Republican Roman Construction - Page 2
The image below shows part of the colonnaded
walk enclosing the peristyle garden of a house in Pompeii. The remains of a
fresco, an art medium composed of wet plaster and paint, is visible on the wall
behind the columns.
House
walls were plastered and painted with decorative panels, scenes from mythology
or from daily life. Exteriors, and walls of the less wealthy, might be bright
solid colors—often an ocher
yellow—or marked and painted
to resemble stone. Columns of stone, wood, or intricately shaped bricks, plastered
and painted to look like stone, supported the roof. The roof beams were generally
of wood, though stone might be used as well for short spans. Both Etruscans
and Romans used the arch and the vault, though the possibilities opened up by
arch construction were not fully explored until later. Wealthy homes might also
boast of an interior garden, the peristyle garden, centered by a fountain and
surrounded by a colonnade, columns supporting the roof of a covered walkway.
Lead gutters and pipes channeled rainwater from the roof into storage for the
household.
Terra cotta, the familiar baked red clay
of modern flower pots, was used extensively by the Etruscans for roof tiles,
column capitals, decorative friezes around the tops of buildings, statues, pots
and other household uses. The Romans preferred stone or marble for most structural
and decorative uses, copying the Greeks, but must have appreciated the way terra
cotta remains impervious to weather —unlike
the soft volcanic stone of the area around Rome—and
continue to use it for roof tiles to this day. Roman roofs were made of overlapping
tiles: tegulae, flat, basically rectangular ones with flanges along
the sides, and imbrices, half-tubes to cap the space over the flanges.
Fittings for the corners and edges of the roof, to direct rainwater and for
decoration, were also of terra cotta, often molded as fantastic or grotesque
faces.
Doors and window shutters from Republican Rome were
generally of wood, though they might be reinforced with iron. Ironwork gates
and grills provided security. Evidence of paneled and louvered designs similar
to what we use today have been discovered in Pompeii. A noticeable difference
was in placement. The Roman domus opened inward. The front entrance was often
the only entrance to the house, although there might be an additional service
gate to a back alley. Wide doorways with draperies and folding doors of louvered
panels opened the dining rooms and other public areas to the atrium or peristyle
garden. No windows opened onto the street at all.
The closest thing to a modern window in urban houses
was an occasional opening, often covered by a grillwork of wood or iron, probably
just to let in light. Windows might also be covered with translucent materials
such as oiled sheepskin or thin sheets of mica or gypsum. By the time of Augustus,
the Phoenicians had learned to blow glass, and to create sheets of it clear
enough for windows. The Romans, true to their common practice of adopting anything
from other cultures that made for a better quality of life, soon were adding
glazed windows to their houses.
The urban domus might include shops opening onto
the street. Ruins show channels in the door frames and sills of these shops
that apparently held the ends of a door that may have pulled down something
like the cover of a roll-top desk or a modern garage door. These were surely
made of wooden boards, but historians don't know how they were held together—with
canvas, leather, or iron rings, perhaps.
Multi-story apartment houses, insulae or “islands,” were home to urban Romans who couldn't afford their own
domus. The ground floor was generally set aside for shops or other commercial
use. The next floors might have two or four “luxury” apartments, with
the density increasing and the apartment size decreasing on upper floors. Before
the days of elevators, there was no such thing as a “penthouse.” We
don´t know the height of the tallest Roman insula, but Augustus limited
the height of insulae in Rome to 70 ft. and a later emperor to 60, so seven
or eight stories may have been relatively common. Writers of the Republican
period complained of the dangers to inhabitants of the insulae, that they often
burned or collapsed, killing those who lived there. The remains discovered
seem
to be of sturdy, well-constructed buildings, but that may be because the worst
ones had all been replaced in ancient times.
If we visited one of these ancient apartment houses,
in addition to the obvious differences, like no electricity and no bathrooms
on upper floors, we might notice the lack of hallways. A great deal of space
was used up by multiple stairways serving only apartments directly above one
another. The rooms within an apartment opened directly into each other, so that
if there were multiple bedrooms one might have to walk through one to get to
another.
The walls of buildings in the ancient Mediterranean
world were generally brick or masonry rather than wood. They were thick by modern
standards, often one and a half to two feet in buildings of only two stories,
and thicker in proportion for taller buildings. Modern buildings, even those
that appear to be of stone, are supported by frameworks of steel if they reach
great heights. The Washington Monument, in Washington D.C., is the tallest modern
building constructed entirely of stone and its walls are 15 ft. thick at the
base to support its 555.5 ft. height.
The Greeks built their walls of
stone blocks cut and trimmed into equal rectangles. The wall looked much
like a modern brick
wall built with the joints between the bricks alternating in each layer. Greek
walls were two blocks wide, with occasional blocks or courses laid crosswise
to bind the two rows together. Romans sometimes built in this “Greek fashion,” called opus quadratum.
For buildings of heroic size the
Romans sometimes built with huge blocks of volcanic tufa. Tufa is relatively
porous and lightweight
for stone, but the blocks still weighed many tons. Early builders may have
used ramps of sand or earth, as is speculated for the Egyptians. But Vitruvius
describes
several machines for lifting and placing stones of great weight, ropes and
pulleys supported by cranes and frames of poles. Rather than use lime mortar,
which
dried out and cracked when used with porous stone, the Romans precisely cut
and fit the stones together and held them together with clamps of bronze
or
iron. Today we see these walls as massive pockmarked ruins, their “clothing” of marble and metal clamps pillaged by the builders of the Renaissance, who
used the ancient buildings of Rome as their "quarry."
Instead of a solid wall of bricks
or stone blocks, a Roman wall more often had facings of brick or stone, a
cavity in the center
filled with rubble and mortar or packed clay, and a coating of plaster. Roman
bricks were large and flat by modern standards, approximately eight by eighteen
by one and one-half inches. Common brick was mud-brick, and even if it was
cured
the recommended two years before being used, it was sensitive to moisture and
weathering. This, and the fact that the stone available around Rome was a
relatively
soft material, volcanic tufa or limestone, surely led to the practice of plastering
walls inside and out. Fired, or "burnt" brick was also used for construction,
as was recycled terra cotta roof tile. Vitruvius reports that only burnt
brick
could be used for new construction of insulae in Rome during his time, as common
brick, or mud brick, walls needed to be thicker than regulations allowed.
Perhaps
that is why the ruins of the relatively newer insulae at Ostia survived into
modern times.
Stone walls or facings might also be made of trimmed
rectangular stones of irregular sizes, opus incertum. The stones could
not be laid in straight courses, but when carefully fitted together with some
stones extending deep into the wall or even through to the other side, this
pattern made for a very strong wall. These patterns of construction depended
on lime mortar to hold the elements together.
Next
page of this article
Buildings of Artificial Stone
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Judith Geary lives in Boone, NC where she is variously a writer, editor and adjunct faculty member at Appalachian State University. She also is editor at High Country Publishers, Ltd.
© Judith Geary 2000
Images © Judith Geary, Irene Hahn (1)
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