The Origin of the Modern Apartment [The Roman Insulae]

Justin Fye

ARCH 10111

 Spring 2011

Professor Robison

5 April 2011

The Origin of the Modern Apartment

In the Roman world most everything occurred within the city limits. Therefore, urban living became an essential component of city planning because of the need for architects to determine where to place all of the citizens. This problem was solved with the implementation of insulae. Insulae are loosely defined to be any entity which could have been divided into cenacula, or apartments.[1] The insulae, in general, housed primarily the lower classes of citizens, providing them with living quarters and shops to display their goods in. The most, well preserved of the remaining insulae in Rome today are located in the ancient cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Ostia, where they “can be safely traced back to the third century B.C.E.”[2] Insulae have also been well documented by older finds such as the houses in Via della Fontana and Villa de Dipinti, where many important discoveries were made.[3] Archaeologists and art and architectural historians have scoured these areas, digging up evidence of what imperial Rome must have been like, and formulating ideas of how their society must have been run. Based upon their evidence, scholars today have a well constructed image of Imperial Rome and the corresponding structures built there. What is of particular concern to this paper is the structure and formatting of these insulae, what structures they were influenced by, and how they have influenced similar structures after their time.

It has been recognized by many scholars that for any precise and accurate evaluation of urban living conditions and dwellings in Rome, a careful review and investigation of the Ostian evidence is needed.[4] This is quite interesting because Ostia was not actually part of the Roman Empire, however, its city models those of Roman precedent very closely, and therefore it is a reliable source for evidence. The Ostian apartment house seems to have been developed from four different types of urban house types. These include the atrium house without shops, the atrium house with shops, the independent shop row, and the dwelling and shop combination with a manufacturing area.[5]  Based upon the insulae found in Ostia, four different categories of apartment houses were created as well.

The four categories of insulae deviate most drastically by what was located on the first floor, and relate to the types of urban buildings which they were influenced by. According to Packer, the ground floor of the Type I insulae consisted merely of the shop, accompanied by either its loft and/or backroom for sleeping quarters, relating it to the atrium house with shops.[6] These shops were mostly individual chambers which served as both work rooms and living quarters, however, a small number of them were two room apartments. Type II insulae had apartments which occupied the ground floor, and did not have shops, relating it to the atrium house without shops.[7] This type of insulae is the form which most closely resembles modern apartments. In the third type of insulae, the ground floors were entirely devoted to sizeable industrial establishments, such as factories, and the apartments were located on the above floors, relating it to the dwelling and shop combination with a manufacturing area.[8] Finally, the fourth type of insulae is known as the multiple dwelling insulae with courts. In this format, a combination of some variation of the first three types of insulae was employed, accompanied by courts intended to provide light and air for surrounding buildings.[9] Some formalities were set up for this type, however. When the apartments had more than one story, the second floor was sometimes reached by a separate stair opening, reached directly from the street. Also, in houses where the upper floor was reached not from the street, but from the central hall or from a side corridor, the upstairs rooms had secondary importance. These rooms were for the poorer citizens and were small, meanly decorated, and quite dark.[10] Consequently, this insulae style relates to a combination of the aforementioned urban building types which set precedents for the apartments as well.

 As a general rule, the floors located above the ground floor did not deviate much from building to building. Typically, the second floor was composed of two separate rooms, one on either side of the stairs, and three apartments, each with two rooms. From there, the third and fourth floors were each divided in to two to three room apartments, or six individual rooms rented out separately.[11] This layout allowed for the type of occupation which was necessary in the Roman cities to house the amount of working class citizens present there. The above information explains how the insulae came to exist, through influence from the shop and domus urban buildings, and also how the floors of these apartment buildings were divided up by their uses and different types.

