Skip to main content

Plunder or Proto-ecology



The Colosseum, perhaps the most iconic of Rome's parade of iconic structures, was famously plundered for building material during the Renaissance, serving as a living quarry for marble and travertine in particular. It was stripped down to a third of its original mass during this building boom. The typical response seems to be: "how dare they have plundered this priceless architectural relic!" Sarah, however, turned this attitude on its head, seeing a resonance between the plunder of the Colosseum and present-day Green building practices. One way building projects earn points for LEED Certification, for instance, is to "plunder" preexisting on-site structures as part of the project.

In today's terms, the much-reviled builders and planners of the 1600's were not plundering, but rather were recycling, making use of a decrepit and no-longer-useful structure as a way of cutting costs and conserving resources. Of course, the stakes were much lower at that time, environmentally speaking, with world population less than a tenth of what it is today and climate change, industrialization, and globalization still far off over the horizon. So maybe it's comparing apples and oranges, but I thought it was an perspective on an art historical orthodoxy. Here's some Colosseum images, starting with Thomas Cole's painting (pulled from wikipedia):



And some of my own photos of its interior, the third of which shows some of the different tunnels and architecture below the stadium's floor. These, incidentally, were not used to flood the stadium in order to stage mock-naval battles, but were the holding pens and access tunnels for combatants and animals. The naval battle idea is romantic (in a sick kind of way), but I'm surprised that anyone who had been inside the Colosseum would think it a possibility--the place is much too small, smaller than any professional football or baseball stadium I've been in inside the states, and there's just no room for maneuvers.





The internet is jammed up with romantic evening photos of the Colosseum, but it's a big internet and I'm sure there's room for one more. The folks in charge of lighting this sucker sure know what they're doing:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Be true to your school now!

This is a cross-posting of a comment I left on peacebang.com's recent post about my school, Starr King School for the Ministry. PeaceBang, who is apparently a UU Minister in the Northeast, posted a few days ago an item about my school's supposed "banning" of the term, "brown bag lunch," because of the racialized connotations of brown bags.* Her post was, to my reading, haughty and dismissive, and she seemed awfully pleased with her own wit and ability to take cheap shots at others with little to no basis for her opinions. I think the comments for that post are up to 40, and it's a pretty lively back and forth. So, here is my contribution: "This may not be the ideal forum for “deep, serious conversation,” but one of the cornerstones of Educating to Counter Oppression is the importance of having deep, serious conversations wherever they happen. The status quo of “waiting for the right moment or forum” to engage with these issues too often leads to...
13 comments
Read more

Family and Gender in Ancient Rome

I mentioned below that Prof. Diane Lipsett delivered a wonderful lecture on the conversation currently taking place between New Testament scholars, family historians, social archaeologists and the like. The title of this post is actually the title of en entire semester-long course taught by Prof. Lipsett, so for our, geez, ninety minute session she condensed her focus to Men, Women, and Children in Ancient Rome. With her permission, I am posting my notes from this lecture below, tweaked a little for readability. Prof. Lipsett is interested in studies of gender formation among non-elites as well as elites, those people about whom we know much less because they did not have the resources or clout to commemorate and study themselves, generally speaking. Roman households were much broader than we conceive of in modern terms, with a wide spectrum of people connected by family and employment living under one roof (the terms domus/eikos/ikea capture this idea of an indiscriminate household...
Post a Comment
Read more

Suspicious? What month is it?

So I had a great post written on questions of agency and identity as explored through Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men and High Fidelity (I focussed more on the film by Stephen Frears than on the original Nick Hornby book), and it mysteriously disappeared. I, of course, blame the government . The crux of my post was that letting outside events and relationships with other people shape your life is fundamentally selfish , and that each of us bears responsibility for claiming our own agency . One of my favorite lines from Richard Linklater's Waking Life is an offhanded remark by a passerby , late in the movie, who tells the nameless protagonist (played by Wiley Wiggins ) "As the pattern becomes more complex , it is no longer sufficient to be swept along," or something like the same. The patterns are becoming more complex, and we face peril if we are satisfied with passivity. But, like I said, that post got erased, so here's a BMW z3 Coupe, ...
4 comments
Read more