I'm Professor Kleiner, and what I'd like to do today

is to give you a sense of some of the great buildings

and some of the themes that we will be studying together this semester.

I think it's important to note, from the outset,

that Roman architecture is primarily an architecture of cities.

The Romans structured a man-made, worldwide empire out of architectural forms,

and those architectural forms revolutionized the ancient world

and exerted a lasting influence on the architecture and the architects of post-classical times.

This semester we will be concerned primarily with urban

communities-- with urban communities--and we

will, in the first half of this

semester, we will focus on the city of

Rome, and in the second-- and also central Italy,

including Pompeii.

And I wanted to show you, at the outset,

an aerial view of Rome--you see it over here,

on the left-hand side of the screen--

that situates us in the very core of the ancient city.

You see the famous Colosseum, the very icon of Rome,

at the upper right.

You see the Roman Forum, as it looks today,

and you see a part of the Capitoline Hill,

transformed by Michelangelo into the famous Campidoglio,

as well as the Via dei Fori Imperiali of Mussolini,

built by Mussolini, and the Imperial Fora.

So the city of Rome again we'll be concentrating on,

at the beginning of this semester, as well as the city of

Pompeii.

An aerial view of Pompeii, as it looks today.

You can see many of the buildings of the city,

including the houses and the shops, and also the

entertainment district.

This is the theater and the music hall of ancient Pompeii.

The amphitheater is over here.

And you can see, of course, looming up in the

background, Mount Vesuvius, the mountain that caused all that trouble in 79 A.D.

So that's the first half of the semester.

The second half of the semester we are going to be going out

into the provinces, into the Roman provinces,

and that is going to take us-- and we're going to look at the

provinces both in the eastern and the western part of the

Empire-- and that will take us to Roman Greece.

It will take us to Asia Minor; Asia Minor, which of course is modern Turkey.

It will take us to North Africa.

It will take us to the Middle East,

in what's now Jordan and Syria, and it will also take us to

Europe, to western Europe,

to cities in France and to cities in Spain.

And let me just show you an example of some of the buildings

that we'll look at as we travel to the provinces.

This is the Library of Celsus, in Ephesus,

on the western coast of Turkey.

This--the theater, a spectacularly well-preserved

theater at Sabratha, you see on the upper right-hand

side; and down here a restored view

of the masterful Palace of Diocletian.

We have the late Roman emperors in a place called Split,

which is in Croatia, along the fabulously gorgeous

Dalmatian Coast today.

So those are just a sampling of the kinds of buildings that

we'll look at in the provinces.

We're going to be seeing, we'll be concentrating on the

ways in which the Romans planned and built their cities.

And it's important to note, from the very outset,

that Rome itself grew in a very ad hoc way.

And we can tell that.

Here's a Google Earth image showing that core of Rome,

with the Colosseum, with the famous,

modern Victor Emmanuel Monument that looks either like a wedding

cake or a typewriter.

It's very white, and it's called the wedding

cake by a lot of the locals.

You see that here.

But it's a landmark in Rome.

And the Capitoline Hill, with the Campidoglio over here;

the Forum, the Roman Forum; the Imperial Fora on this side.

But you can see from the relatively crooked and narrow

streets of the city of Rome, as they look from above today,

you can see that again the city grew in a fairly ad hoc

way, as I mentioned.

It wasn't planned all at once, it just grew up over time,

beginning in the eighth century B.C.

Now this is interesting because what we know about the Romans is

when they were left to their own devices,

and they could build a city from scratch,

they didn't let it grow in an ad hoc way.

They structured it in a very methodical way.

It was basically based on military strategy,

military planning.

The Romans, they couldn't have conquered the world without

obviously having a masterful military enterprise,

and everywhere they went on their various campaigns,

their various military campaigns, they would build

camps, and those camps were always

laid out in a very geometric plan,

along a grid, usually square or rectangular.

So when we begin to see the Romans building their ideal

Roman city, they turn to that so-called

castrum, or military camp design,

and they build their cities that way.

And I show you here one example.

We're using Google Earth here again,

another example of, or an example of a city called

Timgad, T-i-m-g-a-d,

which is in modern Algeria, and the ancient city still

survives.

And if we look at this Google Earth image of it,

you can see there are no later accretions,

as we have in Rome, no later civilizations built on

top of it.

You can see the ideal Roman plan, which, as I said,

is usually either a square or a rectangle.

It has in the center the two main streets of the city.

