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Domestic Architecture

Pompeii provides a copious record of an ancient city as a living organism conditioned by and conditioning the daily life of its inhabitants. Nearly all the various types of ancient Roman buildings and all the methods of construction from mud-brick wall and post-and-lintel to concrete vaulting are represented at Pompeii (Herculaneum has been only partially disinterred). A covered market, a warehouse or granary, a triumphal arch, a comitium where municipal elections took place, and a basilica - the most characteristic building type developed by the Romans, comprising a covered hall with aisles and usually, though not at Pompeii, an apse, and used for the transaction of business and the administration of justice - all stand round the forum, which was the rigidly rectangular, axially planned heart of this as of every other Roman city. There are also three public baths, two palaestrae for gymnastic exercises and sports, two theatres, an amphitheatre for gladiatorial combats and other spectacles (the earliest example known), barracks for gladiators, and so on. Remains of similar structures survive elsewhere, of course, scattered over the whole vast area ruled by Rome, and many of them have greater architectural merit. But it is rarely possible to see so clearly as at Pompeii the urban texture, the relationship of public buildings to each other and to private dwellings, built for single families of varying degrees of wealth and social standing, which cover the greater part of the ground within the city walls.

The building history of Pompeii and Herculaneum came to its catastrophic end at the very moment when Rome and the major provincial cities of Italy were in the throes of urban renewal. The single-family house or domus was everywhere being torn down and replaced by many-storied tenement blocks or insulae, which were needed to accommodate a steadily increasing middle- and lower-class population, the latter flocking to the cities as landowners went over to farming with slaves (imported in quantity as prizes of colonial wars). Simultaneously, the richer families were moving out of the congested areas to live in suburban or country villas. Had the fatal eruption of Vesuvius been delayed for a few decades, it is more than likely that much of Pompeii and Herculaneum would also have consisted of huge regular overcrowded insulae uniformly built of concrete faced with brick and stucco, similar to those whose foundations have been found elsewhere, notably at Ostia. Eventually, by the fourth century, almost 90 per cent of the population of Rome was to be housed in insulae, built to the maximum legal height of five stories (about 70 feet [20m] high) with communal latrines and other facilities. Some of the larger houses in Pompeii had already been converted into such apartments by AD 79. But the city still contained a wide variety of domestic architecture with the homes of bankers, merchants, tradesmen and artisans in close proximity to inns, brothels, bakeries or evil-smelling dye-works, perhaps reflecting a looser social structure than that which was to follow in later imperial times.



The Pompeiian house was inward-looking with an unimpressive exterior often given over to single-room shops (tabernae), which had no connection with the rest of the building (5,33). From the street a narrow passage led into the main interior space called the atrium, a courtyard surrounded by small rooms, which were covered with tiled roofing sloping inwards to a rectangular opening. The word atrium is of Etruscan origin and the type of house planned round it seems to have been peculiar to Italy. In the earliest and simplest the owner's bedroom was in the centre of the side opposite the entrance and beyond it lay a small high-walled garden. Later in larger houses the garden was sometimes extended and surrounded by a covered colonnade called a peristyle - a Greek word, recalling its Hellenistic origin.

From this combination of Etruscan and Hellenistic elements a new type of domestic architecture evolved in Italy. Planned with a regard for axial symmetry, unusual in the Hellenistic East, one space flows harmoniously into the next in orderly sequence. From the outside a Pompeiian house is a featureless, solid block; but its interior reveals that preoccupation with the molding of space - also expressed in the illusionistic wall-paintings - which distinguishes Roman from Greek architecture. Contrasts of light and shade were often exploited, as in the house illustrated here, with its dim cool atrium (the roof has been restored so that the original effect can be recaptured) giving on to a sun-drenched peristyle garden, where there were flowering plants, statues and fountains (5,34)-.

Suburban and country villas were sited to take full advantage of prevailing breezes and wide views over land and, sometimes, water, but also to be seen, to make an impression of many-columned opulence. A portico was an essential feature; one type of villa resembled a Hellenistic stoa and consisted simply of a single row of rooms behind a long colonnade. Others had more elaborate plans, including that in Tuscany owned by Pliny the Younger (AD 61/2-c. 113), whose description of it in a letter vividly conveys the highly civilized taste for which the architects of such luxurious houses had to cater. Besides dwelling lovingly on its many rooms, interior courtyards, terrace and formal garden, Pliny describes the south-facing colonnade, which caught the full strength of the sun, and such features as the pool beneath his bedroom window, 'a pleasure both to see and hear, with its water falling from a height and foaming white as it strikes the marble'. Outside the formal gardens there were meadows no less 'well worth seeing for natural beauty', he wrote; 'then fields and many more meadows and woods'. His dining-room looked on to a terrace, 'the adjacent meadows and the open country beyond' - a great spreading plain 'ringed round by mountains, their summits crowned by ancient woods of tall trees'. Ornamental gardens had been laid out much earlier in Egypt, but the park merging into the natural landscape seems to have been a Roman invention.


Date: 2015-12-24; view: 740


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