Aesthetics and Function of Roman Commercial Buildings in the North-Western Provinces
Building on the results of the first funding phase, the project will investigate whether and in what way the aestheticization of economic spaces as seen in Italy and Greece was taken up and changed in the Roman north-western provinces. Under Roman rule from the Caesarean, and especially from the Augustan period, numerous forts and towns were built in present-day Germany, France, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The newly constructed buildings were based on models from the Mediterranean, but rarely copied them. Instead, the buildings were adapted to suit their own social, functional and artistic needs. The newly founded settlements included various commercial buildings, such as the forum with basilica and tabernae, macella and horrea. In some places, they feature elaborately designed floors, painted or stuccoed walls and ceilings, richly decorated building ornamentation as well as inscriptions and statues. It can be assumed that they have their own specific aesthetic, which can be understood, for example, through divergent materials and colors. This unique aesthetic sets them apart from other functional buildings in the same city, but also differs from comparable buildings in other regions in terms of building materials, building tradition and motifs. The research project thus examines the commercial buildings of the north-western provinces for their underlying, unique aesthetics and their transfer and transformation processes as well as the associated actors and contexts of action.
