Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

We think of great engineering structures as characteristically Roman. The engineering works included roads, aqueducts, and military structures such as Hadrian’s Wall, that went across the island Britannia, from coast to coast. The scale of operations was stupendous, especially when measured against the available resources — no electronic means of communication, no earthmoving equipment larger than picks and shovels, just large numbers of people involved in highly disciplined working groups. Many of these structures were treated as utilitarian, and were made to work efficiently without being expected to have any artistic merits. For example, the Pont du Gard near Nîmes is a spectacular aqueduct that carried a water supply across a steep-sided river valley (with the River Gard at the bottom of it). The bridge was built from great blocks of stone, which were left ‘unfinished’. Temporary timber supports were needed in the making of arches, but once the arches were complete the supports were removed and the arches supported themselves, and much more besides. Some of the stone blocks protruded to make supports for the temporary timbers, and when the bridge was completed these protrusions were just left, and remain to this day. The bridge was in the depths of the countryside — it is visited today for its own sake, and because people like to bathe in the river there, not because it is close to a town centre. When it was new it would certainly have amazed and astounded the few people who went to visit, but would have been visited in the way that a new dam might be visited nowadays, as a spectacle but not as an artistic accomplishment. Had it been in a city centre then it would certainly have been given a more polished treatment. By contrast the imperial baths in Rome and the Pantheon were very finely decorated and finished. The basic engineering structures were covered in marble panels, carved ornament and mosaics. This decorative work, that showed the buildings to be of high status, was derived from the temples that had been developed by the Greeks. This can be seen very clearly in a building such as the Maison Carrée at Nîmes (Figure 13) which immediately looks rather like the Parthenon (Figure 7), but there are also differences, and they belong not just to these individual temples but to the groups of temples of which each of these is a representative. So, for example, the Greek temple has columns all the way round, sitting on a platform that has three steps on all sides (rather large steps, calculated for their visual effect, rather than being convenient to walk up — there is a stone ramp at the end of the building by the way in). By contrast the Roman temple has columns only at the front, and a flight of steps only at the front (and these steps are designed to be walked up). The reason for this is that the Roman temple developed from an earlier type of temple that we call Etruscan, which is what the Roman architect Vitruvius called it in his treatise on architecture (Ten Books of Architecture) (Figure 17). The name alludes to the ancient days of Rome, when the settlement was a provincial town in Etruria. The means by which it developed its ambitions are lost, but it grew in importance and came to establish itself as the capital of Etruria, before going on to annex the regions round about — first those close at hand, and then most of the rest of the lands around the Mediterranean, and some way beyond. The Etruscan temple according to Vitruvius was built on a stone platform, and had timber columns making a porch at the front. Its walls were made of sun-dried bricks, which turn soft if they come into contact with water, and can wash away. That is why the stone platform held them up above the level of the ground, and why the roof was made to overhang. The columns were spaced much further apart than in the Greek temple (proportionally further apart, that is) because both they and the beams spanning between them were timber. These temples were quite small in size, and the timber and mud-bricks were perishable, whereas the Greek temples, by the time the Romans came into contact with them, were monumental in scale and built of stone. Not only that, but they had developed a very precisely codified system of sculpting the columns and beams, which developed over a long time and became an exacting set of proportions and adjustments, so that for example the columns were modelled with ridges in them (flutes) that were cut on site so that they would not be damaged in transport, and the columns and flutings tapered so the top of the column was narrower than its base. What is not obvious at first is that the taper does not follow a perfectly straight line, but bulges out very slightly from where that straight line would have taken it. This bulging (which is called ‘entasis’) was carefully worked out, and was supposed to make the columns look right when seen by eye — without it there is apparently a tendency for the columns to look as if they grow slightly thinner than they should be in the middle. The Greeks, it can be seen, lavished attention on their temples, or at least on the important ones such as the Parthenon, which was decorated discreetly with fine sculpture. There was not only the cult statue inside the temple, cast in bronze and covered in gold and ivory as was traditional. It was made by Phidias, who was also responsible for the celebrated statue of Zeus at Olympia (which is always listed, along with the Pyramids, as one of ‘the wonders’ of the ancient world). These statues are now lost, but most of the marble sculptures that decorated the Parthenon survive (many of them in the British Museum, where they are known as the Elgin Marbles). It was a building of enormous prestige, and it impressed the Romans, who adopted the Greek architectural language, simplified it, and applied it to the buildings that they built across the whole of their vast empire, making this classical language the most widely used system of decorating buildings across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.