With the insulae, a new style of Roman apartment was developed. The apartment portions of the insulae were composed of combination of three different rooms. The main room of the apartment was the medianum, which was a centrally located, hall-like room designed to provide access to all other rooms.[12] This room was extremely important as it served as a common room for all of the bedrooms and the living room. It was characteristic of the apartments to entirely lack kitchens, or a room similar to that of a modern kitchen, and thus eating was done in the medianum as well.[13] According to Mr. Hermansen, “the mediana were large, pleasant rooms with lots of air and light, in comparison with the darkened rooms behind them, and, therefore, it is natural to expect that much of the family’s activities took place there.[14] With the aforementioned idea in mind, scholars are able to formulate a minimal pattern of life which occurred within the walls of the insulae. It can be hypothesized that in the daytime the center of activity in the apartment was the medianum, while at night the family retired to the inner rooms. These inner rooms included the exedra, which was a small living room, as well as the cubiculum which were the bedrooms. Within the cubiculum, there were two beds, each of which was placed along one of the walls end to end, and there was often a statue placed in the bedroom.[15] This provided the maximum possible space inside these small rooms, while providing a sense of either ancestral or religious pride through the presence of the statue. It is noted by Mr. Hermansen that cubicula are often mentioned by scholars as being, “among the rooms where privacy was respected.”[16] This helps to support the forming of the pattern of life mentioned above because this sort of privacy would have been wanted in the evening hours. Also, as far as the layout of the apartment rooms is concerned, it was typical that the series of rooms were grouped on the three sides of the medianum which faced the street or inner courtyard. The two rooms located at opposite sides of that central room were usually larger in comparison to other rooms in the insulae, and one of them, in particular, was more luxurious in size and decoration.[17] The idea of luxury in the insulae apartment buildings is quite interesting, because it conveys just how important perfection and quality was to the architects and designers of Roman constructs. Even though these apartment buildings were constructed for the poorer, less influential members of Roman society, they were still provided with some aspects of luxury and grandeur.

The standardized architectural elements of the insulae are the next important aspects of the buildings which must be addressed. The insulae were built in accordance to the available land within the city limits. As a result of this, on average, the residential block size which was utilized for the construction of the insulae buildings was only approximately two hundred and twenty square meters of land.[18] Because of the limited amount of ground area available for residential structures in the urban regions of the Roman Empire, architects recognized early on the necessity to build upward in levels, as opposed to outward in dimension. Structurally the insulae were originally constructed of timber and mud brick[19]. However, after learning of their vulnerability to catching fire and collapsing, architects began constructing the insulae of pozzolana, a hydraulic cement which was discovered by the Romans and is still used in some countries, which is made by grinding pozzolana with powdered hydrated lime.[20] This pozzolana was then faced with brick for aesthetic appeal. The outward appearance of the facades created by the opus quadratum brick facing was remarkably uniform among all insulae of the latter construction method. Ornamentation of entrances was also quite common among the insulae, and this was done by placing pilasters on either side of the entrance way and decorating a pediment above the entrance.[21] These seemingly simple ornamentation details gave the urban insulae an appealing aesthetic, which helped them to blend with the surrounding buildings.

Internally, door and window elements were uniform as well. As far as doors are concerned, the shop doors were always separate and differentiable from all other doors of the insulae, and “rhythmic rows of shop doors extended along nearly every public way, giving architectural unity to the buildings on each side.”[22] Doors and windows were also both standardized in shape and, usually, in placement, and windows were structurally similar to doors.[23] These standardized elements of the Roman insulae seem to have been helpful in a multitude of ways. They allowed for unified aesthetics, providing simplicity in architectural design, the mass production of doors and windows, because they were standardized in shape, and uniformity in construction, as each building was customarily a reproduction of the one prior to it.

Some architectural elements were also present in all insulae, but were not standardized in their design and placement. These elements included stairs and balconies. Which stair plan was used in a given building was determined by the amount of space which was available, as well as the budget under which the structure was being built.[24] The type of stair plan used was simply a resultant of working within the available boundaries, both spatially and economically. On the contrary, balcony types were chosen simply by the necessary positioning. As a general rule, balconies opened off of the third floor of the insulae apartment rooms, and were supported by a row of groin vaults below which were sometimes structurally needed, and sometimes merely for decorative aesthetics.[25] All of the architectural elements discussed above proved to be crucial to the design and development of the Insulae.

