trajan’s column on architectural materiality: between trajan’s column and trajan’s hollow michael j. waters
pocket landscapes: trajan’s monument to poché
hidden trajan 119
trajan’s progeny the wayward cast: gipsotecas, digital imprints, and the productive lapse of fidelity
a set of directions for the reader: 185 steps michael
trajan’s hollow 1:10 marble in the 21st-century 197
scaling trajan’s hollow the agency of scale: employing scale shift as a design strategy 225 trajan’s hollow 1.5 plaster: of paris to rome (and back)
Foreword: Reproducing Monuments
david gissen
Joshua Stein’s Trajan’s Hollow joins the numerous reproductions of Trajan’s Column that collectively shape the meaning of the original monument in Rome. It is a volatile and germane time to think about reproductions and monuments. In the past twenty years, discussions of “digital” reproductions both extended and transformed historic ideas regarding how mechanical reproductions provided ways to access, understand, and preserve monuments. The most recent discussions of reproductions emphasize how both mechanical and digital reproductions are slowly transforming the meaning of monuments—in often profound ways. This brief essay considers some of these insights and how Joshua’s project relates to them.
One hundred and ten years ago the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl defined monuments as those enduring witnesses of time that become monuments due to their “age-value” or “artistic value.” The former term describes artifacts that become admired, and ultimately preserved, by the simple fact that they represent a particular time, while the latter term describes artifacts that represent a particular form of artistry or point of view. The terms are not mutually exclusive.Whether admired for artistry or historical legibility, monuments, in Riegl’s definition, endure in place, but their surroundings transform. Riegl’s definition of the monument emerged from his work in documenting the historic monuments of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It remains an early and useful definition of the monument with broad influence in subsequent preservation and heritage documents. One first identifies those works of historic or artistic value and then documents them through reproduction processes.
While Riegl’s definition of the monument remains sensible, other qualities might be ascribed to monuments that upend relations between monuments and their documentation. Are monuments first recognized for their historical and artistic contributions and then reproduced so that these qualities can be admired? Or, as Jean Baudrillard, Bruno Latour, Thordis Arrhenius and Jorge Otero-Pailos suggest, are artifacts reproduced in such a way and in such quantities that they become
Introduction
joshua g. stein
This book is the result of seven years spent processing a rare twentyfive-minute visit to a historical monument constructed nearly 2 ,000 years ago, from materials formed twenty-five million years before that. What can be learned today from a storied Roman monument that has been obsessively documented over the course of two millennia? Trajan’s Column, one of the great masterworks of Roman antiquity, has been examined scrupulously by historians and archaeologists, and admired by tourists and Romans alike. Despite its prominence within academic discourse and its monumental stature within the city, few would use the word “architectural” to describe the Column; few even realize the monument is habitable. But I was to discover that this hollow cylinder, with its internal spiral staircase, shapes a nuanced interior experience, unknown (or unappreciated) by most. Trajan’s Hollow uncovers aspects of the Column that have been neglected amidst all the historiographical attention focused on the monument. In so doing, it reveals the lacunae in many of the dominant paradigms of historical inquiry. By temporarily turning away from the abstract geometries, proportional exercises, and visual outlines that so often define our study of the ancient world, this research proposes to map the surfaces and mine the interiors of these monuments, revealing patterns and particularities that might otherwise be written off as anomalies or mistakes. In a contemporary culture increasingly inundated with knock-offs, contested samples, remixed and rehashed styles and forms, this project seeks to establish a methodology for the transformational use of our inherited patrimony through playful yet rigorous documentation, modification, and recontextualization.
Trajan’s Hollow has one straightforward objective: to physically reconstitute all aspects of Trajan’s Column that have been hidden, forgotten, or excised from public view, collective memory, or public record. This simple goal becomes complicated by the thorny challenge of defining exactly what constitutes Trajan’s Column in the first place. Next follows the task of identifying the best method to document that which is missing. As an object of study, this monument was selected precisely because of the many complexities it reveals, thus demanding more
piranesi, “view of the front of trajan’s column,” plate iii, 1774–75
g.b.
On Architectural Materiality: Between Trajan’s Column
and Trajan’s Hollow
michael j. waters
There has been a recent obsession with materiality in architecture.Why have architects begun to think once again about the potency of matter as a bearer of meaning? After all, descriptions of buildings have for over 2 ,000 years focused primarily on materials. There is no singular answer, but it is certainly part of a broader societal trend, one that may be partially a reactionary movement to the Digital Revolution, just as the Arts and Crafts movement was to the Industrial Revolution, or even an outcome of the rising problem of ecological scarcity.Yet within the architectural discourse, many have suggested it is a response to the removal of materials from the conceptual process of architectural signification with the rise of Modernism. While early 20 th-century architects celebrated the arrival of an array of new materials, many of which they claimed dictated form, architecture increasingly moved toward abstraction. At the same time architects fetishized individual materials (glass, steel, concrete, and even marble), many moved towards an architecture in which meaning was located in the abstract, geometrically pure design.Yet the marginalization of materiality in architecture is by no means purely the consequence of Modernist dogma or Deconstructivist manifestos. It was in the Renaissance that the humanist Leon Battista Alberti first theorized an architecture fully formed and perfected in the mind, which was only later realized in and corrupted by physical materials. In his conception of design, form and materials were conceived of separately and independently. While this hylomorphic dichotomy was supported by Aristotelian natural philosophy, in terms of architectural practice, the concept that materials were irrelevant to design and subservient to form was completely new with little basis in contemporary practice.The separation of architecture from its inherent material essence thus has its origin in the 15 th-century. That said, it has been only more recently that this concept has begun to significantly shape architectural production. This divide between form and material did not exist in antiquity. Design in the ancient world, while grounded in theoretical concerns and architectural norms, was both a physical and mental activity. It moreover was directly linked to the material process of construction.
