Between Aesthetics and Investment. Close-Reading the Tuff Façades of Pompeii

Pompeii, VI 12, 1-3.5.7-8: Façade - Overview of the façade of the House of the Faun with the main entrance (roofed) surrounded by shops (Photo: Miko Flohr [2013])

Flohr, M. (2022). ‘Between aesthetics and investment. Close-reading the tuff façades of Pompeii’, in M. Trümper and D. Maschek (eds), Architecture and the Ancient Economy. Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 155–172 (you can buy the volume here).

Why did Pompeians suddenly - in the mid second century BCE - start building houses with façades of finely polished tufa ashlar?  his chapter offers a reassessment of the economic rationale underlying the transformation of building practice in mid-second century BCE Pompeii, when local traditional building practice based on carefully stacked blocks of travertine was replaced by a much more varied building practice that combined mortar with a number of regional building materials, including tuff ashlar. The chapter observes that the new practice partially started from aesthetic considerations, but emerged with a clear economic rationale that both minimized costs and anticipated upon return on investment. Putting these developments in a broader Italic context suggests that the emerging building practice was facilitated by the unique local material circumstances at Pompeii: the developments in building technology were to a large extent local in nature, and should be seen as independent of architectural change. This, in turn, transforms our understanding of technological development in building practice in late Hellenistic Italy. 

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