Most importantly of all the aspects of the Roman insulae, however, is what future buildings and concepts it influenced. Simply on a Roman level, the insulae influenced the architecture of the late domus.  After the year A.D. 300, the medianum, which was the new element present in the design of the insulae, made itself known in the new type of domus. One example of this is the Domus di Amore e Psiche, where there is a medianum stretched in front of three rooms, similarly to the set up of the apartments, “where at the far end the stateroom of the house was located and outside the medianum was the nymphaem garden.”[26] It is seen that from the year three hundred and forward, most of the features of the old fashioned atrium domus had been abandoned.

In a much broader sense, however, the Roman insulae, dating back to around the third century B.C.E., has played a major role in influencing modern structures such as low income urban housing and modern apartments and condominiums. According to Mr. Carcopino, “the insulae combined a number of cenacula, that is to say, distinct and separate dwellings like our ‘flats’ and ‘apartments,’ consisting of rooms not assigned in advance to any particular function.”[27] He also mentions that the plan of each story was to be nearly identical to the floors above and below it.[28]This type of architectural formatting can be seen readily in modern apartments and condominiums. Apartments and condominiums, in general, are buildings with stacked floors which enclose a large number of rooms, with each floor simply replicating the floor plan of that which is below. In addition these building are used to house a large number of people at a relatively low cost of living. The insulae also set a rather important precedent in the architectural world by not only housing the large number of people resulting from the Roman Empire’s ever growing population, but also by developing a way to do so in the vertical direction.[29] The domus, the first inner city structure to house citizens in the Roman world, was built only to have a ground floor. By designing the insulae, a greater number of citizens could be housed, while using less ground area, an idea crucial to city planning still used today.

Although the Roman apartments achieved a number or great feats, some of the aspects of the insulae were not necessarily ideal. The apartment buildings acquired a bad reputation for being overcrowded and unsafe, although there appears to be some variation in their quality from building to building. Also, the upper stories lacked heating and running water and apartments only occasionally had lavatories. According to Adkins, even later insulae, such as ones at Ostia, “may not have been much of an improvement for the tenants, as these same qualities seem to be inherently present in the later Ostian reproductions.”[30] Even with these less than perfect living conditions, in the 4^th century at Rome, insulae outnumbered the Domus type of house by more than twenty five to one and Insulae continued to be the main type of housing for the majority of the population in some of the larger cities, such as Pompeii and Herculaneum, until the end of the empire.[31]

As has been discussed, the importance of the insulae to Roman culture as a whole cannot be understated. Vastly influenced by the early domi, the insulae developed into urban residential structures used to house the ever growing population of the Roman Empire. These buildings set precedents in many ways. This includes the idea of constructing vertically in height, in opposition to horizontally in ground area, as well as duplicating the layout of floor plans successively while rising. With those two ideas in mind it can be realized how the insulae of Imperial Rome have influenced the modern architectural design of apartments and condominiums. Also, with the invention and consequent inclusion of the medianum, the newly designed room element in the insulae, a pattern of design can be noticed between the Roman insulae and the late domi of Ostia. Thus, the legacy of the Roman insulae has lived on and will continue to, as a resultant of its influential elements present in the building of modern architecture, mainly multiple inhabitance residential and urban spaces.

Annotated Bibliography

Adkins, Lesley and Roy A.. Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome. New York City, New York: Facts On File, 1994.

This book source was useful for finding out what the earlier insulae were constructed out of and some of the major problems and concerns the architects had to deal with. This source also looked at some of the negative connotations which came to be associated with the insulae, and told of the less than perfect living conditions the poorer urban residents of Roman cities had to deal with. Overall, this source was useful and the section on insulae is a recommended read for anyone interested in learning about or researching the Roman apartment.

Carcopino, Jerome. Daily Life in Ancient Rome. Henry T. Rowell. New Haven and London: New Haven and London Yale University Press, 1969.

This book source was useful in relating the work of the Ancient Roman’s to modern apartments, displaying their setting of precedent and influence on modern architecture. This proved to be useful, as showing the influences of a particular structure was part of the requirements for this paper. This is another source I would highly recommend, as it is well written, and although a little dated, still provides insight into modern architecture.

