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16.2 Civic Architecture in Ostia
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From the course by Yale University
Roman Architecture
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From the lesson
The Roman Way of Life and Death at Ostia, The Port of Rome
Tour of Ostia, characterized by multi-storied residential buildings and widespread use of brick-faced concrete. The city's public face features the Forum, Capitolium, Theater, and Piazzale delle Corporazioni with its black-and-white mosaic shipping company advertisements. The Insula of Diana, a four-floor brick apartment building, and warehouses like the Horrea Epagathiana highlight the Ostian appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of exposed brick facing.
Meet the Instructors
Diana E.E. KleinerDunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University
History Of Art
Here I remind you again of the original plan that we looked at, the plan from the
mid-fourth century BC, 350 BC, from Ward-Perkins, that
shows you the original costrum of the first colony.
This rectangular space, very regular, with it's own wall surrounding the city.
With the cardo, the north south street, and the decumanus, the east west street,
intersecting exactly tt the center of that city.
And then at that intersection as was Roman
practice, the placement of the forum of the city.
A great open rectangular space with the temple pushed up against the back wall.
In this case a Temple of Jupiter, a Capitolium dominating the space in
front of it and then other buildings around it as you can see.
Although there's a striking
difference between this forum and the forum that we saw
at Pompeii, because you'll remember at Pompeii the various major
buildings, the Basilica, the Temple of Apollo and so on
sort of radiating out from the central core of the forum.
We don't see that here.
We see the buildings sort of placed separately
from that main forum space, but in every other
respect very similar to the general plan of these early Roman cities.
What's also useful about this particular plan is the fact, that it shows
you the way though, as time went by and as the city grew,
it shows you the way in which the cardo and the decumanus were
extended and then the other buildings of the city were added here and there.
A number of baths, lots of private residences.
This is a
particularly important building here at 15 and 16, which we'll look at today.
The 15 is the theater and 16 is the so-called Piazza of the corporations,
the Piazzale delle Corporazioni which is very significant and we'll look at
that soon. If you go and visit the city of Ostia
today and enter at the ticket booth what
you see, almost immediately, is again a
polygonal masonry street very, looking very much
like Pompeii but once again there are no stepping stones in Ostia unlike Pompeii.
Which is, which the plot thickens there in terms of why we
see those in Pompeii and don't seem to see them anywhere else.
You walk along that polygonal masonry street, pavement and you see
both the remains up here in the upper left of the original republican city wall.
And it should bring back memories of opus quadratum [LAUGH] or
ashlar masonry that we saw at the beginning of the semester.
You can see it's consistent with the age in which it was built in the republic.
But then over here as you make your way along one of the main, on
the, one of the main streets you see what is characteristic of Ostia as a whole.
And that is concrete construction, brick-based concrete
construction, both for the residences and also for
the public buildings and also for the
religious structures, namely the temples in this city.
The reason for this of course takes us back to
the Neronian period, the fact of the great fire of 64.
When it was realized, you'll remember the Sebora
which was located back beyond the precinct walls
of the forum of Augustus.
The area where the working poor of Rome lived, primarily
in rickety apartment houses that were made out of wood.
Multistoried houses, those were actually multistoried but
they were always going up in flames.
And there was a recognition after the great destruction of the
fire of 64 that the Romans needed to fireproof their buildings.
And so they beg-, and so they recognized the fact that brick is better at,
at protecting the structure from fire than stone is and they,
and stone can burn and they actually began to, as we know,
we've talked about this before, they began to build their houses
and many of their civic structures out of concrete faced with brick.
And we see that development especially well here in Ostia.
And Ostia is extremely important for us also because many of, many comparable
buildings that were put up in the city of Rome itself no longer survive.
The same apartment houses that we're going to see in Ostia did exist in Rome.
We have some remains of them.
There's a very prominent one at the base of the Capitoline Hill, to
the left of the hill as you, as you climb up that hill.
But we have very little evidence for this in Rome, and so we
have to rely on Ostia to give us the best picture of apartment
building in Rome, in Roman architecture in the second century AD.
Here is a, a spectacular view of Ostia as it looks today from the air.
