Pompeii Apartments :: Architecture Building History Essays

Pompeii Apartments The Pompeii apartments are located in the middle of a town called La Habra, population roughly fifty-five thousand. They lie nestled in an apartment community, nearby two other apartment complexes. For the residents, this offers a moderately inexpensive housing alternative to living in a house, most of which are small or expensive in La Habra. Nearby, actually on the other side of a wall, pass the cars on Beach Boulevard, the major thoroughfare of the town, which connects La Habra to the rest of Orange County and four freeways that participate in the Los Angeles/Orange County freeway system, notorious nationwide for its complexity. Hence, the apartments offer convenient access to the rest of the southland. In ancient Rome, Pompeii was a typical town, founded in the seventh century BCE between two Greek colonies in what is now southern Italy. When the neighboring volcano Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, the city and many of its inhabitants were encased in ash, which served to preserve the area in its same condition for centuries. For this reason, Pompeii is an extraordinary example of the Roman towns and their inhabitants' ways of life. Many of the paintings on the walls of the houses, for example, still survive, as well as imprints in the ash of the various plants used in the gardens of wealthy townhouses. These townhouses, or domuses, offer a glimpse into the lives of the upper class of Roman citizens and their expressions through art and architecture, much of which remains as it did almost two thousand years ago. There are many similarities between the Pompeii apartments and a townhouse of historical Pompeii, accompanied by just as many differences. To begin with, the modern construction materials of the apartments are nothing similar to the brick and concrete walls of the Pompeiian domus. The apartments use wooden frameworking with drywall and fiberglass insulation, covered on the outside with a flame resistant stucco. Typical to apartment construction now, these materials are a technological leap from ancient Rome. Another difference appears in the ground plan and design of the structure as a whole compared to that of a Roman townhouse in Pompeii. Where a domus would have an axial design centered on the line of the fauces, atrium and tablinum in the front of the building, the apartments have a central grass area with trees, bordered on all sides by the building. Access to the apartments comes through gates at the corners of this quadrangle design instead of through a single front entrance.