Styles and Movements
Roman Architecture
Ancient
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The architecture of the Roman world, which took the Greek orders and joined them to the arch, the vault, the dome and concrete, making possible interior spaces and engineering works Greece never attempted: the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the great baths, aqueducts and basilicas. Roman building set the structural vocabulary Europe drew on for the next fifteen centuries. Its own tradition begins with the founding of the Roman Republic in 509 BC and runs to about the 4th century AD, after which building in the former Roman world is reclassified as Late Antique or Byzantine architecture.
Facts
Disputed
PeriodCentury-level approximation only, no exact year is given: sources place the close around the 4th century AD, after which building in the former Roman world is reclassified as Late Antique or Byzantine architecture. The tradition's own beginning, 509 BC, the founding of the Roman Republic, is carried in the entity's prose description rather than forced into a start-year column. Origin RegionItaly and the Roman Empire 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Roman builders were the first to exploit concrete structurally at scale, which is what let them span and vault spaces the trabeated Greek system could not.
Influenced
Byzantine building practice grew directly out of late Roman construction, keeping Roman concrete and brick technique while developing the dome-on-pendentive system further.
A deliberate revival, guided by surviving monuments and the text of Vitruvius.
Influenced By
Rome took the Greek orders and joined them to its own structural inventions.
Notable Examples
Sources
1. Encyclopedia Britannica
2. Wikipedia
Wikimedia Foundationen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_architecture, lead paragraphQuote, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_architecture, lead paragraph
Roman architecture covers the period from the establishment of the Roman Republic in 509 BC to about the 4th century AD, after which it becomes reclassified as Late Antique or Byzantine architecture.
2. Wikipedia
2. Wikipedia
Sir Banister Fletcher's A History of Architecture
Banister Fletcher, edited by Dan Cruickshank (20th edition), Architectural Press, 1996Associated With: Concrete, General history, Roman construction chapter, on concrete
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