Water and Architecture: The Integration of the Binary
Emily Feicht
Oral Session 2 S
In “Water and Architecture: The Integration of the Binary,” this paper reviews the binaries of Roman architecture and their relationship to water. The facilitation of architecture is not without cultural influence both before and after construction. The paper looks at Hadrian’s Villa in
Tivoli, Italy, and specifically the Maritime Theater, during Imperial Rome. While scholarship is provided on spaces and scholar’s interpretations of binaries have been researched in other spaces, little has been found for a transparent and multipurpose space such as this. Therefore, in this paper, I research the concrete evidence of the Villa itself in the time of imperial Rome, while comparing this to research written about Hadrian and other Roman villas. In addition, this paper aims to draw connections to evidence we can infer about the Maritime Theater, through other architectural contexts that involve water, such as bathhouses and a fountain villa, and fusing them with gender theory in antiquity.