Vitruvius The Rooms For The Hot And Tepid Baths Analysis

According to Vitruvius, “The rooms for the hot and tepid baths should be lightened from the south west……..or the south, because the set time for bathing is principally from midday to evening”. He continues in his detailed account to mention that “the hot bath rooms in the women’s and men’s departments adjoin each other, and are situated in the same quarter; for thus, it will be possible that the same furnace should serve both of them and their fittings.”
Baths of more than a few rooms rising to fairly uniform rooflines would have been rare because of lighting needs and the differing proportional heights required by varied room shapes. Sometimes the resulting irregular silhouettes were partially masked by parapet walls, but enough vaults
However, their essential characteristic, the continuous, level capping of vertical elements, was a less dominant feature of design in baths than in trabeated buildings because inside spaces continued to rise above the entablatures’ zones, and because these buildings were not unitary shapes that could be continuously and neatly edged and bound in the traditional way. Since baths were not based on the iteration of an architectonic unit or formal concept, the whole apparatus of traditional classicism was fractured; signs of this, such as ressauts and non-structural columns, were noted
As a result, Greek design was used piecemeal – column screens under archways, supporting only a length of entablature; huge orders apparently but not in fact footing converging groin-vault forms; strips of entablature or cornice marking junctions of major forms or the principal zones of a wall design; and so on. The many curving forms in both plan and elevation competed with the order for attention, lessened their authority, and robbed them of their former dominance. Considering how varied in form and relative scale these buildings were, the use in them of classical design elements is surprisingly successful. The orders and their mouldings, also variously scaled in order to fit the major forms, largely set close to walls and crowed into corners, did not look out of place. But they were no longer primary elements: in buildings supremely functional, they were decorative and symbolic.

The walls also changed, and not just in degree of elaboration. Its two sides were often different in plan, and in sophisticated buildings the same was largely true of elevations also. Though their structural role of course remained, the walls of a vaulted room stood tangent to rising, inward-spreading curves, part in theory at least of a seamless, continuous envelope rising from the floor at one side of the room to curve up and across to the responding, duplicate