Реферат: The Origins Of The Computer Essay Research

centuries AD), reflect that model. Farther away it reappears at Trier in

northwestern Germany, at Autun in central France, at Antioch in Syria, and at

Timgad and Leptis Magna in North Africa. When political disintegration and

barbarian invasions disrupted the western part of the Roman Empire in the 4th

century AD, new cities were founded and built in concrete during short

construction campaigns: Ravenna, the capital of the Western Empire from 492-539,

and Constantinople in Turkey, where the seat of the empire was moved by

Constantine in 330 and which continued thereafter to be the capital of the

Eastern, or Byzantine, Empire.

Christian Rome. One important thing had changed by the time of the

founding of Ravenna and Constantinople; after 313 this was the Christian Roman

Empire. The principal challenge to the imperial architects was now the

construction of churches. These churches were large vaulted enclosures of

interior space, unlike the temples of the Greeks and the pagan Romans that were

mere statue-chambers set in open precincts. The earliest imperial churches in

Rome, like the first church of St. Peter’s erected by Constantine from 333, were

vast barns with wooden roofs supported on lines of columns. They resembled

basilicas, which had carried on the Hellenistic style of columnar architecture.

Roman concrete vaulted construction was used in certain cases, for example, in

the tomb church in Rome of Constantine’s daughter, Santa Costanza, of about 350.

In the church of San Vitale in Ravenna, erected in 526-547, this was expanded to

the scale of a middle-sized church. Here a domed octagon 60 feet (18 meters)

across is surrounded by a corridor, or aisle, and balcony 30 feet (9 meters)

deep. On each side a semicircular projection from the central space pushes

outward to blend these spaces together.