RCA School of Architecture ResearchRCA SoA Research

‘Hoc Opus, Hic Labor’ is an ongoing research on technological shifts in the architecture of Ancient Rome. It was published in Arch+ as well as the book The Business of Architecture. The research questions the assumption that technology is driven by scientific ‘progress’, aiming to show how majour shifts in construction logic are often prompted by the need to control the labour force. Ancient Rome offers an ideal testground for this hypothesis, not only because its 1000-year development is consistent and lengthy enough to establish recognisable patterns, but also because its history is fundamentally a history of continuous colonisation, and of the way colonial aggression reshapes labour practices and the distribution of wealth and resources.

Ultimately the research tries to flip the narrative of conventional architectural history putting the builders themselves centre stage, and arguing that any built form is primarily the index of the hands that built it.
Although in archaeological studies there is extensive literature on the evolution of Roman masonry, architectural evaluations of this process are scarce and often outdated; moreover, these studies focus on the technical challenges at stake and never connect the innovations with labour conditions, or with the fine-tuning of the Roman colonial machine. ‘Hoc Opus, Hic Labor’ wants to show how form is the outcome of complex processes that often have a significant ‘invisible’ component: the human cost of those who actually build architecture.

Straddling political theory, archaeological evidence, and a rereading of the original Latin literary sources, this research wants to reclaim the history of technology as a formal architectural fact, dense with political and ideological implications.