Roman Architecture is a course for people who love to travel and want to discover the power of architecture to shape politics, society, and culture.
3.4 Innovations in Concrete at Rome: The Tabularium and The Theater of Marcellus
Loading...
來自 Yale University 的課程
Roman Architecture
175 個評分
從本節課中
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.
與講師見面
Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
I'd like to turn now to, a couple of buildings in Rome.
Back to Rome.
To look at first, a building called the Tabularium
that dates to around 78 B.C., that was a
very important building in Rome, because it was used
to house the state archives at that particular juncture.
It was put up by a man, we even know who put
it up, a man by the name of Quintus Lutatius Catullus, and
I put his name on the monument list for you.
And it was located on the north side of the Forum,
of the Roman Forum, and the south slope of the Capitoline hill.
Here I show you one of these excellent Google Earth flyover views of this part
of ancient Rome, or what ancient, what, what
this part of ancient Rome looks like today.
And we see the landmarks that we've already
pointed out.
The Colosseum at the very top, the Roman Forum lying in front of the Colosseum.
Mussolini's Via dei Fori Imperiali, the Imperial Fora over here.
Palatine Hill up here, the Circus Maximus here.
The Wedding Cake, so-called, of Victor Emmanuel, the
modern building, a nineteenth century building over here.
And then the, the, Capitoline Hill,
redesigned by Michelangelo, with the oval piazza.
The Tabularium is located right here.
It is, again, facing the Forum, the Roman Forum, but, it is the back
wall of one of Michelangelo's, palaces, the
so called Senatorial Palace, designed by Michelangelo.
What Michelangelo did is what was done so often by later architects,
incorporated, didn't tear down, the earlier Roman Tabularium.
But incorporated its wall as the back wall of his Senatorial Palace.
And that's exactly what it remains today. Here we see a view of the Tabularium.
We're standing on the Forum side.
Looking at the, the, wh-, the, what remains of the Tabularium.
And we can see some of the features that we've already
been discussing today.
First of all, let me point out, that it is made out of concrete.
It's made out of concrete.
The building is concrete.
But here, in Rome they decided not to use,
Opus incertum work was not the rage in Rome.
Instead they were much more interested in cut stone.
Cut stone and you can see that they have used cut stone in this structure.
Cut tufa stone. I think you can recognize this stone
as tufa.
Remember tufa is indigenous to the city of Rome.
Rome has a lot of fairly decent tufa.
They've used tufa here.
And they have used a tufa work also for
the arcades above and for the columns, the capitals are
done in tra-, travertine, added in travertine, considered the most
important part, so they use the more expensive material there.
But you can see here, as at the
Sanctuary of Hercules at Tivoli, that we
have this combination of arcades and columns.
And once again as, as was already pointed
out, columns that have no structural purpose whatsoever.
Columns that are there for pure decoration.
And this scheme of arcades with columns is going to, become extremely important,
in the future. One can go inside the Tabularium today and
see what remains of the state archives.
There are some very interesting corridors and vaulting that one can see.
And by the way, it's a nice place to go because there's also a
panoramic window on which one can get
some spectacular views down over the Roman Forum.
There's some great pictures as well photographs as well.
We're looking here at one of the corridors of the Tabularium.
You can see that
the arches are made out of stone supported by columns, but in
between them there are a series of bays, as you can see here.
And in between them, we have domical ceilings that are made out of concrete.
So concrete used here, combined, concrete for the domes combined with stone.
The Romans were very, handsome stone, that the Romans,
those in Rome itself favored used for the arches and
used to decorate the walls as well. And what's interesting is
that we find in these corridors, some a, a series of ramps, and a series of steps.
And there's actually one staircase that has 66
steps - I've counted them - 66 steps as
well as ramps and what we see happening
here, and these are again covered by barrel vaults.
What we see happening here is the Romans
paying a lot of attention to varying the
experience that you have when you walk through buildings.
Sometimes you're going to be walking on a straight path, sometimes you're going
to be walking on a ramp, sometimes you're going to be walking on stairs.
To vary that experience, so and you're going
to see panoramas and so on along the way.
