Spolia

Spolia, from a Liverpool neighborhood to ancient Rome.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

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• 0:36Roman Mars?

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• 1:21Roman Mars?

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• 1:49Roman Mars?

  This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In South Liverpool, there's a neighborhood called Granby. It used to be one of the most vibrant and diverse neighborhoods in the UK. It had a busy main street lined with shops and cafes. But by 2012, when an architect named Lewis Jones first visited, most of the houses were unoccupied.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  So, you know, a couple of hundred houses, but only about 10 or 12 people still living there. The rest of the house is all empty.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Granby had suffered through decades of unemployment, aggressive policing, and failed redevelopment schemes. And over time, the neighborhood had hollowed out.

• 2:31Roman Mars?

  That's 99PI's senior editor, Delaney Hall.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  The local government had forced residents to sell their homes and then boarded them up. But before the authorities sealed each house, they gutted it.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  They'd strip everything out. They'd strip out the copper, the lead, everything that was seen to have an economic value, but also everything that would enable someone to live there. The toilets, the kind of infrastructure. And that was to prevent people from squatting in those houses after they'd been emptied out.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  And after stripping the houses and boarding up the windows, the government would place a sign on the front, reading...

• 3:09Speaker 01

  "All items of value have been removed from this property." And, you know, it's quite, quite a provocation when every single house on the street says on it, "No items of value in this house."

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Of course, the government meant materials like copper and lead. But there are other kinds of value embedded in a home. There's the skill it took to build it, and the years of life that happened inside of it, and the community that grew up around it. And what happened next in Granby would prove the signs wrong.

• 3:43Roman Mars?

  A small group of residents basically refused to leave the neighborhood. Little by little, they began clearing trash from the empty lots, planting community gardens, and painting the boarded up houses in bright colors.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Eventually, this band of holdouts formed a community land trust, or a CLT. Their goal was to take ownership of the empty houses and bring people back to the neighborhood. They raised money through a patchwork of small grants, and then they realized it might be useful to have some folks on board who knew how to design and build stuff, which is how Lewis got involved.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  They wanted to renovate those houses. They wanted to provide those as affordable housing. They wanted to invite people who previously had lived in that neighborhood but had to be moved away from it. They wanted to invite those people back in.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  Lewis is a part of a design collective called Assemble. And with Assemble's support, the CLT advocated to the local government to stop demolishing the remaining homes. Then they worked together to renovate a handful of the old houses.

• 4:47Roman Mars?

  As they pulled out materials that were too damaged to save, they started experimenting with the debris. Eventually, they set up a little backyard workshop with a local artist. And together, they figured out how to make something that they called Granby Rock.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  And it was basically a kind of rubble tarotso that we'd take all of the broken bricks and bits of slates and other kind of debris coming out of the renovation process, and we'd recast them as components for these new decorative fireplaces and mantelpieces that we then put back into each house.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Every chunk of Granby Rock was unique, swirled with color from the old bricks and flecked with pieces of broken slate. Then it was poured into molds and polished smooth. Granby Rock fireplaces and countertops went into each of the renovated houses.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  It just felt important as part of kind of the process of reclaiming the narrative of these houses, of this neighborhood, that actually valuing everything that was there was important.

• 5:50Roman Mars?

  Over the next few years, dozens of properties in Granby were renovated and then offered as affordable housing. And slowly, people started moving in.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  New families prepared dinner on the countertops made from salvaged brick. They sat near fireplaces that were cast from the rubble of the house next door. They were living in a very real way, with materials from the neighborhood's complicated past.

• 6:17Roman Mars?

  In the world of design, there's a term that's used for the practice of taking elements from older buildings and reusing them in new ones. It's called spolia. And what Assemble did in Granby was a version of that. The designers looked at the materials from the old houses, and they saw an opportunity to make something new.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  Reuse has always been an element of how humans build. We are endless recyclers, pulling nails out of old burned timbers, and cleaning and restacking used bricks, and hauling stone from one building to the next.

• 6:52Roman Mars?

  But with spolia, this reuse isn't just a matter of practicality. It also carries meaning. The old material has a history, and using it in a new building is a way of acknowledging that what came before still matters. And that might be why spolia shows up in some of the world's most famous architecture. Places like the Hagia Sophia, Notre Dame, and the Great Mosque of Cordoba all use repurposed stonework.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  But to really understand spolia, you have to go back to the place where the practice first became widespread. It happened when a civilization was in the middle of an existential crisis, and it started pulling apart the old world in order to build a new one. That civilization was the Roman Empire.

• 7:40Roman Mars?

