Who am I? Well, I consider myself an architect turned archaeologist
and I have had a career as a professor of classics at Ohio University.
My passion has always revolved around the making of architecture and my academic interests focus particularly on the construction technology of Graeco-Roman architecture
.
I have published widely on monuments in Rome and the Roman Empire. I served as the Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Professor at the American Academy in Rome (2018-21). I am currently based in the Classics Department at University of Cincinnati as a Rawson Visiting Scholar.
Sketches of Rome 1985-1992. Center: digging footers and laying rebar in Georgia 1984. (Click for larger images)
I grew up in LaGrange, Georgia knowing that I wanted to be an architect since 9th grade. I never considered anything else … until a bit later. I went off to Virginia Tech where I earned a five-year Bachelor of Architecture degree (1987). The architecture program there was modeled on the Bauhaus tradition. We had dark rooms, pottery studio, wood shop, metal shop, and printmaking facilities. I explored them all and acquired a variety of skills while also learning what I was good at and what I wasn’t. But regardless, I loved working with materials. The first few summers in college, I returned home to work for a local construction company, mostly as a draftsperson but occasionally as a laborer doing jobs like digging footings in the red Georgia dirt. I also learned how to “butter a brick”. I have always enjoyed making things, but the variety of experiences in this job really peaked my interest in the construction process.
After my third year in college, I went to Europe for the first time and when I arrived in Rome I saw the bricks and arches, and I knew that Louis Kahn had been there (he was, in fact, a Resident at the American Academy in Rome in 1950). I sketched and sketched to try to capture the city during my time there. The combination of study, design, construction, and the broadening of my world started to merge into an inchoate idea about how my interests could all come together.
Collection of hand drawings of Trajan’s Forum and Markets from my “Trajanic trilogy” in the American Journal of Archaeology (1993-2000) Made both with and without computer drawn underlays. Central image is from my notebook of triangulation measurements at Trajan’s Markets.
After college I headed to Philadelphia and worked for Mitchell Giurgola Architects on the project Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco. However, I had fallen in love with Rome and that planted the seed of my interest in Roman architecture. Graduate school was never far from my mind. In 1989 I married fellow archaeologist Tom Carpenter and then set out for Lincoln College at Oxford to study Classical Archaeology (M.Phil. 1991) with Jim Coulton and there I met Janet DeLaine and Hazel Dodge. When I arrived at Oxford I knew that I wanted to do a thesis on Trajan’s Markets, and with help from Amanda Claridge, then the Assistant Director at the British School at Rome, I began to study the vaulting there. But to do that I needed plans and sections, so I began to measure. These were the days before Total Station so it was just me, a helper, and a measuring tape. After each day measuring I returned to the BSR, and I began to triangulate, eventually creating a series of large hand drawn plans. After two years at Oxford, I returned to the US intending to work as an architect, and I spent a year in Charlottesville, Virginia while my husband was teaching at University of Virginia. I met John Dobbins who asked me to experiment with learning Autocad because he was thinking of using it in his work at Pompeii. This was in 1992 before the transition to CAD in most architecture firms - among many architects there was still a stigma about using the computer to draw and I had resisted learning. Here was an opportunity for me to test it with no strings attached and without having to be designated the computer nerd in the office… but alas I found it extremely useful and here I am a computer nerd some three decades later. After a year and half in the US, I decided to return to Oxford to pursue a doctorate, and this time I did it with Autocad skills firmly in hand.
Illustrations from Concrete Vaulted Construction in Imperial Rome (Cambridge 2005)
For my doctoral dissertation I expanded the study of vaulting at Trajan’s Markets to include vaulting from Nero to Trajan. During the 90s I worked on a number of monuments in Rome but particularly on the Colosseum and Trajan’s Markets and Column. I eventually published two articles in the Journal of Roman Archaeology (1998, 2005) on the Colosseum and what I called my Trajanic trilogy in the American Journal of Archaeology (1998, 1999, 2000), which included two articles on the construction of Trajan’s Markets and an analysis of how Trajan’s Column could have been erected, which in turn became the basis of a National Geographic video made using stop motion video. I could not have accomplished this work without the support of Lucrezia Ungaro and Roberto Meneghini at Trajan’s Markets and Rossella Rea at the Colosseum.
Stages in carving the Corinthian capital (peperino). Each side left in a different stage of finish. Numbers represent total hours.
Much of this research was part of the larger project that would become my first book, Concrete Vaulted Construction in Imperial Rome (Cambridge 2005), which won the Archaeological Institute of America’s James Wiseman Book Prize in 2007. The genesis of the book took place once I joined the Department of Classics (later the Department of Classics and World Religions) at Ohio University in 1998, but the real push came when I was Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 2001-02. I was deep into writing mode during that year, but I took off three hours a week to go to Peter Rockwell’s studio where over the course of 8 months he taught me to carve a Corinthian capital. This took me on a road trip with Betsey Robinson and Nancy Winter to the quarries at Carrara to buy my own set of carving tools. Though not directly relevant to my book project, the carving experience was a precious one that I cherish and will be forever grateful to Peter for his generosity.
Illustrations from Innovative Vaulting in the Architecture of the Roman Empire (Cambridge 2015)
After the book came out, I was working at the AAR library and looking for my next project. My carrel was located together with those of Fikret Yegul, Brian Rose, and Phil Stinson, all of whom work in Turkey and were insisting that it was embarrassing that I had not yet been there. Up until that point my research was focused in Rome and Italy, but with the book out, new horizons awaited. In the summer of 2006, Tom and I set out for a five-week trip around western Turkey. Aside from my first introduction to Europe in 1985 it was probably the most profound trip I have ever taken.
Afterwards I had an idea for my next book project, Innovative Vaulting in the Architecture of the Roman Empire 1st to 4th Centuries CE (Cambridge 2015). I didn’t want to focus on Turkey alone but rather I wanted to examine how construction materials and vaulting techniques differed throughout the Roman Empire. I wanted to explore why some vaulting techniques traveled from point of origin to certain places and not to others. I received a grant from the National Science Foundation for this project in 2007 and spent the year in Rome making trips to other parts of the Mediterranean. During the writing of this book, I traveled back to Turkey numerous times, once as Visiting Professor at Mersin University, as well as to Egypt, Greece, Tunisia, Croatia, Spain, France, and Britain (I had not been remotely interested in Roman Britain when I was student at Oxford!). I discovered that contrary to popular belief – or perhaps my own belief – the Romans did not teach the conquered people how to build but rather those people had their own traditions and were incredibly innovative in their own right inventing new techniques that would sometime travel back to Rome itself.
An AAR Walk and Talk at the Pasquino, Fall 2019 (photo by John Suvannavejh).
After taking a sabbatical in 2015-16, I spent the fall of 2016 as the Williams Visiting Professor of Roman Architecture at University of Pennsylvania. Then I returned to my home institution, Ohio University, as Chair of the Department of Classics and World Religions. But soon thereafter, the Mellon professorship in the Humanities at the American Academy in Rome was advertised so I applied, and in the summer of 2018 found myself in Rome again, this time for a period of three years (2018-2021) as the AAR Mellon Humanities Professor. Halfway through my appointment, the covid crisis hit , the AAR closed, and most of the Fellows returned to the US. Tom and I were left to spend the lock down in Rome, March-May 2020, as two of the five people living at the AAR, a very surreal experience. The new cohort of Fellows arrived in January of 2021 and we all hunkered down in the AAR through various lock downs (remaining covid free). I completed my term as Mellon Professor in June 2021. I am now in the Department of Classics at University of Cincinnati (https://researchdirectory.uc.edu/p/lancasle).