And we are obviously looking down on the forum.
On the great, open rectangular space of the forum with columns a, around it.
We are looking also at the Capitolium at the
temple of Jupiter, which is a very large structure,
as you can see here, made out of concrete faced with brick.
It is a typical Roman temple, unlike Hadrian's temple
of Venus in Roma because we see that it has
a facade orientation, it has a single staircase, it
has a deep porch, free standing columns in that porch.
So a typical Roman structure and it's a typical Roman temple and then you can
also see its vast scale.
There are a couple of people standing here who look miniscule
in relationship to this building and only part of the building.
In fact, full height of the building is not even preserved here.
So, it was even larger still than what you see.
The reason for its size is twofold: one, because we have already
seen that this taste for larger and larger buildings has really taken off.
We saw it in Hadrian's Forum in Rome.
We saw it in Domitian's Palace on the Palatine Hill.
We saw it in Hadrian's villa at Tivoli and in
the Pantheon, the largest span, the largest dome ever built.
So this taste for, for largeness, grandiosity
in architecture has really taken off, so it's
not surprising to see this capitolium, which was
built in the Hadrianic period, specifically 120 A.D.,
also being large in scale.
But there's a second and perhaps even more important reason.
And that is in a city in which all of the, most of the houses are
what are called insulae, -a in the singular,
-ae in the plural, Insulae multistoried apartment buildings.
Often of as many as five stories.
If you want your capitolium to stand out in that city and be
seen up above those apartment houses, you've gotta build it very high.
And that is undoubtedly the reason that they, one of the
two reasons, the more important reason, that they had built this
temple so large, and especially so tall, so that you could
see the temple of Jupiter from everywhere in the city of Ostia.
Here's a view of the temple as it looks today in isolation.
Again, only part of
its height preserved.
But enough for us to get a very good sense of it's concrete construction brick facing
here and as I've already described the single
staircase columns in the porch and so on.
I mentioned already that it was under Augustus that a theater
and an entertainment district was added to the city of Ostia.
And it, it that building, you see the remains of it
here along one of the major streets of the city of Austia.
It was renovated in around 200 A.D., that is in
the early part of the third century A.D., so considerably later.
It was expanded to be able to hold 200, 2,500 spectators at that particular point.
And much of the concrete and brick-faced construction belongs to that renovation.
One can't imagine a built in quite like this in the age of Augustus.
So what you're seeing here is primarily the restored view.
The restored version of this building.
But what you can see that does at least link it
back to the Augustan period is the fact that the design
of the facade is very similar to the
design of the Theatre of Marcellus in Rome.
With the, with the arches and the in this case pilasters between them.
That same general scheme that we saw
for theater and for amphitheater architecture used here.
The main difference of course is the fact that we have concrete
construction with brick facing rather than
concrete construction with stone facing travertine
in the case of the Theater of Marcellus.
I haven't yet shown you a Roman latrine,
but today is the day for the Roman latrine.
we, and, but you have to imagine of course,
that in any major public building, like a theater where
you're going to have a lot of people there at
the same time, you have to provide a public latrine.
And when I say a public la-, latrine, I really mean a public latrine.
There was no privacy, as you can see, in this latrine whatsoever.
What it, what it is, what it is composed of, as you can see, is a bench that lines
the walls with a series of holes in it
and then just one single drain that encircles the buildings.
So this gives you an idea of where you had to go if
you needed to go during intermission, if
you were attending the theater, the theater
in Ostia.
One of the most important buildings in
Ostia is, is, is connected to this theater.
I'm showing you now the plan of the theater, which
corresponds to theaters that we've looked at throughout the semester.
Typical Roman plan.
It has a semi circular orchestra.
It has a stage building or scaenae frons here.
It has a
semi circular cavea. The seats which are which are,
which are placed on top of, of course, in this case, a concrete foundation.
this, like other Roman Roman theaters is an urban phenomenon.
There was no hill to build this on, so the Romans have to build,
the Ostians had to build their own hill out of concrete, and then support the
cavea on top of that, but the cavea is made of stone seats.
They use stone for the seats, as is traditional in Roman theater architecture.
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