When I first stepped into the Colosseum 16 years ago, I sensed an underlying order. Given the crumbled state of the ruins, however, it was up to visitors like me to piece together the amphitheater and imagine how it once was. Inside the 'arena', which means 'sand' in Latin, which denoted the material that could soak up blood efficiently, 400,000 gladiators and slaves fought to their death to entertain the masses. Their last views on this fair earth were probably the blue sky and thousands of bloodthirsty raucous Romans packed into stands rooting on their warriors. Within the stands, walls and columns laid out in a perfect elliptical grid, and a multitude of stairs fitting within pie shaped wedges of space. As an architect, the real drama of the Colosseum was not in the arena, but under the stairs. As I sketched out spatial order and impressions of habitation, I could imagine concession stands selling grilled Italian sausages, throngs of Romans peeing in the bathrooms, and merchants selling souvenirs to the masses. Strip away the masonry and the walls, and you get a Heatherwick Vessel like hive of circulation.
Now as I revisit the Colosseum from afar, feverishly probing its plans, models, and sections and constructing 3 dimensional computer models trying to piece together its ideal state, I see the Colosseum Operating System more and more clearly. The Colosseum is modular Roman construction pushed to its logical extreme. Radial walls and columns define 80 bays within an elliptical grid. Within the grid, 4 typical pie shaped sections are deployed: (1) straight run stairs, switchback stairs, main north south west east entries, and radial passages. The spatial complexity of the Colosseum is surprisingly derived from only 4 typical sections for (color coded within the video) that are deployed within the bays and interconnected.
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