Claridge, Amanda. Rome. Barry Cunliffe. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 1998.

This source provided excellent visual insight into the apartment buildings of Rome, something every other source lacked. This source included multiple plan drawings, as well as a section, both which I used to construct the sections included within this paper. Although I did not use any of the text as reference for this paper, I would recommend the images.

Harsh, Philip. "The Origins of the "Insulae" at Ostia, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome". 12. (1935), 7-66, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4238581. (accessed April 3, 2011).

This source was a scholarly article which set up the idea of using Ostia as a lucrative means for research, because the city was modeled after the ancient cities of the Roman Empire. For this paper, the article did not offer much more insight into the insulae, however, for the idea mentioned above it was useful. I would mildly recommend this source to others interested in the insulae of Rome.

Hermansen, Gustav. Aspects of Roman City Life. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: The University of Alberta Press, 1981.

This book source was the second most useful source that I found pertaining to all of the aspects of the Roman insulae. It did a great job of providing insight into all of the rooms, their names, and corresponding uses. This source also helped to set up a pattern of living for the Roman plebians and lower class citizens who inhabited the insulae, giving them a sort of historical context. This source comes highly recommended from me for anyone interested in the insulae.

Packer, James E.. "The Insulae of Imperial Ostia, Memoirs Of the American Academy in Rome". 31. (1971), 1-65, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4238664. (accessed April 3, 2011).

The most useful of all of my sources, this scholarly article by James Packer gave all of the necessary information about the important architectural elements of the Roman Insulae, as well as discussing the floor plans of the insulae and how they were influenced by the previous precedent of the atrium houses. This source is an absolute necessity for anyone writing about the insulae of Rome, and would be a good read for anyone interested in the Roman Empire in general, as well as urban development.

"pozzolana." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011. Web. 03 Apr. 2011. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/473488/pozzolana>.

I used the online Encyclopedia Britannica as the source to define pozzolana. Other than that this source was not utilized in any way, and thus did not provide much information for me, however, as always, encyclopedias provide accurate information for everything.

Storey, Glenn R.. "Regionaries - Type Insulae 2: Architectural/Residential Units at Rome, American Journal of Archaeology". 1006. 3 (2002), 411-434, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4126281. (accessed April 3, 2011).

This scholarly article was somewhat useful in its talking of typical size of plots for the insulae. It also contained a few nicely worded phrases that were paraphrased in this paper. Another recommended source as it is peer reviewed.

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[1] Glenn R. Storey, “Regionaries - Type Insulae 2: Architectural/Residential Units at Rome,” American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 3 (2002), p 411-434.

[2] Storey, p. 422

[3] Gustav Hermansen, Aspects of Roma City Life, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, 1981, p. 17.

[4] Phillip Harsh, “The Origins of the Insulae at Ostia,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, vol. 12, (1935), p. 7-66

[5] James E. Packer, “The Insulae of Imperial Ostia,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, vol. 31 (1971), p 1-65.

[6] Packer, p. 6.

[7] Packer, p. 7.

[8] Packer, p. 14.

[9] Packer, p. 18.

[10] Packer, p. 61-62.

[11] Packer, p. 69.

[12] Hermansen, p. 43.

[13] Hermansen, p. 43.

[14] Hermansen, p. 44.

[15] Hermansen, p. 23.

[16] Hermansen, p. 19.

[17] Hermansen, p. 18.

[18] Storey, p. 422. 

[19] Lesley and Roy A. Adkins, Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome, New York City, 1994, p. 143.

[20]“pozzolana,” Encyclopedia Brittanica, Encyclopedia Britannica Online, 2011.

[21] Packer, p. 38.

[22] Packer, p. 21.

[23] Packer, p. 22.

[24] Packer, p. 41.

[25] Packer, p. 41.

[26] Hermansen, p. 44.

[27] Jerome, Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient Rome, New Haven and London, 1969, p. 24.

[28] Carcopino, p. 24.

[29] Carcopino, p. 24.

[30] Lesley and Roy A. Adkins, Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome, New York City, 1994, p. 143.

[31] Adkins, p. 143.