Working title: “Pluritemporal Cityscapes: Late Republican and Imperial Perspectives on Architectural Time Layers in Rome”
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Mischa Meier, Prof. Dr. Richard Posamentir
A city is constantly changing the way it looks. Architecture is planned, completed, destroyed, reconstructed, rebuilt, and built over. Building projects are realised but also modified, abandoned, or never started. As a result, the current appearance of a city is only a snapshot and one possibility among many. Architecture that is visible at one time can be invisible at other times – and vice versa. However, the knowing observer is aware of some of these invisible buildings and therefore includes, based on his own present, architecture from the past, future, and ‘other’ city in his cityscape. He not only looks at the city as it is but also as it was, will be, could have been, and could be. In his imagination, the architecture of several time layers overlaps and forms a pluritemporal cityscape.
In my dissertation, I examine this temporal multilayeredness of cityscapes in ancient Rome. The focus is on the authors of the late Republic to the middle Imperial period (from Cicero to Juvenal) since during this period a fundamental political and urban transformation took place in Rome which also affected how the architectural time relations and the pluritemporality of the city were perceived and described.
From a cultural-historical perspective, the following questions are explored: when and why did ancient authors write about architecture beyond the current city? How did they describe the architecture of different time layers and relate them to each other? Which interrelations existed between these cityscapes and the time concepts, the particular contexts of the authors, and contemporary developments and discourses? Based on a broad collection of material, selected descriptions are first examined in case studies and then analysed, compared, classified, and interpreted. For the investigation of architectural time layers and time relations, a new model will be developed and applied, which can also be transferred to other cities and epochs in subsequent studies.
This study aims to show that architecture was able to develop a great impact in discourses beyond the currently built, that the city of Rome was perceived and described by the ancient authors as temporally multi-layered, and that these multi-temporal cityscapes and time concepts emerged in contemporary contexts and in turn had an impact on them. In this way, this project aims to open up an innovative perspective on the ways of thinking and patterns of interpretation in late Republican and Imperial Rome and highlight the cultural-historical potential of investigating ancient concepts of time.