To make it an experience to go into
a building, and to wander around that building.
But we are also going to see, and I will show you this particularly
in the last structure we talk about today, we
are also going to see the Romans not hesitating to
be the controlling force that they very much were, and
to establish certain predetermined paths that you have to take.
So, you are having a varied experience but you are kind of
having it in the way that the Romans want you to have it.
And, and that's an interesting phenomenon that I hope we'll think about together
in the, as we converse in the, in the online forum.
I want to show you one last building in Rome today before I show you the, the
real pièce de résistance of concrete architecture of, of this early period.
I'd like to show you one more building in Rome.
It's a later building, and in some respects it belongs in a later lecture.
It's the Theater of Marcellus in Rome, a theater that was put up by
Rome's first emperor, Augustus.
After the death of his nephew and son in law Marcellus he seems to have put it up.
That is, Augustus seems to have put it up, he was in great grief at
the loss of this young man because he had hoped that Marcellus would succeed him.
Marcellus was married to Augustus's daughter Julia.
He had hoped that Marcellus would succeed
him but Marcellus unfortunately died very young.
Augustus was in, in incredible grief and
he put up this theater in Rome, this stone theater in Rome, in honor of Marcellus.
The theater was put up, as I mentioned, either in 13, or in 11 BC.
So I could talk about this, we have several lectures
on Augustus, and I could talk about this in that lecture.
But I decided to put it here because it really is the culmination,
in a sense, of some of the experiments we've been talking about today.
And I wanted you to
see it in this context for that reason.
We are looking at the theater of Marcellus as it looks today.
Parts of it are extremely well preserved, as you
can see, at least these first two tiers here.
The main reason that the building has survived, and you
can, well I'll talk about the details in a moment.
The main reason that the building has survived, and I,
I believe I mentioned this in the introductory lecture, is that
it was reused over time.
It was reused as a as a fortress in the
Middle Ages, it was used as a palace in the
Renaissance, and it was used as, and most recently and
is still being used as a very luxurious condominium today.
This is where Google Earth really comes in handy.
You can go, if you go on to Google Earth,
because it's very difficult to get a sense of the way
in which this ancient, the ancient part of this structure relates
to the rest of this structure today, without going up above it.
And by going up above it, and looking at it, both from above
and, and Google Earth now allows you to do 3D at the same time.
So you can do 3D and up above at the same time.
you, you can see the relationship of this building to its modern locale.
And by the way it's just in the shadow, it's very close to the Capitoline hill.
It's a hop skip and a jump from the Capital Line hill this
area of Rome it's actually the so called Jewish ghetto area of Rome.
It served as the ghetto in in times past and is still referred to
it that way today and it has some of the best restaurants in Rome.
If you have never had carciofi alla Judea, Jewish artichokes, wow,
they are incredible.
And there are several, lots of restaurants in this area that has them.
They're a real, a real Roman treat.
It's considered a part of, a very
characteristic part of the cuisine of ancient Rome.
It's definitely something to experience.
But we see the Theater of Marcellus right here, and you can see both the
facade, which is the ancient part of it, but also the rest of the building, and the
way in which it is used today
as a condominium with apartments opening off, these
lovely, courtyards with trees and plants and
flowers, and all sorts of, of things there.
And, there's another famous temple.
The Temple of Apollo that is located right outside.
There are only three columns preserved of that temple.
But, also, its podium, right in front of the Theater of Marcellus.
This is, again, Google Earth.
You can look, not only, at what the building looks like today, but
you can recreate now, all of the, in these last couple of months,
they've enabled us to recreate Ancient Rome as well, and one can do
that for all of the buildings that we'll be looking at this semester.
And this one is their recreation.
It's fairly simple, but their recreation of the Theater of Marcellus.
And it allows us to look at some of the features
of that building.
Again, sorry that I have to talk about, so
much about terminology at the beginning, but as I mentioned
once we get through this, the first couple of
weeks we won't have to do much of that anymore.
But the basic components of a Roman theater were the seating, which is called
the cavea, which is this semicircular seating that we see here.
