Event Description
It may be hard for some of us to imagine that for eons running water was not part of everyday life, at least not before the rule of the Roman Empire. The Romans built a futuristic and sophisticated system of aqueducts, sewers, and hydraulic infrastructure to supply Rome and elsewhere with water as wells began to run dry hundreds of years before the birth of Christ.
Katherine Rinne, an architect, researcher and professor at the California College of Arts, is the preeminent scholar of Rome's 27,00-year history of water usage. She will present her lecture "Rome, A City and Its Water Supply" on Tuesday, October 16. It is the first Architecture + Interiors ARFAA lecture of the year.
Rinne's book, The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of the Baroque City (Yale University Press, 2011), received the 2012 Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians and the 2011 John Brinkerhoff Jackson Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies and her studies have been supported through Guggenheim, Fulbright, and NEA research fellowships. Her work is aimed at understanding the relationships that exist between water systems, cultural practice, and urbanism in Rome and what practical applications can be utilized to develop future systems for parts of the world that suffer from water shortages and rising sea levels due to climate change.
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