Big Buildings – Big Architecture? (Topoi B-2-3)

A striking characteristic of many ancient Near Eastern buildings is their vastly oversized dimensions. Based on examples of early monumental buildings in Uruk (Southern Iraq, late 4th to late 3rd millennium BC) and on the Roman Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek (Lebanon), the project involved the quantification of expenditures for building materials and organization, as well as the translation of the results to terms of economy. These examples contributed to the discussions of research group (B-2-) XXL – Monumentalized Knowledge on the definition of monumentality at various times and in diverse parts of the world, the addressees, and the implicit conceptions of space.