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Argument › No. 17/2025

Athenaeum. The Dynamic Metabolism of an Ancient Architectural Program

https://doi.org/10.54508/Argument.17.07

  • / “Ion Mincu” University of Architecture and Urban Planning Bucharest, RO

Abstract

The Athenaeum represents a type of building with a unique appearance attested in the history of Classical Antiquity, built during the reign of Emperor Hadrian, century. II AD. About this first historical form of the Athenaeum, currently known as Hadrian’s Athenaeum, we know certain aspects derived from its mention in ancient historical literature that speak mainly about the function and the events hosted in this place. Other clues related to the architectural features of the edifice remain shrouded in uncertainty, in the absence of any archaeological sources of ancient Rome attributed to this type of building.

However, archaeological investigations undertaken with the extension of Rome’s metro line C between 2007 and 2011 resulted in the unexpected discovery of a public edifice attributed to the reign of Emperor Hadrian (AD 117- 138), which has been hypothesized to represent the ancient form of the Athenaeum. In parallel with its first and only ancient appearance, the Athenaeum disappears for a period of more than a millennium that broadly overlaps with the period of the Middle Ages, but it experiences a strong revival with the first signs of Modernity, starting with the 17th century.

Between these two determining periods for the course of the Athenaeum, the original ancient one and the one of modern recurrence, the ambiguity surrounding the program emerges following the confrontation of the meanings assumed in Classical Antiquity and the alterations they undergo with its new appearances.

The research on the particular evolution of this architectural program aims precisely at the attempt to elucidate the ambiguity of the Athenaeum, by investigating the sources behind its revival, as well as the features that characterize the continuity of its architectural phenomenon, other than the simple recovery and perpetuation of its name.

The comparison between these two postures is what ultimately outlines the dynamic profile of the Athenaeum, materialized through the variation of forms and meanings that it knows following the revitalization of the program in various cultural spaces. In this way, the dynamism associated with the Athenaeum is a characteristic derived both from the ambiguity resulting from the diversity of modern forms, and from their evolutions which in turn know transformations over time. The evolutionary processes to which the modern appearances of the Athenaeum are subjected constitute its metabolic dynamism, in permanent resonance with the much wider phenomena that characterize the cultural and social space of the West as a whole.

Keywords

program, Athenaeum, dynamism, symbol, culture, humanism

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