When in Rome

In a special issue of the National Geographic magazine published this month entitled Water: Our Thirsty World is a beautiful map featuring every river system in the world and detailing the challenges we all face managing our precious fresh water resources in the 21st century. I have heard it said more than once that “water is the new gold” and this fascinating journalistic study more than brings that cliché to life. Ironically, it was made apparent to me on a recent visit to the Getty Villa, a beautiful art museum on the Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu, CA, that the ancient Romans knew this all along.

Touring the beautiful villa and grounds, modeled after a first-century Roman country house, the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, Italy, which was buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79, I noted an amazing rainwater capture system in the atrium, the main public meeting room in a Roman house. Combining a large opening in the ceiling called a compluvium with an indoor pool companion impluvium, water was channeled to an underground cistern for future use. Combining the sculptural beauty of several carved lion heads around the compluvium ready to channel water to the pool below with the functionality of efficiently capturing rainwater from a large roof area, it was an ancient tour de force for both the artist and the engineer.

So dear reader, do you have some other examples from ancient times of how architecture can help solve our water issues of today?