We are so used to the megastructures of the 21st century, to the skyscrapers of dozens of levels, to impressive works of engineering, and yet sometimes just walking into a building that was built two thousand years ago can make our jaws drop, for that's what the Pantheon does. The most famous, the most dramatic, the most important of all Roman temples is the Pantheon, it has that huge inscription on the frieze, the empty pediment, that perfectly ordinary colonnade in front, and that characteristic shape of all Roman temples, That is the first thing you notice about the building and it was the first thing that the ancient Romans also noticed, which made them believe that when they entered, they were entering a conventional temple like the other temples in their city, but once they entered through the enormous bronze doors they were amazed. The exterior of the building was designed to prepare you for something as different as possible from the interior and when you came in, you entered a space that was simply overwhelming. In the front we have sixteen huge columns in one piece, something unusual since they were generally made of several pieces, these were granite brought from Egypt, they were necessary to support the enormous weight of the pediment of this temple. The double pediment is due to the fact that the columns were originally going to be taller but they had problems transporting them and they put the current ones of forty-four Roman feet in height. The reconstruction that we have of the image that there was is generally that of a crowned eagle that was a sacred symbol for the Romans, the eagle associated with the god Jupiter, and the crown with the deified emperors, so this is no coincidence. If we go a little deeper we can see how massive these columns are and the space of the pronaos, which by itself could be a temple. The pronaos is the portico of ancient temples. On the ceiling we see this wooden structure with marble beams and arches, when reading old descriptions of this work we discover that this wooden structure was originally made of solid bronze . In the 17th century it was replaced with wood to use bronze to make the canopy for St. Peter's Basilica. To understand the shape of the pantheon we must know that it takes two different types of temples and transforms them, looking at the plan of the pantheon you can really realize how much you can manipulate the thickness of the wall all these small subtracted spaces are niches in the wall that they make It is possible to have altars or statues and this is necessary because the architectural program of the pantheon is different from that of most temples. In Greek "pan" means everything and "theion" means god that is to say "pantheon" all the gods. So, if a typical temple needs to have an altar for a god, the pantheon the temple of all gods needs to have many altars, or at least it needs to somehow symbolize this connection with the cosmos in a more inclusive way than a temple. typical and does this in a number of ways. First it is important to talk about these niches, when we talk about vaults we talk about these arches that push the loads to the sides and that is why they require a thick wall to contain the weight, the Pantheon complies with this because it is a super thick wall But what happens when you start carving these niches inside the wall? Doesn't it make the wall stiff? In your desire to create spaces, are the altars of the gods compromising the stability of their structure? What it does is crenel the surface, something similar to what corrugated cardboard does. Corrugated cardboard is very rigid because the curvature of its surface makes it reinforce, the curvature of the geometry becomes part of the structure. The stone columns are not that useful here because if you push a column, it fails, but the arches are much more stable because they distribute the loads to the sides. So, by cutting arc-shaped niches it becomes a kind of corrugated, and even inside the wall where we cannot even see, they also left cavities to take advantage of this notion that certain geometries can improve the rigidity of the structure. So the pantheon is kind of a hybrid, and if you compare it to something like the temple of Fortuna Virilis you can see the ways it can be hybrid. Fortuna Virilis is about a single thing, you can see the cella surrounded by a wall and the columns that create a portico and it is frontal so, how does the pantheon have these forms? Well, it has the porch and it has the Cella, but it is putting together two very different conditions and it brings them together in a way that it doesn't even try to hide, what's more, it is putting together three different conditions: here is the front of the building, it is the same as the Fortuna Virilis temple only bigger, here is a large rectangular block that is about this great mass of material that is put in to allow these two irreconcilable geometries to be together, and then you go in and you have this giant space with a dome. When you think of the pantheon or any building, and you try to do an analysis of the building, try to look for the strangest parts, your analysis becomes better when you focus on these parts. If you were doing an essay on the Pantheon and you said "it's all about a circle" that's boring, you wouldn't have observed enough, but something about the union of these three elements, the temple, the huge stone block, and the cylinder , it becomes very interesting. Pantheon, the temple of all the gods ... This is the urban planning diagram of the Romans and when you see the dome of the pantheon it seems that you see this image represented, and this has a double meaning, in plan we see the circle but we also have the circle in section, the space of the pantheon is spherical and in the upper part we have an oculus that means eye. The oculus is inspiring, it is the only light that enters the pantheon in addition to the one that enters through the door, it rains through it, and the water evaporates through it but it is one of the characteristics that the pantheon has, that experience of connection with nature. And maybe you will say how is it possible to put a hole in the center of the dome? That this would not destabilize the structure of the dome? but the logic of building a dome, and you can see this kind of stepping here, it has to do with hoop stacking and compression, it's how to build an arch but sideways, so, each of these stone hoops becomes in stabilizing car, they lock together, gravity holds them together, and you can see more or less how they work because they are much thicker in the part where the dome begins and as they get closer to the oculus everything becomes thinner, and if the architects They would have liked to continue building, they probably could have, but it was not necessary because it is stable that way, and the oculus is the source of light. The idea that it is a circle or rather that it is a spherical space is full of meaning, because the Romans took a lot from the culture and philosophy of the ancient Greeks, and this is probably why the Romans were so successful in their conquests of unknown lands because they gave the people drinking water, bridges, and