Housing The New Romans

In the last twenty years, reception studies have significantly enhanced our understanding of the ways in which Classics has shaped modern Western culture, but very little attention has been directed toward the reception of classical architecture. Housing the New Romans: Architectual Reception and Classical Style in the Modern World addresses this gap by investigating ways in which appropriation and allusion facilitated the reception of Classical Greece and Rome through the requisition and redeployment of classicizing tropes to create neo-Antique sites of "dwelling" in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The volume, across nine essays, will cover both European and American iterations of place making, including Sir John Soanes' house in London, the Hôtel de Beauharnais in Paris, and the Getty Villa in California. By focusing on structures and places that are oriented towards private life-houses, hotels, clubs, tombs, and gardens-the volume directs the critical gaze towards diverse and complex sites of curatorial self-fashioning. The goal of the volume is to provide a multiplicity of interpretative frameworks (e.g. object-agency enchantment, hyperreality, memory-infrastructure) that may be applied to the study of architectural reception. This critical approach makes Housing the New Romans the first work of its kind in the emerging field of architectural and landscape reception studies and in the hitherto textually dominated field of classical reception.

In the last twenty years, reception studies have significantly enhanced our understanding of the ways in which Classics has shaped modern Western culture, but very little attention has been directed toward the reception of classical architecture. Housing the New Romans: Architectual Reception and Classical Style in the Modern World addresses this gap by investigating ways in which appropriation and allusion facilitated the reception of Classical Greece and Rome through the requisition and redeployment of classicizing tropes to create neo-Antique sites of "dwelling" in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The volume, across nine essays, will cover both European and American iterations of place making, including Sir John Soanes' house in London, the Hôtel de Beauharnais in Paris, and the Getty Villa in California. By focusing on structures and places that are oriented towards private life-houses, hotels, clubs, tombs, and gardens-the volume directs the critical gaze towards diverse and complex sites of curatorial self-fashioning. The goal of the volume is to provide a multiplicity of interpretative frameworks (e.g. object-agency enchantment, hyperreality, memory-infrastructure) that may be applied to the study of architectural reception. This critical approach makes Housing the New Romans the first work of its kind in the emerging field of architectural and landscape reception studies and in the hitherto textually dominated field of classical reception.

At a time when we reflect much on the issue of social cohesion, on the influence of architecture in lifestyles and on relationships between neighborhoods within large modern cities, this book aims to approach the study of "inhabitating modes" in roman urban dwellings. Drawing on concepts common to historical anthropology and incorporating evidence from multiple lines of research (archaeological, iconographic, textual, etc.), this volume aims to contribute to the reinvigoration of a social history of antiquity through new research projects, publications, and digital tools from both individual and collaborative efforts. This field of study is currently undergoing a period of disciplinary revitalization and this volume is an opportunity to present the most recent work and to dialogue in an interdisciplinary perspective.

The first detailed study of “Neo-Antique” architecture applies an archaeological lens to the study of New York City’s structures Since the city’s inception, New Yorkers have deliberately and purposefully engaged with ancient architecture to design and erect many of its most iconic buildings and monuments, including Grand Central Terminal and the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch in Brooklyn, as well as forgotten gems such as Snug Harbor on Staten Island and the Gould Memorial Library in the Bronx. Antiquity in Gotham interprets the various ways ancient architecture was re-conceived in New York City from the eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Contextualizing New York’s Neo-Antique architecture within larger American architectural trends, author Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis applies an archaeological lens to the study of the New York buildings that incorporated these various models in their design, bringing together these diverse sources of inspiration into a single continuum. Antiquity in Gotham explores how ancient architecture communicated the political ideals of the new republic through the adaptation of Greek and Roman architecture, how Egyptian temples conveyed the city’s new technological achievements, and how the ancient Near East served many artistic masters, decorating the interiors of glitzy Gilded Age restaurants and the tops of skyscrapers. Rather than classifying neo-classical (and Greek Revival), Egyptianizing, and architecture inspired by the ancient Near East into distinct categories, Macaulay-Lewis applies the Neo-Antique framework that considers the similarities and differences—intellectually, conceptually, and chronologically—among the reception of these different architectural traditions. This fundamentally interdisciplinary project draws upon all available evidence and archival materials—such as the letters and memos of architects and their patrons, and the commentary in contemporary newspapers and magazines—to provide a lively multi-dimensional analysis that examines not only the city’s ancient buildings and rooms themselves but also how New Yorkers envisaged them, lived in them, talked about them, and reacted to them. Antiquity offered New Yorkers architecture with flexible aesthetic, functional, cultural, and intellectual resonances—whether it be the democratic ideals of Periclean Athens, the technological might of Pharaonic Egypt, or the majesty of Imperial Rome. The result of these dialogues with ancient architectural forms was the creation of innovative architecture that has defined New York City’s skyline throughout its history.

