Abstract
Without the benefit of cognitive or evolutionary theory, late Roman villa patrons and designers intuited their way toward houses that engaged and strongly affected the emotions of inhabitants and visitor participants. Through the lens of their unique cultural moment, they discovered and deployed strategies that respond to certain innate and universal human needs. These were the aspects of a formal language of design that arose from a competitive ‘architectural arms race’ among a newly minted elite in the era of the late empire, which left a heritage that echoes through the history of architecture. Through the application of methods in cognitive science we can recover some of those strategies and understand their effects with a new specificity. Cognitive science confirms, continues, and elucidates earlier discoveries in phenomenology and psychology, placing the embodied and active human agent into the center of the experience of ancient architecture.
Highlights
Roman villas of the elite in the late Roman empire, from approximately the 3rd to 5th centuries AD, comprise one of the largest and richest bodies of material culture of the era
The ideology of the Roman villa centered around its provision of a setting for otium, or educated leisure, in the countryside, but always in relation to the city, and incorporating ‘public’ activities revolving around patrocinium, or the face-to-face patronclient relationship that was central to Roman civic life
The room, with its curving stibadum and fountain-pool, opened at the front to provide diners with views onto a light-filled exterior scene in the peristyle and beyond, combining a sense of refuge with a wide prospect in what seems a most satisfactory way. This discussion has touched on only a small selection of the ongoing discoveries in the emerging field of cognitive science and the environment, in seeking to address some issues in the innovative and spectacular architecture of the late Roman villa phenomenon, from a perspective that departs from the traditional causal narrative
Summary
Without the benefit of cognitive or evolutionary theory, late Roman villa patrons and designers intuited their way toward houses that engaged and strongly affected the emotions of inhabitants and visitor participants. Through the lens of their unique cultural moment, they discovered and deployed strategies that respond to certain innate and universal human needs. These were the aspects of a formal language of design that arose from a competitive ‘architectural arms race’ among a newly minted elite in the era of the late empire, which left a heritage that echoes through the history of architecture. If you look at the Baths of Caracalla ... We all know that we can bathe just as well under an 8-foot ceiling as we can under a 150-foot ceiling ... — Louis Khan on the Baths of Caracalla at Rome (Kahn 1960: 150) If you look at the Baths of Caracalla ... we all know that we can bathe just as well under an 8-foot ceiling as we can under a 150-foot ceiling ... but I believe there’s something about a 150-foot ceiling that makes a man a different kind of man. — Louis Khan on the Baths of Caracalla at Rome (Kahn 1960: 150)
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