Roman Architecture And Its Principles Of Construction Under The Empire

The architects of ancient Rome developed a vibrant and enduring tradition, inspiring those who followed in their profession even to this day. This book explores how Roman architects went about the creative process.

The wealth of excavation of ancient buildings in the past 50 years and the resulting flood of publications has created a demand for a survey of building practice in antiquity. This two-volume work deals with the techniques of setting together the fabric of ancient buildings: the manual and mechanical operations involved; the materials, tools and equipment used. "Ancient" here means from very first beginnings (origins) to the end of Late Antiquity (i.e. about 600 A.D.); as manifested geographically in the Old World of Europe and the Middle East (not sub-Saharan Africa, Further Asia, the Far East or New World). Building (the product and the process) is limited to architectural building and looks at the technology of civil engineering only where it introduces novelties. Technology here means the system of techniques used in the process of building construction rather than the science or theory of building. The 10 chapters of this first volume are intended to give a general perspective of animal building in the light of evolutionary biology, then of building in the Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Levanto-Aegean, Achaemenid, Greek, Roman, Late Antique -Early Christian / Byzantine / Sassanian contexts (with a weighting towards the lesser known prehistoric beginnings and late antique end). The second volume will focus on the technical details: materials of construction, structural systems, principles of construction and forms of construction.

Examines Roman architecture as a party of overall urban design and looks at arches, public buildings, tombs, columns, stairs, plazas, and streets

This lavishly illustrated volume presents a comprehensive architectural study of 87 individual temples and sanctuaries built in the Roman East between the end of the 1st century BCE and the end of the 3rd century CE, within a broad region encompassing the modern states of Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan. Religious architecture gave faithful expression to the complexity of the Roman East and to its multiplicity of traditions pertaining to ethnic and religious aspects as well as to the powerful influence of Imperial Rome. The source of this power lay in the uniformity of the architectural language, the inventory of forms, the choice of styles and the spatial layout of the buildings. Thus, while temples have an eclectic character, there is an underlying unity of form comprising the podium, the stairway between the terminating walls (antae) and the columns along the entrance front - in other words, the axiality, frontality and symmetry of the temple as viewed from outside. The temples and sanctuaries studied in this volume demonstrate individual nuances of plan, spatial design, location in the sanctuary and interrelations with the immediate vicinity but can be divided into two main categories: Vitruvian temples (derived from Hellenistic-Roman architecture) and Non-Vitruvian temples (those with plans and spatial designs that cannot be analysed according to architectural criteria such as those defined by Vitruvius). The individual descriptions presented focus solely upon the analysis of the external and internal space of the temples of all types and do not involve any cultural or ethnic discussion.