Having toured all the streets blocked by the construction of the new, unified monument of the forum, it becomes possible to recognize a consistent pattern of the incorporation of these streets within the infrastructure of the renovated forum (Table 10.1). Certain elements are repeated again and again, giving insight into the designers’ intent. Thus, in four of the six affected streets, a monumental building intrudes upon the space of the street, occupying the area of one sidewalk but leaving the surface of the street intact. Moreover, while half of these streets dead end at the forum, allowing limited access for vehicles, the other half has no connection at all to the transport network. Of these later streets, all were intruded upon by monumental buildings and this isolation highlights the fact that their survival as “streets” was due to a pre-existing capacity to function as drainages for the new constructs.
The chronology of the repurposing of these streets is also instructive (Table 10.1). Although known in earlier periods, in nearly every instance it is a construction from the final redesign that completely bars the use of the street as means of vehicular access to the forum, either as a dead end or a restriction still farther away. The remaining entrances (at the forum’s northeast and northwest corners) still force carts to dead-end at the forum even as they facilitate and emphasize pedestrian movement. Conversely, in nearly every instance it is at this same time that the use of the street as a conduit for excess water is accentuated. Moreover, the simultaneity of this transformation is mirrored and complemented by its geographical extent: in every quarter of the forum the provision for drainage of the new constructions was made using the surface of the very streets those constructions suppressed. This solution is so consistent in form, chronology, and extent that it can be categorized as an “infrastructural style” or “type” and given a name: ‘suppressed street drainages’.
The consistency of this response demonstrates how seriously the designers of the forum considered the practical consequences of their monumental constructions and how uniform were their responses to the intertwined infrastructural and ornamental problems they faced. In unifying the fafades of the forum, a design element, which Dobbins (2007, 170—171; figs.12, 16) termed the “fafade wedge”, was repeatedly applied to the pre-existing architecture to conceal the misalignments between the open, rectangular area of the forum and the buildings that surrounded it. Like the suppressed street drainage, the fafade wedge was a solution known to Pompeii’s architects from early on, but it is in the final decades that its is applied programmatically. Thus, on the west side of the forum, the archaic orientation of the Sanctuary of the Temple of Apollo is masked by a series of piers that grow wider from south to north. Less dramatic is the associated adjustment of the Basilica’s porch. Both of the west side fafade wedges are from the period of the colony and are connected by the span across Via Marina. On the east side, the post-earthquake(s) frontages on the Eumachia building and the Macellum widen from south to north, adjusting the interface between the forum colonnade and the interior of these buildings (Dobbins 2007, 171).
These fafade wedges were an important modular component of the larger architectural plan for the monumental reconstructions throughout the forum. By incorporating the pre-existing architecture, fafade wedges fit the goals of a new design without needless destruction and rebuilding. At the same time, however, by blocking access to the forum and disrupting schemes of drainage, these design elements created the need for an equally consistent infrastructural response. This infrastructural response was the suppressed street drainage. Its use is even directly connected to the fafade wedges that linked the east side of the forum, as these wedges suppress access to the forum from the Vicolo del Balcone pensile and Vicolo degli Scheletri. Like the fafade wedge, the suppressed street drainage as a modular element of practical planning incorporates pre-existing constructions (the surface of the streets) and modifies their role without dramatically transforming their form. This architectural slight-of-hand changed the role of the streets around the forum from being primarily access routes into what were, essentially, large gutters. Moreover, the impact of sealing off the forum was anticipated from the inception of the new forum program, and the planning for the mitigation of its effects (suppressed street drainages) was integrated with the means of that blockage (linked fafades and fafade wedges).
The value of this infrastructural design element as a tool for the Pompeian city planners becomes even clearer when it can be seen employed in other places in the city and at the same time. The Central Baths of Pompeii occupied all of insula IX 6 and intruded upon the Vicolo di Tesmo, which bordered it to the east, in a manner nearly identical to construction of the eastern sanctuary wall of the Temple of Venus. Once again, the sidewalk and a portion of the street was sacrificed, which narrowed the street beyond use for wheeled (but not pedestrian) traffic (Laurence 1994, 105), causing a number of repercussions throughout the city. Again, as at the Temple of Venus, the removed paving stones still remain inside the Central Bath’s eastern wall, just meters away from their original placement. That the purpose of maintaining the surface of Vicolo di Tesmo was to serve the needs of drainage is supported not only by the fact that the majority of the bath’s roofed area is in the east, but also that the drain for the baths was constructed to empty onto this street (NSc 1878, 110-111; Mau 1899, 204; Fagan 1999, 219: fig. 17; De Haan and Wallat 2008).
World History