embrasure and texture within a column window at the juncture between two drums
Could Apollodorus of Damascus have anticipated this transference of material from the outside to the interior? The Romans knew about the deposits created by calcium-rich water and designed their aqueducts with maintenance walkways that allowed the periodical removal of this build-up. While historians have spent centuries debating the idealized systems of geometry developed by the ancients, could we not learn an equal amount about issues beyond proportion and composition? How might one develop drainage systems that anticipate the slow erosion of our buildings? How could a building operate as a vessel for its own dissolution?
diagram of column exterior eroding into its interior superimposed over g.b. piranesi's, “vertical section of trajan's column" (detail), plate iv, 1774–75
Over the centuries, the Column has become the container for its own dissolution.
Rome
1861–62
Unravelled
Narrative
American Academy in Rome
Rome 2010–2011
Horizontal
Cross-Section
Museo della
Civilita Romana
The Wayward Cast:
Gipsotecas, Digital Imprints, and the Productive Loss of Fidelity
joshua g. stein
The speed with which imitations can now be produced (sometimes appearing even before their “originals” 1 ) may soon render direct mimicry obsolete or simply uninteresting. In his account of the loss of aura,Walter Benjamin notes the discrepancy between the time-intensive methods of manual reproduction versus those by machine: the quickness of the eye replaces the labor of the hand.2 But while speed may be a primary factor in this transformation, materiality is equally at play. An investigation into the traditions and techniques of physical transference of qualities from model to copy may offer a more “productive” form of reproduction than the visual imitation—one that offers new perspective on the original while escaping the tyranny of its likeness. Rapid advances in digital scanning and surveying technology in archaeology, historical preservation, and geomatics offer means of reproducing formal information that are no longer tied to the visual, our primary mode of reproduction. Architecture will need to quickly redefine its default methods of historical analysis and its role in contemporary design.
The production of copies was not always understood to be an act of forgery. Ancient Rome’s ability to borrow from other cultures is well-known, including the assimilation and translation of Greek and Etruscan tropes and forms by Roman artists and architects. But there existed a parallel tradition—the less intellectualized process of analog reproduction that yielded duplicates of the past initially intended more as documentation than inspired variation patterned on historical models. This included a respected craft tradition in the creation of plaster casts, objects that for several centuries were highly regarded and collected. Although currently these reproductions tend to be associated more with artisanal or archaeological traditions than fine art, they offer another paradigm by which we might understand a contemporary possibility for the copy.
trajan’s hollow 1:10
marble in the 21st-century
Trajan’s Hollow 1:10 attempts to embody the language of marbleworking into an object many times smaller than the original Column and the enormous quarry blocks of Carrara. To do so, this miniature reconstruction began by first reversing the process of the original’s material journey, traveling backwards from Rome to the source of the marble in the quarries near modern-day Carrara.
Trajan, along with many of the ancient Roman builders, had a predilection for Luna marble, preferred because of the proximity of the quarry to the sea, which ensured easy access from Rome by boat.
Luna marble, along with the marble from nearby modern quarries of Carrara, is located in the Apuan Alps between Liguria and Tuscany. These mountains, formed during the Triassic, are an older, geological appendage to the Apennines. The famous stone here was developed approximately twenty-five million years ago when high pressure metamorphosed limestone of the Apuan Alps into marble.
While “Carrara” is usually used to describe the marble itself, there exists a network of specialized towns in the region, centered around the processing and transportation hub of Carrara. Much of the industrialized cutting operations associated with the marble used for construction and commercial purposes takes place in the city of Carrara, located between the mountains and the Ligurian Sea. The quarries themselves are located farther east in the mountains, while other towns in the alluvial plains such as Pietrasanta specialize in the sculptural marble-working craftsmanship of the marmistas, or marble carvers.
stagetti marble studio in pietrasanta
The Agency of Scale: Employing Scalar Shift as a Design Strategy
joshua g. stein
The ability to enlarge form took a momentous leap in the digital era. A host of software modeling packages gained popularity in the 1990 s, fundamentally altering architecture’s relationship to scale and object-hood. The virtual modeling space of digital software, removed from the material constraints of the physical world, has effectively created an a-scalar environment in which dimensional specificity is completely fluid and temporarily fictional.This digital scalelessness offers the potent capability to move effortlessly from the small to the big and back again—as long as one remains in this virtual space. However, this newfound facility within this a-scalar design environment has also eroded an important disciplinary expertise in scale and its effects in architectural design. Current advances in technology demand a reconsideration of these techniques and their design potential.
Throughout history artists, craftspeople, and designers have continually been compelled to make things bigger—or, more precisely, to produce copies of objects they find in the world or create themselves at a scale different from the original artifact. A clever artisan might make a small-scale version of a proposed project to visualize form or composition before expending the labor and materials necessary to produce the “real thing.” But not all enlargements are created equally. The primary challenge is to develop amplification techniques that maintain greater precision than pictorial approximation or gestural “eyeballing.” Contemporary techniques of digital scanning and reproduction now allow us to move beyond a simple visual enlargement and instead integrate the less predictable influences of texture, materiality, and tooling into the process.
The history of inventions aimed at reproducing two-dimensional sketches and three-dimensional maquettes into much larger tableaus and sculptures stretches back at least 5 ,000 years. Squaring, employed by the Egyptians, involved the use of a grid mapped out on a smaller object to then guide the transfer of shapes to the same grid expanded to a larger scale. More mechanized methods would follow starting in the Renaissance. With the pantograph, invented in 1603 , artists could
