LITMIR.BIZ

      The aqueduct in Segovia, Spain, constructed during the 1st century AD, snakes through the town, its conduit supported on increasingly tall tiers of arches as the ground level falls away.

      Roman architecture, at its best combining sublime beauty with function, often played a vital role in consolidating and spreading Roman power and maintaining its civilization. This fascinating combination of characteristics is perhaps best expressed by the bridges and aqueducts that Rome created throughout its empire. Their roles as routes of communication and the means of supply were of vital importance to the well-being of the Roman world. Aqueducts brought a plentiful supply of water – essential for the Roman concept of civilized life – and roads transported goods and luxuries over great distances, allowed wealth creation through trade, and security through speedy troop movements. In addition to being functional objects, bridges and aqueducts were also intended, in their design and solidity, to express Rome’s cultural aspirations and the longevity of its vision. Together, these intentions produced structures of intense beauty – a beauty that comes from the pure and powerful realization of functional demands and of the way in which the potential of available building material can be enhanced through design.

      A remarkably large number of Roman bridges survive, in whole or in part, still fulfilling their original function within the former empire. They continue to astonish, inspire and delight, through their scale, fitness for purpose and often daunting engineering boldness. But there are four Roman bridges that haunt my imagination. They epitomize Roman engineering genius, in which sublime and utterly moving beauty is achieved by the almost ruthless observance of function. They are the essence of engineering, and also the essence of architecture at its best. There is little about their design and construction that is superfluous to function or to pertinent meaning. Their stones carry messages, about the power of engineered structure and about the seemingly eternal power of Rome. In all these bridges each detail possesses an intensity of meaning and beauty: even those that appear ornamental are in fact calculated to add extra cultural or spiritual significance, raising purely utilitarian design into the poetic realm of architecture.

      All of these structures lie outside of Italy. Two of them, the Pont du Gard in southern France near Nîmes and the aqueduct of Segovia in Spain, carried the very life-blood of Roman civilization: abundant water. The others, the Alcántara Bridge over the River Tagus in Spain, and the Pont Flavien, in Saint-Chamas, Bouches-du-Rhône, France, seem to have served a largely military, strategic and triumphal purpose marking the omnipotent presence and power of Rome. But each one, in its solidity and scale, seems to have been built in defiance of nature. And yet this is not quite so, for it is the essential paradox of engineering that the violence of the forces of nature can only be withstood by man-made structures that fully utilize the forces of nature. The fact that these structures survive after 2,000 years or so – with all significant damage being the work of man and not natural forces – demonstrates most succinctly how well these Roman engineers understood their work.

      The Pont du Gard is a stupendous aqueduct located about 29 kilometres north of Nîmes. As its name suggests, it spans a valley through which the river Gard winds. It forms part of a conduit constructed to carry the waters of the Alzon some 50 kilometres to Nîmes and, rather appealingly, no one is absolutely sure of its date. The current consensus of opinion is that the aqueduct was started by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, the brother-in-law of Emperor Augustus in about 18 BC and that the Pont du Gard itself is around 2,000 years old, although some argue that it dates from the mid first century AD. But what is more certain is that the Pont du Gard is one of the most moving and awe-inspiring structures to survive from the ancient world. The first glimpse you get of it is a virtual assault on the senses: its scale is majestic, its form intensely pleasing and it soon becomes clear that most of the architectural details that it sports are not merely ornamental but are expressions of the means of construction.