David Maclay Building A Roman City Summary

Therefore the building of Verbonia took an outrageous amount of overall intelligence and physical strength. This shows how intelligence and physical strength equally contributes to the all the steps of building the Verbonia. Knowing that analyzing how intelligence and physical strength plays a huge roll is important for others to know and understand. This goes for the building of any city. So overall intelligence and physical strength can help to get the job

The skilled had an important job in building the city. In the passage it says, " The skilled laborers cut, polished, or carved inscriptions in the stone."

During the building and designing of the Verbonia there were many times when the people required both intelligence and physical strength.

Ancient Rome is one of the greatest and most influential societies in the history of the world. From the basic rules of how the Roman Empire is set up to the infrastructures in the city, the strict hierarchy of Roman social structure can be reflected clearly all over the whole ancient Rome. In fact that “public architecture presents people with the official view of a society and provides the background against which its individual markers live their lives.”1 With the great desire of Roman for entertainment and their special taste for blood, the amphitheatre is considered as the most popular and most representative type of the entertainment building in the ancient Roman culture. And

In the short article “Building a Roman City” by David Mcaulay, the author describes the intricate design and building process of Verbonia, a Roman city. Intellect and Physical Strength played a big role in creating Verbonia and cities like it that go on to form an empire. Intelligence and strength were used in Verbonia in the laborious work it took to build it and the tedious city planning.

When one thinks of Roman architecture, many things come to mind, such as arches, columns, statues, and richly covered surfaces in marbles. One must stop to think that this empire, which gained power and influence in the first century BC, must have been influenced from the thousands of years of cultures preceding them in order to create their masterpieces of ingenuity. This phenomenon can be seen in our borrowing of ideas of ancient Greece and Rome for the construction of our capitol buildings in the United States. The Romans surely considered design principles of other cultures when developing their buildings, since daily conquests of new lands opened Roman soldiers’ eyes to innovations from the great vastness of their empire. This

The process in which a Roman city is very well thought out and developed. The short passage, “Building a Roman City”, written by David Macaulay, explains the way the Romans lived in the early years of manhood.

In the spring of the Roman year 728 (25 B.C.), the master plan for Verbonia was ready. A few years later, that paper had brought itself to life. How? Verbonia was designed and built with equal contributions of intelligence and physical strength. This balance led to Verbonia being a exquisite city of beauty and precision. The Roman engineers planned ahead for Verbonia's future, considering the advancements their communities would make. The strength of the Romans was crucial to the city's development simply for the fact that they needed it in order to access the materials that were needed. The brawn and brains also worked in harmony for when the limitations of the human bodies kicked in, their brains took over the situation.

The Roman Empire is credited with the development of many great achievements. These achievements can still be seen in Rome and throughout the world. The Romans are well known for their aqueduct system and huge colosseum that are still standing today. These monumental building feats would not have been created without the use and knowledge of many different techniques. The use of cement was one of the technologies employed to build these large structures. The utilization of arches was another. Many people associate the idea of arches with the Romans. However, they were not the first people to utilize arches. This paper will concentrate on why the Romans were credited with developing the arch; what they did to improve previous cultures use of arches; and how the Romans used arches to create massive structures that are still standing today.

Some evidence to prove this is, "The clay was made into bricks and tiles in factories near Arretium. The clay, dug out of large pits in the ground, was formed into standard shapes and sizes using wooden molds." A reason for having to be intelligent and having to have physical strength is, they need skilled workers to cut, polish, and carve the stone. If they weren't that smart or unskilled they would lift huge block from the ground which required both strength and intelligence. The text states that, "The skilled laborers cut, polished, or carved inscriptions in the stone. The unskilled workers seperated and lifted the huge blocks from Earth. The stone was usually cut with a saw. When the stone was hard, the blade used in the saw had no teeth; sand and steel fillings were placed under the blade and the back-and-forth motion of the saw ground away from the stone." So with that said it was very important to have physical strength and to have intelligence because of those reasons. The way we build today still uses both of those ideas just a little bit less since we have tools to help

The only way the Romans could have never thought of an idea as innovative as Verbonia if it weren’t for their intelligence. They planned out every street and block from scratch, but still planned them with purpose. The Romans paid attention to every single mathematical detail. For example, to ensure that sunlight reached the street, "No privately owned building, they decreed, could be higher than twice the width of the street on which it stood" (Macaulay 1). To calculate the maximum height of a building in order to see if sunlight reaches the street must require some intelligence, for it would take a skilled mathematician to figure out how the angle of the sun and the shadow that is created to help keep the street exposed to sunlight.

This paper offers a discussion about how ancient Rome developed and utilized arches and concrete to further expand their civilization. The importance of these technologies will be covered, along with the benefits to Rome. Concrete was a Roman invention which was composed of materials that were plentiful. One of the base materials used in Roman concrete was pozzolana, a volcanic soil.

     The design and structure of a city is as important as the people who dwell within her walls. The placement of streets and the structures built there are carefully plotted for optimal use. Foot and cart traffic, fire hazard, and access to water were all key factors in city planning. Eventually the Romans had fine tuned their design principals in such an advantageous way that they molded all of their city states similarly.

The Romans engrossed some crucial know-how from the Etruscans. The article states “this included the “arch” and the ”vault”, which were destined to carry Roman engineering into a development directly away from that of ancient Greece” (Roman architecture [sa]). The vaulting techniques used by the Romans were the simple geometric forms: the groin vault, the segmental vault, and the semi-circular barrel vault. The vault surfaces were customarily covered with stucco or tiles as recommended construction techniques.

The phrase “Rome wasn’t built in a day” is commonly used to describe things that take time and patience. The phrase is very true, Rome was not built in a day and it did not rise out of nothing. The rise of Rome was impacted greatly by Etruscan urbanism, Greek colonization, and Hellenistic imperialism. These external influences gave rise to the Republic by impacting the growth and formation of the city, both architecturally and civically, and contributing to the eventual success of the urbs.