History Summarized: The Pantheon

It's a good dome, simple as that.

Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.

[Jacob-sbsu]

Fun fact: it took us years to figure out the special ingredients to roman concrete, the solution? They just replaced the word water with saltwater. Back then ingredients lists for roman concrete just assumed you knew to use salt water, so they all just said "water"

[lordundeadrat]

Question: "How do you even begin to calculate that?"
Answer: You don't. You build a scale model first. Take the model to the proposed building site on that date and hold it level. Look inside to where the sun is shinning. That's the direction the entrance needs to be in at full scale. Make a note, mark the build area as you go.

Additionally, you don't even need a scale model. A stick will do the job. On the proposed date you go out and shove a stick in the ground. See that shadow? The entrance needs to be that direction. The length of the shadow shows you the angle the door needs to be at. No Trig necessary. Just fundamental Geometry and good notes.

[AngeliqueDaemon]

I love the sheer joy Blue gets out of domes.

Also fun art history fact: ANY Greek statue you see that is MARBLE, is a Roman copy of a Greek original. Greek statues, unless they were part of a structure, were all cast in bronze, which was light enough to hold up under its own weight, and why you see them in radical poses. That's also why the Roman copies all have awkward stumps, weird columns, or sprues that ruin the lines/shape of the statue: marble can't support itself so they had to add extra support in.

[AubriGryphon]

Worker, holding a sledgehammer: "Guys, I know you said 'knock down all the pagan temples', but guys, this is GORGEOUS..."
Priest: "Maybe we could, I dunno, turn it into OUR temple? It IS gorgeous."
Cardinal: *thinks, then gives the thumbs up*

[eleavate]

I feel like if your temple gets struck by lightning and burns down, you've angered someone with it and probably shouldn't make a replacement

[timothymclean]

Who expected Hadrian and Trajan's third temple to fall over, burn down, and sink into the Tiber?

[acecat]

I went to the Pantheon with a school group (I was so lucky to have the opportunity for various timing and money reasons). Rome has absurdly huge seagulls, and my strongest memory of the Pantheon that apparently a seagull swooped down and flew off with a full-grown pigeon as my friends watched (I only caught the motion in the corner of my eye). We were all pretty haunted after that.

[jgreenbelt]

Im a Civil Engineering student who just came back from a semester in which I was studying the math and formula's needed to work with concrete. The Roman Architectural genius is not that they where able to build these massive structures its the fact that they figured out how to make concrete and all of the math behind working with concrete long before Portland even existed and before Portland cement was a thing. A semester long class filled with confusing formula's in which 99% of the students rely on programs like Structure Point to do for them was figured out by the Romans through hand written long calculations its actually insane.

[AnExcellentChef]

The only building more Roman than the Pantheon that I can think of would be the great imperial bath complexes in Rome. They've got the same ingenious brick-and-concrete construction, soaring roofs and domes, giant monolithic columns (some of which only seem to carry load but the load bearing impost blocks are embedded into the walls, they're purely for looks), as well as exotic stones and precious metals for decoration.
But what they have in addition is maybe even more Roman. The massive terraforming/landscaping projects required, the complex heating systems and their logistics, and the most Roman thing of all, the aqueducts carrying millions of gallons of water to them on a daily basis.
They were how the Romans absolutely flexed on every other ancient civilization, who couldn't hope to come close to their level of sophistication and mastery of their environment.

[nathanodonovan]

Interestingly, the great temple at Abu Simbel in Egypt, built by Usermaatre-setpenre Ramesses Meryamun (Ramesses II the Great), also had a similar solar alignment, but i think it's even more impressive as it was built to align on -two- dates, not just one, casting the statues in the sanctuary in light except for that of the god Ptah due to some underworld associations. What these original dates were is a bit murky. Possibly the king's birth day and the day of his coronation, or possibly to do with the Egyptian new year. Unfortunately the millennia since has resulted in axial precession so the Tropic of Cancer has shifted and in addition to that the entire temple was relocated in 1964 to save it from the flooding of Laker Nasser due to the completion of the Aswan Dam so the current alignment is certainly off at least somewhat.

I wonder if the Romans took advantage of Egyptian mathematical knowledge in calculating the solar alignmnet of the Pantheon, since by that point Egypt was under Roman rule.

[nikki]

"How do you even BEGIN to calculate that"
I think that would've been the perfect place for Red to flex her Maths degree😂

[Sootielove]

As a physicist, architects and engineers are clearly madmen and witches

[PilkScientist]

how to calculate sun location:
-start before construction
-stand around at noon on april 21st
-figure out where sun is (look up)
-orient hole and door accordingly

deeper mathematics or modeling are likely nessecary for the exact moment evoked, but like, they did also have the camera obscura by which you could model the phenomenon.

This would also imply they may've known they were building a giant camera obscura which feels pretty awesome.

[Dave_Sisson]

I wanted to see the Pantheon all my life and when I finally did, it was even more awesome than I had imagined it would be. It remained the most impressive building I had ever seen until two weeks later when I visited Hagia Sofia, which totally blew me away and actually reduced this straight middle aged bloke to tears with its utter magnificence.

[nicholasreno]

One of my favorite pieces of party trivia:
The concrete dome was poured continuously. Because of concrete's tendency to not bond with itself if it cures too much, they had to pour it in a ton of small batches that they had to make sure went down fast enough that the previous batch wasn't too hard to bond. I don't know off the top of my head what that magic time is, but it's on the magnitude of hours, so they had to work fast, and never stop. To get one solid, fused piece, they had to have teams of slaves working 24/7 for something like 3 years to get that dome poured. Absolutely insane.

[rifewithpotatoes]

As a geologist, the fact that you very specifically got the unusual concrete formulation correct warms my cold, mafic little heart

[Tea_N_Crumpets]

As an aspiring engineer, the pure engineering of the Pantheon just warms my heart. How they did this 1600 years before we even had basic Newtonian physics is beyond me.

[nairobicataluna]

If the romans were a thing today they would probably get a bunch of copyright claims and comments saying "YOU COPIED THIS FROM ____" and they would be like "NOOOO"
Or they would be Disney

[WolfBoy-omdw]

This is officially one of the most beautiful pieces of architecture I've ever seen in my life

[nidohime]

6:15 Astronomy, my dude.
6:50 Is just me or this building could fit very well into YuGiOh! ? Just look at those squares of the dome and don´t tell me you cannot see how well YuGiOh pictures of monsters would fit so well there.