Key Buildings from Prehistory to the Present by Ballantyne Andrew;

Author:Ballantyne, Andrew;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Laurence King Publishing

Pont du Gard

Nîmes, France; c.20 BCE

The Romans brought urbanism to places that had never experienced it before. Before the advent of motorized transport and mass production, people in rural districts would have done for themselves everything necessary for their own sustenance. In a city it is possible to develop a specialism – to make shoes, do joinery or make fine pottery. With enough people around to make use of the specialized work, a business can thrive. The larger the city, the more specialized the trades are likely to become. And the more specialized the business, the more efficiently and skilfully the goods can be produced, and the more refined they can be. There are distinct advantages for a society that has a network of cities.

Across the Roman Empire, roads made it possible to maintain links between cities and between the provinces and the supreme powers in Rome, which consumed a steady supply of the world’s most luxurious goods. Provincial cities were lower down the command structure, but a regional administrative centre such as Nîmes plainly enjoyed a form of life that was very sophisticated compared with that of the countryside.

The Pont du Gard, as it is now called, was part of Nîmes’s infrastructure. The city consumed crops and minerals from the surrounding rural areas, and also water. Some of its water supply reached the city by way of the Pont du Gard, which was built to carry a stream of water across a steep valley (with another river at the bottom of it).

The bridge’s purpose lies in the channel that runs across the top, closed in from the sky with stone slabs, and the rest of the bridge was built to hold that channel in place. Its position is exact. The water was brought almost 50 km (30 miles), and along that distance it dropped only about 17 metres (56 feet), so the watercourse was almost flat – but not quite. Water cannot be persuaded to flow uphill, and had the engineering been less precise – if the watercourse had wandered up and down even a little – the water supply would not have flowed at all. In fact, it flowed well, and continued in use for some 800 years, until sustained neglect meant that the watercourse silted up and stopped working.

In spite of the fact that the bridge is an impressive monument, it was not built as a monument. The construction is in blocks of stone that were neither decorated nor trimmed to an even surface. To make the arches, stone blocks were put in position on timber formwork, which held them in place until there was a complete arch that could support itself. Then the temporary timber structure was taken away and moved to the next arch that was being built. These timbers were large because they had for a while to support very heavy masonry. They rested on projecting stone corbels – blocks that were longer than the blocks above them – and, if the building had been intended for public view, these projections would have been chiselled off.

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