Essentials of Roman Architecture

The Romans transformed Europe, North Africa, the Near East, and every place which became absorbed in their expansive empire. Roman rule was synonymous with Roman architecture; wherever they went, they built in conformity with a recognizably Roman style of architecture. The handmaiden to Rome’s stunning military conquest of an unprecedented swathe of the ancient world- three continents, the entire Mediterranean basin, and a sizeable portion of the British island- was its capacity to build on a massive scale, erecting impressive yet cost-effective constructions across its empire which marked the appearance and the identity of these regions and diverse people as Romans. As we saw with Roman artwork, the genius of Rome lay in assimilating their conquered subjects’ artistic and technological skills to the service of empire, and by turn, Roman art and architecture came to be composed of different elements which became merged and served as the foundation for further innovations. This homogenizing effect of Roman architecture echoed the same message as that of contemporary visual arts: Roman architecture became the language of power and domination for antiquity and beyond. Roman architecture and engineering transformed Europe, North Africa, Asia Minor, the Levant, and wherever Romans established a foothold. Roman architecture tied these disparate regions and people even after the collapse of the empire which had originally unified them. The longevity of Roman construction, infrastructure, and cultural markers is testament to the extraordinary ambition of the Romans to place the world at large under their command and control. When this vision frayed at the edges and then began to entirely unravel, their architectural innovations survived and inspired entirely new people and civilizations to aspire to the glory that once was synonymous with Rome. This course explores the fundamentals of Roman building techniques and forms from Republic to Empire.