First published in 1965 and now available in a revised edition, The Architecture of the Roman Empire has been hailed as a comprehensive and penetrating account of the rise of Roman Imperial architecture, an architecture whose great vaulted spaces and monumental exteriors defined such terms as “palace” and “Pantheon” for all time.

William L. MacDonald documents the genesis of this new architecture by describing, analyzing, and evaluating four key monuments erected in Rome between A.D. 60 and 130: the palaces of Nero and Domitian, the first true palaces of Europe; Trajan’s Markets (besides his Forum), a superb example of Rome’s highly original social architecture; and the mighty Pantheon. Planned and constructed for the paramount city of the Empire, these building radically altered the history of design and construction. The essentially urban architecture they defined soon appeared in hundreds of prosperous cities and towns, evoking an imagery of Rome throughout its dominions and later carrying many Roman concepts of design into Mediterranean and European architecture.

The emphasis throughout is upon the direct testimony of the buildings as they stand today, and the text is augmented by many plans, reconstructions, and photographs. For the revised edition MacDonald has updated the bibliography and added a new chapter in which he reviews recent studies and continues to probe questions of style and significance that he raised earlier. This book stands as one of lasting value to architectural historians, archaeologists, and the classicists as well as to students of ancient history and culture.

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The author of a classic work on the architecture of imperial Rome here broadens his focus to present an original study of urban architecture in Roman market towns, port cities, veterans’ colonies, and major metropolitan centers throughout the empire.

“Simply the best book on Roman urbanism [that] I know. . . . A formidable breakthrough. It brings to life the genius of Roman urbanism and reveals its continuing relevance for present urban planning and architecture.”—Leon Krier, Architects Journal

“In this very fine book—the successor to his Introductory Study—William L. MacDonald lays before the reader the physical evidence of what a Roman city was like for its inhabitants. . . . The illustrations in An Urban Appraisal, this second volume of The Architecture of the Roman Empire, are superbly chosen, illuminating the text as well as being interesting in themselves. . . . It is a joy to find a book so attractively designed, worthy of both its author and his subject.”—Martin Henig, The Times Literary Supplement

Winner of the 1986 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award of the Society of Architectural Historians for the most distinguished work of scholarship in architectural history.

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The great Villa constructed by the Emperor Hadrian near Tivoli between A.D. 118 and the 130s is one of the most original monuments in the history of architecture and art. The inspiration for major developments in villa and landscape design from the Renaissance onward, it also influenced such eminent twentieth-century architects as Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn. In this beautiful book, two distinguished architectural historians describe and interpret the Villa as it existed in Roman times and track its extraordinary effect on architects and artists up to the present day.

William L. MacDonald and John A. Pinto begin by evaluating the numerous buildings comprising the complex, and then describe the art, decorated surfaces, gardens, waterworks, and life at the Villa. The authors then turn to the ways the Villa influenced writers, artists, architects, and landscape designers from the fifteenth century to the present. They discuss, for example, Piranesi's archaeological, architectural, and graphic Villa studies in the eighteenth century; connections between Hadrian's Villa and the English landscape garden; the array of European verbal and artistic depictions of the Villa; and architectural studies of the Villa by twentieth-century Americans.

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