Water water.

Since Roman times, water has been a life-enhancing adjunct to buildings intensifying their meaning and impact.

The emperor Nero was one of the first to relate water to architecture on a large scale, and he did not make himself popular by doing so. Suetonius described the gardens of the Golden House as having 'an enormous pool, more like a sea than a pool, which was surrounded by buildings made to resemble cities'.(1) The lake was clearly regarded as the most extravagant feature of the Domus Aurea, built almost in the middle of Rome after the great fire. The whole enterprise was so much disliked that after Nero's suicide, his successors quickly destroyed obvious signs of his odious reign, and the pool is reputed to have formed the site (and shape) of the Colosseum.

As well as the reflecting and reflective lake, Nero's garden almost certainly contained rills and streams, for much of it was given over to 'faked rusticity - woods here, open spaces and views there'. Tacitus was cutting about the 'cunning impudent artificialities [of] Nero's architects and engineers, Severus and Celer, [who] did not balk at effects which Nature herself had ruled out as impossible'.(2) The Romans invented the landscaped garden, and relished the relationship of ordered architecture to real or contrived nature. Grand Roman buildings were associated with water, still or rushing unlike the work of the Classical Greeks, who lacked the engineering skills to command the element as an adjunct to architecture.(3)

Water and engineering were integral to Roman culture: the chief priest(4) was called Pontifex Maximus, greatest bridge builder, the man who made links over water. Roman aqueducts brought water to the cities, where its arrival was celebrated in ceremonial fountains. The baths with their huge volumes of water were a focus of public life. A wealthy Roman almost always included a nymphaeum in his villa: a fountain and basins dedicated to the gods of water and springs (nymphs). In even relatively modest Roman houses, water played an integral part, for the atrium, with its central impluvium (rain-water pool), was the first space to be encountered on entering. Under the compluvium (the opening that let the rain in), the impluvium was more than just a cistern, for the image of the sky was caught in it, and light was reflected upwards to the roof and surrounding rooms, as well as reaching them from above.(5) Water, luminosity, volume and structure were all intimately related.

Power of the earth and the monarch

They were not to be so again in Europe for a thousand years after the collapse of the Western Empire, though the sensibility continued in the Muslim world where Roman aquatic engineering skills were developed and enhanced to make splendid gardens from the Alhambra to the Taj Mahal. The Italian Renaissance re-invented the aqueduct and, with it, the wonders of water related to buildings. Re-awakened understanding burst out with astonishing power and imagination in the middle of the sixteenth century at the Villa d'Este(6) where water jets, sprays, squirts, chatters and cascades in innumerable ways, both apparently natural and clearly artificial.

At the bottom of the great gushing hillside which so poetically demonstrates newly-rediscovered command over hydraulics, there is a tranquil passage, where large rectangular fish-ponds reflect the sky. They are the precursors of a new and different sensibility, and a new relationship of humanity to nature, brilliantly analyzed by Vincent Scully who argues that 'In the Italian garden, water is the awesome gift of the earth; in the French garden, water becomes primarily the optical medium by means of which the sky is reflected'.(7) Scully describes the great canal at Versailles where 'our gaze moves rapidly down the tapis vert, but when it hits the water it literally takes off. It no longer adheres but slides - slides across the water to the sky reflected in it ... the human brain, led on by the human two-eyed vision that Descartes analyzed so well, shapes every inch of space to the horizon, and by implication, far beyond it. A human absolutism rules the world at last'.(8)

In total contrast to water as the demonstration of the cosmic power of the Sun King is the age-old celebration of the element as fun. Even Pliny (not a man to offer a joke if a solemn aphorism could he used instead) enjoyed playfulness sometimes, for instance in a curved marble bench in his Tuscan garden from which 'water gushes out from under the seat as if pressed out by the weight of people sitting there, [it] is caught in a stone cistern then held in a polished marble basin which is regulated by a hidden device so as to remain full without overflowing ... A fountain opposite plays and catches its water, throwing it high in the air so that it falls back into the basin, where it is played again at once'.(9) Pliny and his guests reclined on the marble couch with their lighter supper dishes floating about on the basin 'in vessels shaped like birds or little boats'.

Renaissance jokes

The more robust sense of fun of the Renaissance produced the scherzi and giuochi d'aqua. These water amusements varied from the heavy-handed fifteenth-century japes of the Neapolitan Duke Alfonso II, in whose courtyard at Poggioreale diners could suddenly find themselves two or three feet deep in water, to the sudden delicate jets and sprays which unexpectedly cooled visitors to gardens designed 100 years later.(10) Today, some of the cheerful delight of such devices is echoed in the changeful fountains of the US(11) and Singapore, in which children caper amid unpredictable squirtings.

Water can be caused to echo and intensify any human emotion from awe (of wild nature, or of Cartesian command of it) to the light-hearted pleasures of folly and the comforts of domesticity. We have lost much of the virtuosity in its use which Roman and Renaissance designers commanded so comprehensively. It is time to rediscover it. P.D.

1 Suetonius quoted by Masson, Georgina in Italian Gardens, Thames & Hudson, London, 1966, p38.

2 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius, The Annals of Imperial Rome, translated by Michael Grant, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1996, p364. In fact, even Tacitus had to admit that Nero (who may or may not have ordered the fire to be started) was ostentatiously generous to the victims. He rebuilt much of the city at his own expense, with planning regulations intended to promote health and reduce fire hazards. The Domus Aurea and its parks may have been demolished by Nero's successors because they saw a chance to make a fortune in real estate.

3 Though of course, some Classical Greek temples have marvellous relationships to water, for instance the temple of Poseidon at Sounion, dramatic above the sea on its cape. The Hellenistic civilizations had engineering technologies which prefigured the Roman.

4 Later the emperor in his capacity of chief priest. The title is now used by the Pope.

5 Difficult to appreciate now, for the impluvia of Pompeii and Herculaneum are dry.

6 Originally designed for Cardinal Ippolito d'Este by Pirro Ligorio in the 1550s.

7 Scully, Vincent, Architecture: The Natural and the Man Made, St Martin's Press, New York, 1993, p248.

8 Ibid p228.

9 Gaius Plinius Luci The Letters of the Younger Pliny (Book V, 6). Translated by Betty Radice, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1969, p 143.

10 See for instance Lazzaro, Claudia, The Italian Renaissance Garden, Yale, New Haven and London, 1990, pp65-68. Other Renaissance inventions included fountains with the moving and singing birds mentioned by the Ancients, and even the dreaded water organ (there is an example at the Villa d'Este) of which Vitruvius gives a virtually incomprehensible description (Book V, 7).

11 For instance AR August 1988 (and see opposite).