roads, and because they allowed cultures to continue their traditions, and they took the best aspects of those traditions, and with the Greeks they took a lot of their architecture and of his philosophy. In the cosmology of the Greeks described by Plato in one of his books called Timaeus, the cosmos is spherical, the heavens are spherical, different geometric figures adhere very closely to different important elements, the Earth is rectilinear, it is square, the cosmos is a circle, and putting these two irreconcilable geometries together makes the reconciliation of the Earth with Heaven visible in a certain way, and when you are inside this space looking up at the great circle of light that comes from the oculus, this notion of connection with the sky becomes subjectively something you can experience. It is as if there were another axis introduced into space, not only the x axis or the y axis, but a vertical axis, an axis towards the sky and that axis towards the sky is called "axis mundi" the axis of the world, and this obsession by the circles with the squares it is not only in the volume of the space but also in the pavement, in the coffered ceilings, and in the marble of the walls. The elaboration and articulation of the pantheon dome seems to be cheating in terms of its thickness and in terms of the presence of material, you would think that you might want to have this as thick as possible because then it would be more solid, but in reality it What you want is to have the least weight possible because that way the thrust of the weight is less for the walls. So one of the design tasks is to reduce the weight of the dome, and to reduce the weight without reducing its rigidity, the caissons are made, geometries that, like corrugated cardboard, stiffen the structure, and as the dome becomes thinner as raise the caissons, they also get smaller little by little and this gives the illusion that the dome is even higher than it really is, because this element that you think is only one size continues to reappear and shrink like the perspective So it's a very smart building. What made this building possible was of course the use of concrete that was invented by the Romans, and not only that, but also the use of many types and many diverse mixtures of this concrete, the engineering was brilliant making the weight of the concrete itself it will go down as the height rises based on the aggregate of the mix that decreases as the building rises. The bronze doors are original from the Roman period , they are very large and allow us to begin to see the interior polychrome of the pantheon, and from the moment we enter we can already perceive the volume and space of the Pantheon, you immediately realize that the building is not static in the absolute but dynamic, it is full of movement especially because everything that lines up on the walls, that is, the niches, the columns, the windows, does not line up at all with the coffers of the dome, this creates the feeling that the dome is a completely independent element from the drum on which it rests, and creates a sensation of movement. Most of the interior marble is original, as are the approximately ten meter high columns . Each of the niches had a statue of a god and that large niche at the end is where the emperor Hadrian would have received people, so, in addition to a divine temple, the Pantheon had public meetings in which the emperor spoke with the people. Always when entering the Pantheon you will find the light of the oculus hitting a different point, but during the year and key dates in which you will find the sunlight hitting certain specific parts, for example, on the longest day of the year, the The oculus will be projected exactly in the center of the ground, there are also other dates such as April 21, the anniversary day of Rome, just the door of the pantheon is the one that receives the projection of the oculus, so you receive it when you enter. Here is an example of the light hitting on the longest day of the year, June 21, where you can see the intensity of the light hitting the pavement while the rest is dark, a unique experience that you can see on some days of the year you can have a great appreciation of the colors that tell us something, purple was the color of royalty because it is the most expensive pigment of all and reaffirms the divine status of the emperor. In the dome we can see the coffered ceilings, which are actually covered with modern stucco, but under the stucco there are holes in the center of each cofferdam that indicates that each one had a rosette or a bronze panel, it is not known exactly. It is amazing that the interior ornamentation of the Pantheon is only a fraction of what it was in ancient times. On each side of the access door there is a large niche, Agrippa, the original architect wanted to put inside a statue of the current Emperor Augustus, but Augustus did not feel worthy to be inside, so Agrippa decides to put a statue of himself The same, and one of Augustus in the exterior niches of the temple this felt because if you turn to the other side out of the pantheon you would be seeing the entrance to the mausoleum of Augustus, eight hundred meters to the north , where he would be buried when he died. This is the inscription that recognizes the original architect: MARCVS AGRIPPA LVCII FILIVS CONSUL TERTIVM FECIT, Marco Agrippa, son of Lucio and did so during his third consul. Actually the Pantheon of Agrippa was destroyed twice and the one we know today was built by the emperor Hadrian in the year 125. This is a model of how the Pantheon would have been in Roman times, there would be a square in front and behind It would have been very tight, very dense, because a characteristic of Roman urban space is the figurative space, in ancient Greece, the buildings were the figures in space, while in Rome it is the space that the buildings form, so, Even when you have something like a cylindrical building that stands out loudly on its figure, you think that it must be completely impossible not to see a building like that when walking through the city, the fact is that it was all very tight and the things that you clearly experienced as shapes were the openings, that is, the squares, the small courtyards, the forums in front of the buildings, this is the Roman space. On the day of Pentecost it is a Roman tradition to throw rose petals through the oculus of the Pantheon a visually extraordinary experience, in the year 608, Emperor Phocas declared the Roman Pantheon as a Christian church, and since then it has been the most visited site in Italy. The Pantheon was copied in the Renaissance and the Baroque, and in almost every Neoclassical building, including the Pantheon is perhaps the most influential building in history, both Renaissance and modern, if you think of all the modern architects who take this building as a reference. you will realize that the influence of the Pantheon is everywhere. Thanks for watching the video until the end, I hope you have learned something, if you liked it, give it a like and subscribe to see more videos like this one, don't forget to follow me on Facebook and Instagram, until next time!