  That's funny. I was just thinking about the Roman Empire.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  At its peak, the Roman Empire controlled the entire Mediterranean world. It spanned Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia. The empire lasted for roughly five centuries. And nearly 2,000 years later, we are still arguing about its legacy.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  So my name is Dr. Emma Southern. I am a Roman historian. I am an ex-academic, and now I write books about how horrible the Romans were.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Emma loves to hate the Romans. She has been obsessed ever since she first learned about them as a teenager.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  The thing that I love the most about them, more than any other empire really, is the complete disconnect between their image of themselves as being the most rational, the most perfect, the peak of civilization, the best that humanity can be, combined with the actual reality of what their empire was, which was a horrifically violent machine that chewed up land, it chewed up resources, and produced marble buildings and emperors.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  The Romans projected power through architecture. Emperors built enormous monuments to prove that they were rich and legitimate.

• 8:59Roman Mars?

  Emperor Augustus famously claimed that he, quote, "Found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble." Hadrian built the Pantheon. Trajan built his famous column. The Flavian Emperors made the Colosseum.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  In fact, pretty much all the Roman emperors that we're familiar with today are the ones who left behind something monumental. Because that was the whole point of building the monuments in the first place. The Romans were always thinking about the future. They were always imagining us, 2,000 years down the road, marveling at what they'd created.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  Soon as they can afford to build an expensive stone, they do build an expensive stone because they know it will last. And they're always producing for the generations in the future to make sure they will be remembered.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  The most expensive, durable, monumental stone to build with was marble. And Romans quarried it from all over their empire. They got green marble from Greece and red porphyry from Egypt. These Roman quarries were state-owned, and they relied mostly on slave labor. They were located in hot, dry places, and they were all overseen by the army. It was terrible, back-breaking work.

• 10:14Roman Mars?

  After mining the marble, the Romans shipped it across the Mediterranean and used it to build the kind of magnificent structures they became famous for.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  And that's how it went for many centuries. The Romans built monuments to show how awesome they were, using rare stone from far-flung places, and the message it conveyed was clear: Rome was eternal. Until it wasn't.

• 10:40Roman Mars?

  Starting around the middle of the third century, the Roman Empire got hit by a series of overlapping catastrophes. Each one made the next one worse. This wasn't exactly the fall of Rome, it was more like the stumble.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  First, there was political chaos.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  People keep murdering the emperor and then declaring themselves emperor far, far away from Rome, and it's very chaotic and there's no stability at the top.

• 11:06Roman Mars?

  Meanwhile, the empire's neighbors were watching this political instability, and they're thinking, hey, there's an opportunity here.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  Everybody around the outside of the empire thinks this is a great time to try and have a go at taking some land for themselves. You start to get non-Roman peoples trying to get inside the empire.

• 11:25Speaker 02

  Then, a pandemic hit. It was called the Plague of the Cyprian, and it was horrific. For almost 20 years, it ripped through the empire. Some scholars now think it was a virus similar to Ebola.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  And it was killing thousands of people a day for 20 years in seasonal cycles.

• 11:47Roman Mars?

  And then, the climate was also changing. The agricultural parts of the empire experienced terrible droughts. The Nile stopped flooding, crops failed, people starved.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Oh, and then there was hyperinflation on top of everything else. And these various crises went on and on for decades.

• 12:05Roman Mars?

  Needless to say, nobody was really looking after the Romans' magnificent marble buildings during this absolute cluster of a half-century. There was a lot of deferred maintenance, while people dealt with hemorrhagic fevers, and famine, and invasion from all sides.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Nobody has been replacing broken tiles, or polishing the tiled floors, or putting the mosaics back together.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  The result was that, in Rome, there was a lot of beautiful, expensive marble just sitting there, slowly falling apart from neglect.

• 12:37Roman Mars?

  At the same time that was happening, Rome's quarries in Greece, Egypt, and North Africa were becoming really hard to access. Travel and trade was much more dangerous. That meant if you wanted to build something impressive, and the Romans always did, you couldn't just order up some new marble.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  The Romans were in a bind. Their colossal old monuments were falling down, and they couldn't get the material to build new ones. Until, finally, one guy connected the dots. He realized that you could use those old buildings as raw material to build new stuff. His name was Constantine.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  By the time Constantine kind of comes and unites the empire, everybody is very ready for a savior.

• 13:25Roman Mars?

