell from that, from that from Livy's description,
from this fragmentary remain, we can piece together what it looked like.
And you can see it here, a very, very long,
rectangular structure that went all along the bank of the river.
Storage, you need a lot of storage.
You're, you know, from the, especially with the, as
the Romans began to conquer the world, they were trading
more extensively with other parts of the world, and
consequently, they needed, they needed places along the Tiber river.
To store the goods that were both going out and coming in.
So they build this gigantic warehouse along the banks of the Tiber.
Now there's a
fair amount of disagreement about some of the smaller details
of this warehouse and what it looked like in antiquity.
So we have to do the best that we can
to bring that evidence together to determine what it looked like.
But as, as I said in some details you'll see there's variation.
So sev, several of the things I'm going to show you very slightly.
But the only one that you'll ultimately [LAUGH] responsible
for is the one that's on your monument list.
But I just want you to be aware of the fact that that
there are different, that there are different
interpretations of exactly what it look like.
Wha- what we are sure of, and what's most important for us today,
is that it was made of concrete and that it had barrel vaults.
What was a barrel vault?
The barrel vault was a, a, a, a vault that
was again made out of concrete, placed on a wall,
and then had the vault was shaped like the
side of a barrel, as you can see here which
is why it's called a barrel vault, shaped like
the side of a barrel resting on walls down below.
A fairly simple shape, that could not have been made or it would be very
difficult to make out of stone, but was easily able to be made out of concrete.
And we see a series of those barrel vaults placed one next to another, for the
warehouse, for the Porticus Aemilia in Rome.
It was placed, and actually I, I neglected to mention, Livy also tells
us that the Porticus Aemilia had four tiers, it was tiered in four levels.
And we see those four tiers here, rising up ever so slightly along the slope,
of the Tiber river. This is a cross section of what the inside
of the Basilica Aemilia might have looked like.
You see those great barrel vaults here.
You see that the architect has been adventerous in the sense that he has
not placed the barrel vaults on solid wall, as we saw in that diagram.
But has opened those walls up, created piers, and arches above those piers,
to create these arcades, which is quite ingenious, and, and very
smart, because what it does is enable there there to
be both axial movement through the building, but also lateral movement.
You can walk, not only along each barrel vault,
but you can walk in between the piers, which, as
I said, creates much more open, a sense of
much more openness, and lateral as well as axial movement.
The other thing that you see here is, are the back walls,
where we can see just what we saw in that fragment of the building.
The arched doorways, as well as the arched windows in
the back walls, which of course allow light into the structure.
Lots of activity needed to happen here as things were moved in and out, and
those who worked here needed to be able to see, everything that they were doing.
The, the view that you have on your monument list is this one.
It's a restored view of what the Porticus Aemilia
might have looked like in antiquity, and it's very helpful.
It's a cutaway view which gives you most of the major features all in one place.
You can see that it is indeed tiered, there are four tiers for this
structure that they move up slightly as they move up the slope of the hill.
You can see the use of the barrel vaults. You can see the piers down below.
You can see the flat
roof that these seem to have.
But as they rose up slightly along the slope
of the hill, you can see that the that
the designer has placed small, curved, slit windows on
each tier to allow again additional light into the structure.
And you could also see, from this diagram, that it was
made of concrete and faced with opus incertum work, these small,
small irregular stones, that we saw in the Temple
of Vesta, also used as the facing material here.
Here's one more, restored view, which shows
you roughly the same, the four tiers.
The barrel vaults, the windows, the various tiers and then most importantly
these, these doorways and windows in the back, as well as the general space
that was available inside this extraordinary building.
I mentioned that while we'll look at
a couple of buildings, several buildings in Rome.
I also want to go out to some of
the colonies that were founded by the Romans in the
vicinity of Rome in the second and first centuries
B.C., and where they began to build as we saw.
They began to plan towns.
They began to put walls around those towns.
They began
to put temples in those towns.
And they also began to put other
structures including warehouses and sanctuary's and the like.
The ones that we're going to look at today here again, Rome is at the star
and we're going to look at buildings in
Terracina, over here, in Tivoli, and also in Palestrina.
And you can see the proximity of those to others
we talked about last time, Norba and Cosa and Falerii Novi, and so on and so forth.
It's not surprising, again, to see the Romans turning to
their environs, as they make these earliest towns and as
they start to fill these towns to make them into
the kind of mini Romes that they, that they so desired.
So I'm going to, we're going to look at a series of these, of different dates and of
considerable interest, in terms of what they
herald for the future of Roman architecture.
The first that we're going to look at is a market hall, a
market hall at a place called Ferentino, Ferentino and it dates to I
may have neglected to men- to show you Ferentino on that map, but
it's in will all the others there, Ferentino around 100 B.C., it dates to.
And you can see
that it's essentially one giant barrel vault, one giant
barrel vault, which was used as the market hall.
The, you can see also that that giant
barrel vault, which is made of concrete, has opening
off it, on the sides, a series of
arched areas, with also barrel vaulted on the inside.
These were used as the market stalls, inside this market place.
You can also see I believe very well, that the facing that is used
for this concrete is opus incertum work for the walls and for the vaults.
And then what they've done to emphasize the
location and the shape of the arches, they
have used stone around those, also to give
further solidity to this part of the building.
They have used
stone, and you can see it's a combination
of, of nicely cut ashlar blocks, down here, but
also of the voussoir blocks that we saw
in the Falerii Novi gate, used over the arches.
So this combination of both stone and of, of, cut-, of, of, opus quadratum
stone, and also of opus incertum, used as the facing for this particular structure.
What's significant about this building is that it looks forward, to
things that we're going to see later on develop in Roman architecture.
Primarily, I showed you in the introductory lecture, a glimpse of the
markets of Trajan in Rome, and I remind you here of the great
market hall of the markets of Trajan, which is even more sophisticated in
its use of concrete, because it has ribbed vaults, as you can see.
But this experimentation that we're going to see in the early
second century A.D., in Rome would not have been possible, without
the experimentation in concrete that took place in this very early
stage, in the second century and in the first centuries B.C.
