Towards of a theory of reconstructing ancient libraries

Mamoli, Myrsini

Title:

Towards of a theory of reconstructing ancient libraries

dc.contributor.advisor	Knight, Terry
dc.contributor.advisor	Peponis, John
dc.contributor.author	Mamoli, Myrsini
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Wescoat, Bonna Daix
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Hollengreen, Laura
dc.contributor.committeeMember	Carpo, Mario
dc.contributor.department	Architecture
dc.date.accessioned	2014-05-22T15:20:39Z
dc.date.available	2014-05-22T15:20:39Z
dc.date.created	2014-05
dc.date.issued	2013-12-11
dc.date.submitted	May 2014
dc.date.updated	2014-05-22T15:20:39Z
dc.description.abstract	The library was one of the most important institutions in the Hellenistic and Roman city, as evidenced in the writings of ancient authors, and the building remains of libraries found throughout the Greco-Roman world, from Asia Minor to France and from Africa to Northern Greece. Yet, the library remains one of the least easily identifiable building forms and one of the most difficult to reconstruct, because unlike architectural types such as the temple, stoa, or theater, the library exhibits significant variety in design, scale and monumentality and the use of different component elements. In reconstructing libraries, scholars often rely on a prescribed set of assumptions about components and their arrangement that limit our ability to identify libraries and understand their diversity of arrangement. This dissertation proposes shape grammars as an effective computational methodology to identify, understand, and reconstruct ancient libraries of diverse and variant scale, design and monumentality. The work presents a comprehensive documentation of known and identified libraries, reviews the design principles of the architectural form of ancient libraries, and on the basis of this historical analysis proposes a shape grammar for the formal specification of ancient Greek and Roman libraries. The library grammar encodes the design principles of ancient libraries in ninety-one rules that are grouped in two major parts: the first generates the main hall of the library and its interior design, and the second generates the complete layout of the library including additional porticoes, peristyles, exedras, gardens and propylon. The application of the rules generates libraries of diverse scales and monumentality: libraries known in the corpus and as well as hypothetical libraries. The dissertation presents grammatical derivations for the seventeen known and identified libraries. These derivations, depending on the degree of preservation of the building remains of libraries, function as an evaluative tool for the validity of the grammar or for the reconstructions proposed by traditional research. In many cases, they point to different possibilities in the identification of the building remains related to libraries among remains of different phases or remains belonging to neighboring buildings, and suggest variant scenarios of reconstruction that might not stand out using traditional techniques of reconstruction. The metadata of the rules in the grammar and the derivations are used in a frequency analysis that provides a probabilistic model as an effective and systematic guide in identifying, evaluating and predicting the architectural form of libraries: the main hall and the threshold are identified as mandatory architectural components, the niches and focal point as most likely, and the podium with a colonnade as less likely to occur in a library. Less frequently, the library is a whole complex with exedras, a monumental entry and additional rooms that function as auditoria, banquet halls or offices. Moreover, the work presents the derivations of possible libraries and evaluates the rules applied to generate them based on the frequency analysis. In the end, the work concludes whether these buildings are libraries, non-libraries or exceptional libraries. Lastly, this dissertation assesses the opportunities and challenges that emerge in using shape grammars to identify and reconstruct libraries and also the value and impact of using formal computational methods in the systematic exploration of variations in reconstruction of the archaeological record.
dc.description.degree	Ph.D.
dc.format.mimetype	application/pdf
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/1853/51779
dc.language.iso	en_US
dc.publisher	Georgia Institute of Technology
dc.subject	Ancient libraries
dc.subject	Computation
dc.subject	Generative grammars
dc.subject	Shape grammars
dc.subject	Reconstruction
dc.subject	Archaeological fragments
dc.subject	Archaeological remains
dc.subject.lcsh	Antiquities
dc.subject.lcsh	Archaeology Methodology Data processing
dc.subject.lcsh	Architecture, Ancient
dc.title	Towards of a theory of reconstructing ancient libraries
dc.type	Text
dc.type.genre	Dissertation
dspace.entity.type	Publication
local.contributor.advisor	Peponis, John
local.contributor.corporatename	College of Design
local.contributor.corporatename	School of Architecture
local.relation.ispartofseries	Doctor of Philosophy with a Major in Architecture
relation.isAdvisorOfPublication	f95b3f83-26ab-42f8-add3-259d8e13ac11
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication	c997b6a0-7e87-4a6f-b6fc-932d776ba8d0
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thesis.degree.level	Doctoral