The north-south street is called the cardo,

c-a-r-d-o.

The east-west street is called the decumanus,

d-e-c-u-m-a-n-u-s.

We'll go back to all of this in the future; so you don't have to

worry about it today.

The cardo and the decumanus,

and you can see that they cross exactly;

they intersect exactly at the center of the city.

And then the rest of the city is arranged in blocks,

very regular blocks, this grid plan that I mentioned

before.

Then some of the major monuments, whether it's the

theater or the forum, are arranged in different parts

of the city, and then these blocks

constitute essentially the housing and the shops and so on

and so forth.

This is a city that was planned in around 100 A.D.,

under the emperor Trajan.

And again it gives us an inkling of what the Romans --

when the Romans thought about ideal Roman town planning --

it was this grid plan, not Rome, but this grid plan

that they had very much in mind.

Cities like Rome, like Timgad,

and most of the others that we'll look at in the course of

this semester, were surrounded by defensive

walls.

As a major military machine in its own right,

Rome was only too aware of the dangers of attack from others,

and consequently they walled their cities.

And we will look at the two major walls in Rome,

as well as walls in other parts of the Roman world.

I promise not to spend too much time on walls,

because they're essentially piles of stone.

But they're important in their own right and I will speak to

them on occasion, and especially the two in Rome.

You see them here.

This is the first wall in Rome, the so-called Servian Walls,

which was built in the Republic, in the Roman Republic,

to surround the city, the Republican city,

and essentially the Seven Hills, the famous Seven Hills of

Rome, to surround the Seven Hills of

Rome, in the fourth century B.C.

You see a section of it here.

This wall--any of you who've come to Rome by train,

and the Stazione Termini, see a very extensive section of

the Servian Walls, as you get out--I don't know if

you've noticed it, but you should see--an

extensive section of the Servian Walls right outside the train

station.

This is a different section, a picture I took on the

Aventine Hill, showing part of that wall.

And that was eventually replaced by later walls.

The city grew over time.

It needed a more extensive, broader wall system,

and in the late third century A.D., under the emperor

Aurelian, the famous Aurelian Walls were built.

The Aurelian Walls, as you know -- there's no way

you've missed those -- I'm sure if you've been in Rome

you've seen the Aurelian Walls-- they're there,

they're very much there-- at least if you've left the

city.

Maybe if you've just gone into the core of the city and haven't

gone beyond that, you might not have seen them.

But if you've left the city, you've seen the Aurelian Walls

-- a very impressive set of walls that encircled the later

city.

One thing that's apparent to you as you look at these,

even if you have no knowledge of Roman

architecture, is these are made of very

different kinds of materials.

So technical issues come to the fore right away as one analyzes

this sort of thing.

In the early period, essentially blocks of stone,

piled one on top of the other, for the wall.

Here, a more sophisticated use, later on in the Empire,

of a new technology that we're going to talk about a lot this

semester.

That is concrete, and what concrete did to

revolutionize Roman architecture;

concrete, in this particular case, faced with brick.

We talked about regular town planning and the location of the

cardo and the decumanus.

I want to show you just an example of this.

This is a city in Italy, in this case the city of

Pompeii.

You see it here in plan.

This is a plan of Pompeii as it looked, just at the moment that

Vesuvius erupted.

So in August of 79 A.D.

this was the way Pompeii was at that particular time.

You can see it's not really a rectangle;

it's kind of elongated, sort of like an oval,

kind of an oval, an irregular oval.

But it has the sense; I think it has the sense.

It shows you that again even though the Romans were thinking

to try to create their cities in a very regular way,

it didn't always work out exactly that way,

depending on the terrain and so on and so forth.

But this is a rough--it's sort of an irregular rectangle,

as you can see here.

But if you look very carefully, you sort of say to yourself

like, "Where's the cardo,

where's the dec?

You just told us the cardo and the

decumanus intersect in the center;

like where are they?

Why aren't they intersecting in the center?"

Well, surprise, surprise, maybe not such a

surprise, if you look over here at the bottom left,

you will actually see the original city of Pompeii.

In the fourth century B.C., the third century B.C.,

the second century B.C., Pompeii didn't look like this;

Pompeii looked like this.

And if you look very carefully at just this section,

where we have the buildings in the various colors,

you will see that there is indeed a cardo and a

decumanus that intersect exactly at the center of this

roughly square-- so this was actually pretty

regular originally-- this roughly square city of

Pompeii.

At three we find the forum, because the forum is always at

the intersection.