Rome was the largest city in the ancient world. As the capital of the Roman Empire, it was clearly an exceptional city in terms of size, diversity and complexity. While the Colosseum, imperial palaces and Pantheon are among its most famous features, this volume explores Rome primarily as a city in which many thousands of men and women were born, lived and died. The thirty-one chapters by leading historians, classicists and archaeologists discuss issues ranging from the monuments and the games to the food and water supply, from policing and riots to domestic housing, from death and disease to pagan cults and the impact of Christianity. Richly illustrated, the volume introduces groundbreaking new research against the background of current debates and is designed as a readable survey accessible in particular to undergraduates and non-specialists.

This volume presents a series of case studies that trace the ways in which audiences across Europe have attempted to return to Pompeii by emulating its interior decorations since the city?s rediscovery in the mid-eighteenth century. As such, it is about both the impact of Pompeian antiquity on the present and the reception in the present of that antique past, exploring the variety of ways in which Pompeian domestic space and decoration have been revived (and for what purposes and audiences). The contributions to the volumes compare the ways in which Pompeian wall decorations were interpreted and adapted, given new context and put to serve new social and political purposes, both close to their place of discovery, in the Kingdom of Naples, and in the far-off European periphery, represented by Denmark and Sweden.

What does 'Roman' mean? How does the mythical city touch people's identities, values and attitudes? In the long-established and official imaginary of the West, Rome is the citta dell'arte, the city of faith, an heirloom city inspired by the traces of ancient Empire, by the brooding aura of the Church, by Hollywood fairy-tale romance, and by the spicy tang of veiled decadence. But what of its contemporary residents? Are they now merely guides and waiters servicing throngs of tourists indifferent to the city's contemporary charms? Guy Lanoue, a former resident of Rome, explores how Romans live the modern myth of Rome Eternal. Since the 19th century, it has defined an important community, the fatherland, a home-spun society where the rules of everyday life become 'tradition': ways of eating, dressing, making and keeping friends and acquaintances, 'proper' ways of speaking and a hard to define but nonetheless tangible air of composure. Guy Lanoue is a Professor of Anthropology at the Universite de Montreal.

During the rise of New York from the capital of an upstart nation to a global metropolis, the visual language of Greek and Roman antiquity played a formative role in the development of the city’s art and architecture. This compilation of essays offers a survey of diverse reinterpretations of classical forms in some of New York’s most iconic buildings, public monuments, and civic spaces. Classical New York examines the influence of Greco-Roman thought and design from the Greek Revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through the late-nineteenth-century American Renaissance and Beaux Arts period and into the twentieth century’s Art Deco. At every juncture, New Yorkers looked to the classical past for knowledge and inspiration in seeking out new ways to cultivate a civic identity, to design their buildings and monuments, and to structure their public and private spaces. Specialists from a range of disciplines—archaeology, architectural history, art history, classics, and history— focus on how classical art and architecture are repurposed to help shape many of New York City’s most evocative buildings and works of art. Federal Hall evoked the Parthenon as an architectural and democratic model; the Pantheon served as a model for the creation of Libraries at New York University and Columbia University; Pennsylvania Station derived its form from the Baths of Caracalla; and Atlas and Prometheus of Rockefeller Center recast ancient myths in a new light during the Great Depression. Designed to add breadth and depth to the exchange of ideas about the place and meaning of ancient Greece and Rome in our experience of New York City today, this examination of post-Revolutionary art, politics, and philosophy enriches the conversation about how we shape space—be it civic, religious, academic, theatrical, or domestic—and how we make use of that space and the objects in it.