Very fine and informative presentation, rich with contextual detail, succinctly and enjoyably delivered. I especially appreciate your obvious affection for many of the Louisiana buildings with which you're so familiar, most of which were new to me. I found myself equally charmed, I think, by those smaller works you featured -- clearly favorites of yours.
You prolly dont give a shit but if you are stoned like me during the covid times you can watch pretty much all of the new movies and series on InstaFlixxer. I've been streaming with my brother during the lockdown xD
Positively outstanding lecture. Haven’t heard a better presentation since I heard Robert Gamble as a kid in Montgomery. I hope to find more of your lectures online.
I think the reason the Romans probably moved toward simple circular shapes is because it's much easier to recreate those profiles if you need to do repairs or do additional work. Once you get into ellipticals it would seem to me as if every carpenter's profiles would be different, and if you lost or broke the molding plane that exact shape may be lost forever. So moving to a circle just seems like an easier way to standardize shapes, and the Romans were very practical.
The Romans also celebrated the circle due to the advent of the Roman arch, which is effectively a half circle. Use and derivation of that shape, through its segments would seem complimentary. We see this in future Italian architecture as the segment arch, and its equivalent pediments. The Roman forms of the already established Greek orders also conveyed an added structural strength. Pulvination and ellipses would be distortions of the established circular shape.
