Affiliation: University of Pennsylvania
Mantha Zarmakoupi is the Morris Russell and Josephine Chidsey Williams Assistant Professor in Roman architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, Department of the History of At. She holds her degrees from St. John’s College at the University of Oxford (DPhil and MSt), and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University (MA with distinction) and the National Technical University of Athens. Her research interests include ancient art and architecture of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, urban and harbor infrastructure, and how cultural interactions between Romans and Greeks influenced their artistic productions. She is the Director of the study and excavation of the he Bouleuterion and triporticus at Teos (Turkey), as well as the co-director of underwater surveys around Levitha, Kinaros and Maura (central Aegean Sea) and d Delos and Rheneia. Her most current publications, Shaping Roman Landscape: Ecocritical Approaches to Architecture and Wall Painting in Early Imperial Italy (Getty Publications, 2023) received the 2021 David R. Coffin Publication Grant of the Foundation for Landscape Studies.
In this lecture I present the ways in which the installation “An Archaeology of Disability” offers an experiment in the historic reconstruction of the Acropolis in Athens that moves beyond ableist approaches to classical heritage. “An Archaeology of Disability” is an exhibition / research station designed and curated for the Venice Biennale, Architettura 2021 by David Gissen, Jennifer Stager, and Mantha Zarmakoupi, exhibited at the Gipsoteca di Arte Antica in Pisa (2022), the Paul and Alexandra Kanellopoulos Museum in Athens (2023) and the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki (2024).
The accessibility of historic architecture not only determines who can experience the past, but it also informs how we think about disabled people as part of history. This installation presents an experiment in the historic reconstruction of the Acropolis in Athens. We explored what it means to reconstruct lost elements of the Acropolis through the lens of human impairment. Such an approach contrasts to the pursuit of “accessible heritage” — a balance between historic authenticity of architecture and technical modifications made for accessibility. We call our alternative to accessible heritage “an archaeology of disability.”
Notions of the “classical” have been in fact constructed on ideas of ableism: healthy muscular bodies as well as perfectly designed monuments and idealized democratic cities, whereby enslaved labor is silenced. Such conceptualizations of the human body in the classical period, barren of their original cultural context, have become idealized representations of human bodies as well as metrics of architectural design. For instance, the Canon of Polykleitos, devised in the 5th century BCE to present a standard in the representation of human form in sculpture, informed Vitruvius’ analysis of proportion and symmetry in architecture vis-à-vis the human body, was revived in Leonardo da Vinci’s Virtuvian Man during the Renaissance, and reincarnated in Le Corbusier’s Modulor Man where the human body became a yardstick of proportion in architectural design. Aesthetics of “purity” and “perfection” are indeed intertwined in restoration projects and architectural projects in archaeological sites and such interventions are entwined with national and supranational debates about cultural identity in the discourses of modernity.
In this paper I focus on two moments in the history of the island of Delos in the Aegean Sea to shed light on the interweaving narratives of Greek architectural history. The two moments I am focusing on are separated by over 2,000 years: the Delos Symposia in the 1960s and 1970s and the port-city of Delos in the second and first centuries. My consideration of the Delos Symposia points to the ways in which Ancient Greek Cities formed part of twentieth-century discussion on the future of cities and the ways in which the classical past was appropriated more broadly in these discussions, on the one hand. My analysis of the urban development of the late Hellenistic port-city of Delos, on the other hand, proposes different ways of approaching and conceptualizing classical urbanism. This bipartite analysis of Delos—the city of Delos as an object of archaeological inquiry and the city of Delos as the meeting place of the Delos Symposia—aims to point to a shared semantic framework of ecocriticism between the fields of architecture and archaeology with regards to the study of the city more broadly that can be traced back to the1960s and 1970s. Rather than a reference to the gray blue marble employed in the monuments of the sanctuary of Apollo, my title, the Blue Marble of Greek Architectural History, signals my intertwining analysis of the archaeological and architectural study of Delos together with a conceptual analysis of its urban and maritime landscape.
Delos underwent a rapid economic development after 167 BCE, when its Roman rulers granted the port of Delos ‘duty-free’ status under Athenian dominion and turned it into a commercial base connecting the eastern and western Mediterranean. The island became a free-trade commercial base under nominal Athenian supervision, but essentially under Roman rule. The result of this economic development was an unprecedented population increase and, by consequence, accelerated urbanization – changes attested by the formation of new neighborhoods and harbour facilities and the redevelopment of existing urban and harbour areas of the island. This presentation will discuss the island’s urban development, maritime infrastructure, and its commercial connections in order to shed light on this important key site in the history of Hellenistic Greece and the nascent Roman Empire.
This paper focuses on the bouleuterion / odeion at Teos and contextualizes the building’s chronology—considering the recent excavation results (Teos Archaeological Project of Ankara University and UPenn, 2022-), monumental building inscription, and relevant epigraphic documents—to address the variegated functions it fulfilled over time. It also tackles the ways in which the typological study of public monuments in the study of Greek and Roman architecture at large has affected our understanding of their design and meaning. By focusing on the long history of this building, I explore the ways in which ancient buildings were multifunctional and puncture our long-held idea that each designated building type must relate to a different function. The typological study of public monuments in the history of architecture is a project of the Enlightenment, but its approach continues to permeate the study of ancient architecture where typologies are an imperative tool of research. In analyzing this building and the rich epigraphic corpus with which it is related, my aim is to show how domains that we often assume to be separate—such as the political and cultural—were not always separate in these buildings. My analysis of the building types of bouleuteria and odeia more broadly and specifically in this region aims at providing an insight into the architectural design schemes that appeared in the Hellenistic and Roman East and the ways in which they served political and cultural transformations.
Contemporary perceptions of the natural and built environment, as well as ideas about nature and art, were intertwined with the architectural and decorative trends of the Early Imperial period. In this presentation, I trace this process by examining ways in which the transformation of the natural and built environment and contemporary perceptions of it, as well as ideas about nature and art, related to the new architectural and decorative mannerisms of this period. I tackle the interrelation between real, visual, and virtual pictorial spaces in Roman villas, examining the ways in which the framing of painted and actual views of landscapes in Roman luxury villas moves between perceptual and conceptual space and transgresses traditional notions of pictoriality, and in so doing materializes the natural world into landscape in the Early Imperial period.
This paper focuses on the bouleuterion / odeion at Teos and contextualizes the building’s chronology—considering the recent excavation results (Teos Archaeological Project of Ankara University and UPenn, 2022-), monumental building inscription, and relevant epigraphic documents—to address the variegated functions it fulfilled over time. It also tackles the ways in which the typological study of public monuments in the study of Greek and Roman architecture at large has affected our understanding of their design and meaning. By focusing on the long history of this building, I explore the ways in which ancient buildings were multifunctional and puncture our long-held idea that each designated building type must relate to a different function. The typological study of public monuments in the history of architecture is a project of the Enlightenment, but its approach continues to permeate the study of ancient architecture where typologies are an imperative tool of research. In analyzing this building and the rich epigraphic corpus with which it is related, my aim is to show how domains that we often assume to be separate—such as the political and cultural—were not always separate in these buildings. My analysis of the building types of bouleuteria and odeia more broadly and specifically in this region aims at providing an insight into the architectural design schemes that appeared in the Hellenistic and Roman East and the ways in which they served political and cultural transformations.
