Ghosts of Buildings Past: Adaptive Reuse in Ancient Rome

Abstract

Practiced to differing degrees, adaptive reuse (conversion of an un(der)used building into one that serves a new purpose) ranges from repurposing materials to transforming entire buildings. Architects involved in such adaptations have to address a building’s essential quality or characteristic features, and may suppress them, acknowledge them, or even emphasize them by retaining traces of past life, and through these ‘ghosts’ host buildings become palimpsests. The adaptive reuse of Roman buildings after antiquity is copiously documented. Still unexplored is the practice of adaptive reuse of Roman public buildings during Roman times, the subject of this paper. After assessing challenges in discerning adaptive reuse, I explore factors that militate for and against the practice, before focusing on two specific instances: the Navalia or shipsheds, which were transformed into a warehouse, and the Saepta or voting enclosure, which became an entertainment venue and then a high-end market.I argue that adaptive reuse could offer advantages over new construction, rooted precisely in the palimpsests that resulted.

Keywords

• Reuse
• Navalia
• Saepta
• adaptive