Caves and cities are normally found at the opposite ends of the architectural spectrum. The former is typically perceived as a primitive, undesigned object, part of nature; the latter is held as the height of civilized planning and rationality. At the Greco-Roman city of Magnesia on the Maeander in western Turkey, however, these two typologies were intimately bound together in unexpected ways. Magnesia on the Maeander was the site of the ancient cult of a cave-dwelling Apollo at Hylai, whose devotees were sometimes imbued with a supernatural strength that enabled them to jump from high cliffs and rush through the mountains carrying entire trees that they had torn up by the roots. City and cave appear to have been linked through a complex dynamic of movement in which the frenzied tree-carriers ended up depositing their burdens at a city-center sanctuary of Dionysos. This movement provides an alternative way of understanding the layout of the city, and augments the scant archaeological remains of the street grid. Drawing on textual and empirical evidence, this study seeks to understand if the city grid, its main thoroughfares, and the orientation of its buildings were influenced by the desire to connect to important topographical features such as the cave of Apollo.

The reconstitution of these dynamics into a synthetic urban topography requires the collation of incomplete evidence from a variety of different sources and time periods, including historical accounts, numismatics, inscriptions found on the site, architectural remains, geographical surveys, and the preservation of toponyms in local memory. This project makes use of procedural modeling, an emerging 3D mapping technique that facilitates the generation of hypothetical three-dimensional visualizations based on geographically located data to explore a series of focused questions about the impact of cultic practice and landscape on the urban layout of Magnesia on the Maeander. The first set of questions is spatio-empirical in nature, and concerns the reconstruction of Magnesia’s city plan. The second seeks to elucidate a ‘topography of ritual’ at Magnesia and explore the ways in which this network of natural places and religious sites coexisted with, and undermined, the spatial system constituted by the city grid. The idea of the cave and its role in Greek architecture is the third object of study, as represented at Magnesia by the sanctuary of Apollo. Finally, these questions form a case study for a critique of the value and potential of the procedural modeling methodology. As a whole, the project aims to contribute to knowledge of the landscape and built environment of Asia Minor in the archaic through Roman periods, as well as entering into discourses of theory and praxis in the Digital Humanities.

Image-based 3D models are powerful resources providing exceptional means, by which the lived qualities of urban environments can be discovered. Traditional means of studying ancient urban features, such as 2D drawings, small physical replications, and even 3D reconstructions, lack characteristics and qualities that greatly diminish architectural historians’ ability to analyze these spaces. Therefore, it is paramount to deploy technology such as photogrammetry that rapidly produces detailed 3D models that can address these deficiencies. Issues such as movement within and through spaces, their communicative qualities, and their ability to cater to a multitude of activities are key to our understanding of how urban environments are perceived and experienced kinetically. At the forefront of this study is the development of an efficient and accurate process for producing image-based 3D models of Pompeian intersections. By eliminating traditionally labor and time intensive processes, one can dedicate more resources to onsite analysis, as well as drastically lowering the costs of traditionally expensive techniques.

During the course of the 1960s, computers and information networks made their appearance in the public imagination. To architects on the cusp of architecture's postmodern turn, information technology offered new forms, metaphors, and techniques by which modern architecture's technological and utopian basis could be reasserted. Yet by the end of the 1970s, when computers and networks fully appeared in the workplace, schools, and even homes, architects had all but abandoned information technology as a source of architectural ideas, relegating computers to a supporting role in architectural practice where they performed only the most mundane of tasks, one from which they would emerge only two decades later.

This dissertation argues that architecture in the 1970s did not in fact retreat from information technology but rather that the changing nature of information technology demanded new modes of architectural thinking that destabilized the traditional discursive function of the machine underpinning modern architecture. It examines various ways in which information technology influenced architectural thinking during this troubled period of transition through the historical treatment of a single case study, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (or Beaubourg, as it was and is still known). It considers on the building's role in a more general program of social and cultural reorganization in the information society, from the original conception of the building as an enormous information processing machine to the reception of Piano and Rogers' building in the years following its completion. In chapters examining the informational ideas in the competition brief, the architectural responses to the competition, the sources for the winning scheme by Piano and Rogers and its relationship to technological utopianism in British architecture, the development of the final building and its challenge to the megastructure paradigm, and the privileging of the user in new techniques of architectural programming first deployed in a cultural building at Beaubourg, this dissertation tries to identify a broad spectrum of modes of engagement between architecture and information technology beyond the tool-based approaches prevalent today.

