Roman Concrete Research Paper

Concrete and the arch are definitely peculiar Roman architectural innovations, which significant development allowed many new infrastructural deployments, including the building and extension over wide kilometric distances of acqueducts and bordering walls, like the Hadrian's wall.

The exploitation of the arch together with the use of concrete are anyway at the centre of all the great public buildings of ancient Rome, hence also including temples (like the Pantheon), amphitheatres (like the Colosseum), baths (like the baths of Caracalla) theatres, roads and bridges (Kamm, n.d.).

Concrete was anyway possibly even the greater innovation of the two, as it also allowed the arch to be properly exploited, and it "undoubtedly was a Roman invention" (Kamm, n.d., para. 5), while

The arch.

As Kamm writes:

A solitary triumphal arch can hardly give aesthetic satisfaction unless its proportions are in tune with its surroundings, and the Romans do not seem to have given much thought to that aspect. The true triumphal arches are thus those which support the bridges and aqueducts that have survived (n.d. para. 6).

"The arch enables wide spaces to be crossed by the use of the minimum of materials, thus relieving weight which would otherwise put an intolerable burden on the structure" (Kamm, n.d., para 6).

And this use of the arch brought indeed to the construction of acqueducts extended over long kilometric distances with the ability to bring water to Rome directly from mountain springs.

Like the Claudian acqueduct having a "channel 70 km long and started its final overhead descent to Rome 12 km out" (Kamm, n.d., para. 6) which was anyway just one of the eleven acqueducts providing water to Rome during the early