The imperial vastness of late Roman architecture was made possible by the invention of concrete.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Architecture is invention.
The Romans were not inventors of the supporting arch, but its extended use in vaults and intersecting barrel shapes and domes is theirs.
There is no reason to design buildings that are more basic and rectilinear, because with concrete you can cover almost any space.
I remember, as a young architect, people always talked about I. M. Pei's concrete. He had a particular specification no one else knew.
I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.
I hope you will understand that architecture has nothing to do with the inventions of forms. It is not a playground for children, young or old. Architecture is the real battleground of the spirit.
Roman civilization had achieved, within the bounds of its technology, relatively as great a mastery of time and space as we have achieved today.
Reinforced concrete buildings are by nature skeletal buildings. No noodles nor armoured turrets. A construction of girders that carry the weight, and walls that carry no weight. That is to say, buildings consisting of skin and bones.
At the Museum of Roman Art, the logic of the forms is very much modern. But in spite of that, the idea of the construction could be related to a historical time.
It is not architectural achievement that makes the structures of earlier times seem to us so full of significance but the circumstance that antique temples, Roman basilicas, and even the cathedrals of the Middle Ages are not the works of single personalities but creations of entire epochs.
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