In the early 4th century C.E., the interior hall of the Basilica of Maxentius was adorned with eight giant marble monoliths. To reach the building site, the 15-meter, 100-ton columns were shipped 2400 kilometers across the Mediterranean, dragged up the Tiber River, unloaded in the overflowing marble yards, paraded down several kilometers of Roman streets, and erected in an area the size of a football field. In Imperial Rome, the ability to transport massive stone monoliths down narrow cobbled streets or mobilize an entire brick-making industry within a matter of weeks were paramount to the success of large-scale building projects. The construction process required a cooperation between the entire city and its infrastructural material and labor networks. The Roman construction site must have been absolutely symbiotic with its urban environment, especially within the context of the Late Empire. The area immediately surrounding the Forum Romanum was a dense residential and commercial zone characterized by a complicated topography and a stratified array of architectural monuments. In order to construct any project within the confines of this region, the builders had to balance a poly-modal understanding of technical engineering knowledge with an exceedingly efficient organizing framework. In addition to the organization of the site, the builders had to coordinate with the many disparate types of materials that were constantly arriving from far-flung sources. The scene created by the shouting workmen, the screeching pulleys, and the rumbling streets was undoubtedly among Rome’s most interesting spectacles. This dissertation will combine an understanding of the spatial implications of the Roman building site with an awareness of the socio-cultural milieu and the symbiotic relationship between the construction process and its contextual environment.

Healing in Motion introduces the concept of locotherapy in order to examine the relationship between Roman temple healing and architecture in the second century CE. Healing through movement was a new phenomenon that emerged in the Roman period involving collective and individual, formal and informal, ritual and non-ritual kinetic actions specific to therapeutic practices. A close reading of the Asklepieion at Pergamon, a prominent Greco-Roman healing center in Asia Minor, reveals the potent connection between locotherapy and architectural design. The analyses draws upon engaging urban phenomenological theory, the extensive literature on Greco-Roman healing, the meticulous archaeological reports on Pergamon, and first-hand data gathered during site visits. Applying an interdisciplinary approach, Healing in Motion emphasizes the embodied, kinetic aspects at play in the design of ancient healing centers, which had been missing from previous scholarship.

By addressing the textual and numismatic evidence and tracing the history of temple healing, the project first substantiates that locotherapy is a direct consequence of the socio-cultural circumstances of the second century CE. The following chapters trace the architectural development of the Pergamon Asklepieion from its beginnings until the second century CE, followed by sections focusing on the architecture of the second century, a period when temple healing and secular healing practices begin to merge. At this point in time, the somatic movement regimen that belonged to the secular medical tradition began to manifest itself in the cures of Asklepieia. The analytical term locotherapy applies specifically to these changing practices and developing relations between medicine and architecture of the second century. In the final chapters, the dissertation demonstrates how the careful coordination of pathways, materials and calculated design choices facilitated and shaped the movements associated with healing. Overall, the project introduces a new kinetic reading, an alternative interpretation contributing to the art historical, archaeological and classical scholarship on the Pergamene Asklepieion.

The freestanding column with culminating statue is generally viewed as a relatively limited genre in Roman art and architecture. The purpose of such a column varies between glorifying a victory and honoring an individual for his or her achievements. While the best-known examples were created in Rome during the Empire, such columns were common in early Byzantine Constantinople as well. This dissertation examines four such monuments: the Columns of Constantine, Theodosius I, Arcadius, and Justinian. These towering monuments were erected in imperial fora along the Mese, the main ceremonial thoroughfare passing across the city of Constantinople. The first part of the dissertation focuses on the art historical and material aspects of column monuments and illustrates the formal and urbanistic innovations applied in Constantinople. Comparison to other column monuments and monuments alike, both in the western and eastern Roman world, situates these built objects within their cultural contexts. The second part of the study addresses the visibility of the columns in the ritual and daily experience, focusing on secular and religious urban processions held along the branches of the Mese. The analysis unfolds a transition process as the columns were transformed from pagan architectural elements to Christian urban monuments: the evolution from the simple and abstract porphyry Column of Constantine; to the hybrid, re-framed, cross-signed Columns of Theodosius and Arcadius embellished with spiral bas reliefs, and ultimately to the richly-decorated, intentionally Christianized Column of Justinian . Hence, the concluding sections explores the Christianization of the area ‘up in the air’ by presenting a hypothetical skyline where each honorary column under investigation constitutes a significant marker in a choreographed sequence. Although the beginning of this process is commonly assigned to the sixth-century adoption of the Virgin Mary as Constantinople’s protector, this study attempts to show that the conversion of the honorific column began earlier. The kinetic, sequential experience of colossal columns and their related fora offers the potential to reembody and enrich our understanding of the shift from the religiously-ambiguous foundation phase in the fourth century to an overtly Christian capital in the sixth century.