CONF: Digitizing Imperial Rome

“Digitizing Imperial Rome: A computerized Approach to the
Architectural History of the Roman Imperial Forum”

Professor Emeritus James Packer, Northwestern University.
King’s Anatomy Theatre Lecture Hall, King’s College London, The
Strand, London. UK
29th of October 2010, commencing at 6 PM.
There will be a reception afterwards at the adjacent Old Anatomy Museum.

ABSTRACT
Although each year millions of people visit the Roman Forum – the
center of Rome’s former remarkable empire – they find only one or two
partially preserved structures and piles of architectural fragments.
Most of the ancient buildings, apart from the few converted into
churches, collapsed after centuries of neglect, leaving their remains
to be quarried by later generations. The details of the individual
buildings are still not widely understood, and the Forum has never
been studied as a unified architectural composition. Moreover, owing
to new archaeological studies and advances in computer technology in
the last fifteen years, it is now possible both to reconstruct the
Forum’s monuments accurately and, with these new reconstructions, to
comprehend the design and meaning of the whole site. These
considerations led my colleague, Professor and Architect Gilbert
Gorski, and me to undertake our new, digitally based study of the
Forum.

Our work clarifies the design of the buildings around the Forum’s
central core. It collects, for the first time in English; the most
important material related each of the major monuments and shows
visually their structure, size and original appearance. Over a period
of nearly forty years (29 B.C. – A.D. 10), Augustus rebuilt the site,
and thereafter, in material, size structure and decoration, its
buildings related clearly to one another. Together they impressively
represented the power and prestige both of Augustus own regime and
that of the Mediterranean Empire it governed.

With some missteps (the short-lived colossal equestrian state of
Domitian, the unfortunately situated, enormous, gaudy Arch of
Severus), later emperors carefully maintained Augustus’ design and
structures, even as they rebuilt many of the monuments after
disastrous fires. The late third century A.D. additions of Diocletian
maintained this tradition but added a fashionable, new architectural
framework that expressed that emperor’s optimistic hopes for the
future of his recently reassembled Empire. Only the end of Rome as an
imperial capital doomed the site to neglect, ruin, transformation and,
from the 18th century on, to the investigations of modern excavators.