Pantheon
 
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Pantheon

BC 118 - BC 128 		Founder: Hadrianus
Santa Maria Rotond Church 609

It was built as a Roman temple dedicated to all Gods, later consecrated as a Catholic Church. Its monumental porch originally faced a rectangular colonnaded temple courtyard and now enfronts the smaller Piazza della Rotonda.
The interior volume is a cylinder above which rises the hemispherical dome. Opposite the door is a recessed semicircular apse, and on each side are three additional recesses, alternately rectangular and semicircular, separated from the space under the dome by paired monolithic columns. The only natural light enters through an unglazed oculus at the center of the dome and through the bronze doors to the portico. As the sun moves, striking patterns of light illuminate the walls and floors of porphyry, granite and yellow marbles.
The dome has a span of 43.4 m, the largest dome until Brunelleschi's dome at the Florence Cathedral of 1420-36.
The interior volume is a cylinder above which springs the half sphere of the dome. A whole sphere can be inscribed in the interior volume, with the diameter at the floor of the cylinder of 43.4 m equaling the interior height.
The dome is constructed of stepped rings of solid concrete with less and less density as lighter aggregate (pumice) is used, diminishing in thickness to about 1.2 m at the edge of the oculus. The dome rests on a cylinder of masonry walls 6 m. Hidden voids and the interior recesses hollow out this construction, so that it works less as a solid mass and more like three continuous arcades which correspond to the three tiers of relieving arches visible on the building exterior. Originally, these exterior walls were faced with colored marbles.
Pantheon is the most important example built by the “Opus Caementicum” technique.

Resource :  James Stevens Curl; “Classical Architecture: an Introduction to Its Vocabulary and Essentials, with a Select Glossary of Terms”, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992.

Leland M. Roth; “Understanding Architecture”, Westview Press, 1993.

Roger H. Clark and Michael Pause; “Precedents in Architecture”, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1985.
 
Search Results In The Collection of The Museum of Architecture:   Pantheon