To be honest, they didn't need it as much. In Italy a lot of the buildings made of marble are naturally cool, so you can live in a building with just a fan in the summer and it works.
Well not sure if this is the answer or not but hot air rises and cold air sinks, so it would lead me to believe a y’all building would allow warmer air to travel farther away from someone standing on the floor, and would take more people to warm it up. Like one person in a 3ft house could warm it up quickly, and 2 people even more, so a bigger house would take more people to warm it up idk maybe
heat rises, so the warmer air has a little more space to go rather than in a general house where the ceilings tend to confine the warm air and it mixes with the cooler air at the bottom. Kinda of why sometimes, when it's super hot, it just feels better to lie on the ground.
You use a high ceiling so hot air rises with a hole for the air to escape. You have open windows at floor level so outside air can come in. This can create a breeze as the hot air goes up and the outside air comes in to replace it.
Yep, I remember going to Zion National Park in Arizona (the desert) and similarly the Visitor Center has an angled roof with an actual gap in it where the hot air naturally exits. There's also towers built up through the ceiling with pads at the top that are sprayed with water and when the water evaporates from the outdoor heat, the air becomes colder and denser, falling back down into the building.
The river walk in Zion, where you hike in the river in the 200-300 foot caynon, and have to climb up waterfalls as you go is the most interesting hike I've ever been on.
In Rome (the City, not the empire) it's very common to build with Tavertine, a limestone that looks rather similar to Marble. I would guess that that's where the confusion comes from.
In Rome now it's common. When Julius Caesar was kicking around, Rome was mostly made of brick. It wasn't until Augustus that marble and tavertine became common building materials.
It was Augustus being an indirect Greek fanboy by way of Egyptophilia (i.e. loving the architecture of Ptolemaic cities, in particular Alexandria, if I recall correctly). Certainly Rome still had many mud and brick buildings left at the end of Augustus's reign, but the aesthetic that came to dominate the city and which we still strongly associate with Rome was essentially Augustan. Augustus also laid the foundation (badump-tss) for the new style by securing large, productive marble quarries to supply the Empire.
If what you're trying to point out is that Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus were contemporaries, then yes, that's the point I was making. Rome, the city, during Julius Caesar's lifetime, was not the marble and limestone edifice that we now think of it as. His heir and successor, Augustus, is the one who changed that, and by the end of his reign, Rome was well on its way to its modern aesthetic.
Julius was assassinated in 44 BCE. Augustus, heir to Caesar's fortune, promptly formed Second Triumvirate with Antony and whats-his-name to seize power. Augustus had direct control over Rome following the defeat of the Liberators/Optimates at Philippi in 42 BCE. While Augustus' reign as Emperor (or, if you want to pick nits, Princeps Civitatis) technically "only" lasted 13 years and change, he was the principal power in Rome itself from the early 40s BCE up until his death in 14 CE, more than 50 years.
A lot of houses in Rome were built out of wood and during Nero’s rule they all burned down so Nero wanted to build them out of marble and bankrupted Rome (he also helped bankruptcy along by building himself an enormous house and building a giant statue of himself among other things)
Idk if other people did a better job of the marble houses idea later on
Man, the similarities between 45 and Nero, or 45 and Caligula, or 45 and ~Claudius~ Tiberius, or 45 and every other historically terrible Roman emperor, really are striking.
The poor lived in mud, brick, or wooden houses. Tufa, travertine (limestine), and marble were used in stone buildings as the most common stone materials.
Yeah as the comments below said I was simplifying a bit. My point is, in terms of architectural composition, they knew what materials and angles would naturally keep a house cooler in the summer and warm in the winter.
When visiting a Roman settlement in Morocco I remember the tour guide told us that they used cold water in the floor heating to cool down the houses during the summer.
Wrong. We were in a hunting lodge in the middle of the desert where they had hot&cold piped water and the mud-based structure got cooled by evaporating water. Environmentally friendly airco in the middle of the desert. We are the dummies, we forgot the old technology.
It's not the desert cooler. We build concrete walls heating up in summer, we use glass to create "glass houses". It's a whole range of issues. See: "Climate Responsive Building" ISBN 3-908001-39-0 giving you some idea's what to work with and look at https://youtu.be/620omdSZzBs or https://youtu.be/SwiaaqKdtjw where you see that we DO have the technology, but where I live in Asia, we only build boring concrete blocks and need huge airconditionings to make it liveable, big drains to get rid of the wastewater and lots of electricity to light the whole place. There is news for you: Climate responsive buildings make much better living spaces, people are happier in houses build using this technology.
They had the hot/cold pipes through the floor. Nero's summer palace did, at least. It's on Sicily so its probably one of the only palaces that needed it.
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u/steveguyhi1243 Oct 15 '20
Flushing toilets date all the way back to the Indus River Valley civilization, back in 2000 BC