• Virtual reconstruction of the facade of the trajanic palace on the Palatine in Rome towards the Circus Maximus | © Architekturreferat DAI Berlin | 3D-model: Lengyel Toulouse Architekten on basis of a digital model of A. Müller
    The Circus Maximus and the Forum Romanum served as places of political life and public communication in ancient Rome. Digital 3D-models facilitated the analysis of the spatial structures and were used as a basis for the reconstruction of different periods of the place and the buildings | ©DAI Berlin
  • Forum Romanum 3.0 | Photo + Copyright: Susanne Muth
    The research and teaching project “digital Forum Romanum” reconstructed the lost visual appearance of the Ancient Forum Romanum through a digital model and made it understandable again. The results of the project were presented in the exhibition "Forum Romanum 3.0"
  • 3D-Model of the Republican Baths in Pompeii | © Monika Trümper
    The Stabian Baths are a key area for the reconstruction of the urban development of Pompeii and for research into the development of ancient bathing culture. New excavations and detailed evaluations enabled a complete documentation and analysis of the republican baths. | Image © Monika Trümper
Wherever societies order their lives in a city, a central role in the construction of the cultural and mental “households” of individuals and social groups is always played by urban spaces of varying functions. The city therefore offers its inhabitants not only living space, which allows them to pursue individual and collective interests and needs, but also a framework for cultural orientation and identity establishment.
AT A GLANCE
29 Researchers
8 Research Projects
6 Dissertation Projects
77 Publications
9 Events
16 Cooperating partners

As recent sociological research has emphasized, a society or social group not only reacts to its existing urban space, but also designs, creates and transforms this space continually – after all, the society is the first to determine what is perceived as space and what can be considered as such. This process whereby urban spaces are actively shaped and modeled was referred to here using the term “cityscaping”, and played a central role in project description that follows. The aim of the research group was to study the processes by which urban spaces were actively appropriated in ancient cultures, and to examine this as a mirror of perceptions and reflections on urban spaces. The phenomenon of cityscaping therefore was treated from two perspectives: the first concerned the physical modeling and functionalizing of urban spaces through their architectural and urban-planning configurations (physical cityscaping), while the second concerned the literary modeling and functionalizing of urban spaces in texts that deal with the men that act within these spaces or that are composed by them (literary cityscaping). These two perspectives stand in a close, complimentary relation: the perception of urban space as living space, made tangible by the literary texts, also necessarily determines its material arrangement, or rather rearrangement; without an awareness of this reflection, architectural and urbanistic findings can hardly be interpreted; conversely, the literary confrontation with the city as a space of thought and discourse – independent of physical reality – is also nevertheless informed by experiences of the real and physically formed urban space, and hence is difficult to interpret without knowledge of this space. Only a reciprocal, interdisciplinary exchange between literary studies on the one hand and archaeology and building history on the other made it possible to comprehensively examine the cultural concept of cityscaping.

Research Projects

Dissertations