Insula
Insula , Latin for island , is a modern archaeological name for blocks of houses in mostly rectangular cities in antiquity, especially in Roman cities . In a narrower sense, it refers to ancient Roman multi-storey apartment buildings that were inhabited by one or more parties. Sascha Priester demonstrated in his research on urban Roman insualae that the Latin term insula is found in some inscriptions in combination with a personal name that is used in the genitive or in adjectival form. This is obviously an indication of the original owner, e.g. in the case of the insula Bolani , the insula Eucarpiana or the famous insula Felicula listed in the registers of regions in late antiquity . Over the centuries, from the Republic to late antiquity, the term insula did not always stand for the specific architecture of a residential building, but was also the name for land itself or for income from rented property. It is noticeable that in antiquity there was no binding Latin term for the construction type of a multi-storey building block with residential units.
History of the building type
The so-called insulae - apartment buildings with up to five or six storeys - were mainly to be found in larger or rapidly growing cities, as the space within the city walls was limited. Even cities that did not have city walls (such as Rome in the Prinzipat) had to grow in height rather than in area, as there was no fast means of transport available.
The existing literary sources for Stadtrom show that there were multi-story buildings with residential units there as early as the late Republic; the skyscrapers were therefore not a purely imperial phenomenon. The archaeological findings that are only partially available in Rome begin mainly in the Flavian period and mostly document the structural condition of the 2nd / 3rd centuries. Century. This gap between the literary sources and the archaeological findings makes it difficult to get an idea of the developments and the typological changes in these buildings. The buildings still preserved in Rome (e.g. the Aracoeli Insula , the so-called Insulae on Via del Corso or the so-called Southeast Insula in the area of today's Stazione Termini) reflect a high standard of living, which apparently also for architectural monumentalization of certain zones. These buildings represent a type of housing that is heterogeneous in detail, but also very flexible overall, the architecture of which often met the needs of changing owners and residents as well as changing usage situations as business and living space over a long period of time. In contrast, the poorly built high-rise buildings, in which the tenants were exposed to considerable loss of comfort and often life-threatening security risks, are only documented in literature.
Design
Shops ( tabernae ) were often found on the ground floor, and tenants' apartments ( cenacula ) on the floors above . The more spacious and better equipped apartments were on the first or second floor (see, for example, the high-quality and stable Aracoeli insula on the slope of the Capitol Hill in Rome or in the Casa dei Dipinti and the Domus di Giove e Ganimede in Ostia ). There was comfort here, several rooms, balconies, running water and toilets. The apartments on the upper floors became increasingly smaller, worse and cheaper.
The insulae were mostly built from air-dried bricks, which soaked themselves in floods and collapsed. This was not possible with fired bricks, but these were more complex to manufacture and therefore more expensive. Even the quality of the air-dried bricks must have been very poor, because normally they shouldn't disintegrate after a flood. In the more expensive houses with fired bricks, these were often used as wall shells, between which Opus caementicium , a type of ancient concrete made of sand, lime water and coarse or fine gravel, was poured. Wood was used for the foundations, floor and ceiling structures, the roof structure, the stairwells, the balconies (if there were any), the shutters and the doors.
The insulae had only an inadequate fresh water supply, if at all, and even this only on the first floor. The tenants on the upper floors used public toilets and bathhouses. This led to serious diseases in the cities, especially after the 1st century AD.
Building regulations
Ancient authors mentioned state measures against the frequent fires and house collapses in the city: Augustus introduced a height limit of 21 m for the insulae . This ordinance was evidently not obeyed, because after the fire in AD 64 during the reign of Emperor Nero , laws were passed limiting the height to 21 m and placing a 3 m distance between buildings. The law also stipulated that the facades of buildings that were next to each other had flat roof extensions to make the work of the fire fighters easier. The less durable and unstable mud brick was replaced by clad cast masonry when building these tall apartment buildings. But the violations of the building regulations did not let up and eventually forced Trajan to limit the height of the insulae to 18 m. In the event of a fire, the narrow streets made it difficult to escape.
Consequences of compaction
During the imperial era , over a million people lived in a confined space in the city of Rome. Housing was scarce and expensive. So the idea was obvious to build on high. In the apartment blocks, many people could live in little space on 6 to 7 floors. Saving space was very important, so the foundation walls could not be thicker than half a meter, which was relatively little for such tall buildings. Despite the tiny apartments in the insulae, more living space was needed, which led to more wooden crates being built on the roofs. This construction method and the narrow streets often led to fires that destroyed entire districts. The rental apartments were often in poor condition, as the landlords refused to have the damage repaired. As a result of poor construction, cracks formed in the walls, which meant that the apartments were always drafty and water penetrated when it rained. This could also lead to limescale peeling and mold formation.
Strabon reported on house breakdowns that did not result from poor quality of the house, but from the landlord's interest in selling, who could earn significantly more money by building luxurious atrium houses on his property.
see also: Roman House
literature
- Peter Connolly, Hazel Dodge: The Ancient City. Life in Athens and Rome. Könemann Verlag, Cologne 1998, ISBN 3-8290-1104-0 .
- Wolfram Hoepfner, Ernst-Ludwig Schwandner: House and City in Classical Greece. 2., revised. Ed. Living in the classical polis . Vol. 1. Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-422-06024-3 .
- Alexander G. McKay: Roman houses, mansions and palaces. Atlantis, Luzern 1980, ISBN 3-7611-0585-1 . Pp. 76-94.
- Sascha Priest: Ad summas tegulas. Investigations on multi-storey building blocks with residential units and insulae in imperial Rome. Verlag L'Erma Di Bretschneider, 2002 (dissertation)
Web links
Remarks
- ↑ Sascha Priest: Ad summas tegulas. Investigations on multi-storey building blocks with residential units and insulae in imperial Rome. Verlag L'Erma Di Bretschneider, 2002, p. 25 ff.
- ↑ Priest: Ad summas tegulas , p. 196
- ↑ Priest: Ad summas tegulas , p. 234
- ↑ Priest: Ad summas tegulas, p. 47 ff.
- ↑ Priest: Ad summas tegulas , pp. 214 ff.
- ↑ Strabo 5,3,7.
- ↑ Seneca, De Consolatione ad Marciam 22, 3; De Beneficiis 6, 6, 2; Letters , 10; Controversiae 2, 1, 11; De Ira 3, 35, 4-5; De Tranquillitate Animi 11, 7
- ↑ Sextus Aurelius Victor Epitome 27.
- ↑ Mentioned by McKay: Römische Häuser , p. 231, who does not name any ancient sources