The cavea is usually divided into a series of
wedge-shaped sections, which you cannot see here but
I'll show you in another view in a moment.
Wedge-shaped sections that are called, each are called the cuneus.
cuneus, and then there is a stage building, we're seeing the back of that
here, but a stage building facing the seating, called a
scaenae frons. A scaenae frons.
What's important to us here, in the context of this lecture, is
that while the Greeks built their theaters, in Greek theaters were the base,
were the main prototype for Roman theaters.
While the Greeks built their theaters on hillsides, the Romans were not content
as an urban, as a, as a civilization that was interested primarily in urban centers.
The Romans were not content to build their, their theaters on hills.
They didn't want to be constrained by having
to build their theaters where hills happened to be.
And so now, with concrete construction, what, what
they were able to do instead was to
build a hill out of concrete anywhere they wanted to build a hill out of concrete.
Right in the center of downtown Rome and then hollow that concrete
out in order to create the entrances and exits from that structure.
And that's exactly what they did for the Theater of Marcellus.
If we look at this detail of the outside of the Theater
of Marcellus, we will see that this building, made out of concrete, is like
the others we've talked about today, faced with some kind of stone.
In this case, the stone is travertine.
The decision of Augustus was to get this more expensive stone,
bring it from, from, from Tivoli And use it for this structure.
Blocks of stone, ashlar blocks of stone, as you
can see here.
And interspersing among the arcades, columns.
Columns that was, as were well-pointed
out before, have no structural purpose whatsoever.
Columns that serve only as decoration.
And the fact that they were decoration is is apparent
in the fact that they have varied the orders here.
We see the Doric order used for the first story and the Ionic order
used for the second story, and we think there may have been a third story.
Today what you see up there is part of the later construction.
But if there was a third story whether that
had columns or pilasters, which you'll remember are flat columns.
If it had those, those were probably of the Corinthian order because
that is exactly the scheme that we see on the later Colosseum.
Doric, Ionic and ultimately Corinthian.
But we're sure at least of the Doric and
of the Ionic.
So these columns have no structural purpose whatsoever, purely decorative.
In a sense they're kind of the icing on the cake.
They don't hold up the building but they decorate it in a very nice way.
And it shows you that the Romans are beginning to use what the Greeks used
as structural components of their buildings, namely columns,
to hold up walls, to hold up roofs.
They are using them for purely decorative purposes,
playing around with their original purpose, and using them in
a different way, and we see that happening in spades here.
If you go into the building you will see
the corridors of the of the Theatre of Marcellus.
You will see what first looks like a barrel vault,
done out of concrete construction, resting on stone, on travertine piers.
But you see that that barrel vault curves.
A curving barrel vault is technically called an annular vault.
You see an annular vault here.
A diagram, of an annular vault here.
It's essentially, again, a barrel vault that curves.
We sometimes refer to it as a ring vault, because of its shape.
So you see those annular vaults used in the Theater of Marcellus,
these are the same vaults that will be used ultimately in the Colosseum.
A quick view of a typical Roman theater, the
Theater of Marcellus in Rome, and a typical Greek theater.
This is the famous Theater at Epidaurus of the mid-4th century BC in Greece.
And I show you, just wanted to point out the main differences.
They look superficially alike in that both of them have an orchestra.
They have an area of seats.
They have
a stage building. But there are some important differences.
One is, and you can't see that over
here, but the Greek theater had a round orchestra.
The Roman theater always has a semicircular orchestra.
Both of them have seats, the cavea.
Here, you can see these wedge-shaped sections of seats, called
the cuneus that, both Greek theaters, and also, Roman theaters had.
Both of them have stage buildings.
Although, the stage building is more prominent in the Roman context.
But the most important distinction is the one I've already drawn.
And that is, as you can see at
Epidaurus, the Greeks build their theaters on hilltops.
You can see the trees and part of the hill very clearly here.
The Romans build theirs on hills made out of concrete.
Not always.
There are some exceptions to that.
We do have some Roman theaters built on hills,
when the hill happened to be in a good location
and, and, particularly beautifully sighted, but for the most
part Romans build them on their own concrete construction.