  Constantine grew up a soldier, and he spent nearly 20 years fighting one civil war after another, until finally, he controlled the entire empire. Then, he proceeded to transform it. He legalized Christianity, for one thing, and, most relevant to our story, he launched an enormous wave of construction. Like every emperor before him, he understood the power of architecture.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  And so did the people around him. Not long after his bloody ascent to power, the Roman Senate gave him a gift: a huge triumphal arch, right next to the Colosseum.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  I have Constantine's arch tattooed on me, because it's the quintessential arch.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  The monument was officially a celebration of Constantine's rule. But Emma says the Senate had its own, more self-interested reasons for building the big, beautiful arch.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  It's the kind of thing you do when you have an emperor who killed a lot of people. You give him the biggest arch, you give him anything that will make him happy, and hopefully not turn his really big, successful army against you at any point.

• 14:33Roman Mars?

  The arch was covered in panels with sculpted scenes on them, but many of those panels weren't originally made for Constantine. They were taken from monuments honoring emperors who lived around 200 years before. This was partly a matter of practicality, because it was hard to get enough new marble to make the arch from scratch. But maybe more importantly, it was a symbolic move. Because, in a narcissistic twist, the images of the old emperors had been reworked to look like Constantine.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  A sculptor has gone in and subtly reshaped the face, because he's got quite a distinctive head, Constantine, so they have made his big, square head and put that on to the original.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  This effectively made it look like Constantine, with his big, square head, was doing all the stuff that past emperors had done. Like riding a horse over the bodies of his enemies, or addressing a crowd of troops, or hunting a lion. The idea was to remind people of when Rome was great.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  To invoke a memory of Rome at its healthiest, at its most prosperous. So it is a specific and deliberate choice to make that clear connection back to a kind of lost, golden past.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Constantine's arch was a masterpiece of political messaging, and it was also a turning point in the history of architectural reuse. There has been some debate among scholars about whether the repurposing of the panels was artistic or just practical, but a lot of them think it wasn't just recycling to cut costs. It was meant to communicate something about the new political moment.

• 16:18Roman Mars?

  A column pulled out of a pagan temple still has an aura of prestige. A carved panel from Rome's Golden Age still carries a certain authority. Constantine understood that if you placed those materials in a new context, all of that accumulated meaning could be deployed in new ways. It was reuse as propaganda.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  Constantine's reuse also set a new precedent. Once the emperor himself started pulling apart old monuments to build new ones, it gave permission to the rest of the empire. It became this interesting and legitimate thing to do. And soon, this kind of reuse was spreading. People started salvaging old columns, and decorative friezes, and ornamental stonework. They would pull that material out of old buildings and use it in new construction.

• 17:09Roman Mars?

  And a lot of that new construction was churches. Constantine had legalized Christianity, and now the faith needed a lot of grand, new buildings to match its status as a legitimate religion. Huge basilicas went up across the empire, and they needed marble. Thankfully, there were crumbling pagan temples everywhere, full of the kinds of stone that would make churches look amazing.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  And it becomes about the power of the church on earth, to show that this is God's earth, and we can decorate His house with all of the beautiful things.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  The other thing that supercharged this new wave of architectural reuse was that Constantine had founded a new capital, named for himself, in Constantinople. And much of the new building in Constantinople involved materials salvaged from other places.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  When he founds Constantinople, he sweeps around the empire, taking up cool stuff from other places, basically, in order to decorate his new city, much to the stress of everybody else.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  A lot of people were not thrilled about the old marble temples being pulled apart. Especially in Rome, it sometimes felt like the city was being taken apart, piece by piece.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  Everything that we know about what ordinary people saw about it is that they hated it.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  People actually rioted. They were so fed up that their neighborhoods were starting to look ramshackle, and just bad.

• 18:36Speaker 03

  Like, that was a nice building that was in my neighborhood, and it had really nice columns on it, and now it doesn't have any columns, and the roof is falling down. And what, nobody's going to do anything about that?

• 18:47Speaker 02

  They needed the equivalent of a Roman HOA, some enforcer who might keep up the standards of the neighborhood. And eventually, about 50 years after Constantine basically invented this kind of reuse, later emperors were passing laws trying to stop it. If you were caught stealing stone from buildings, you could be fined. But the laws were pretty toothless, and it kept happening anyway. And this tension never really went away. There were the people who wanted to preserve the old buildings, and then there were the people who wanted to strip them for parts.

• 19:23Roman Mars?

  In fact, that tension eventually became embedded in the word that we use for the practice. The term spolia was coined during the Renaissance, when researchers of the time had rediscovered Classical Rome and fallen in love with it. And when they noticed that beautiful ancient Roman stonework had been salvaged and then wedged into medieval church walls, they were disgusted. It looked to them like the church had pillaged the ancient world. They coined the word spolia from the Latin for the spoils of war.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  To describe this process, to make it into a process of war, of almost attack on these old buildings. The use of spolia starts as a Renaissance moral judgment on what has happened.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  But over time, the term lost its moral sting.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  And now, in academic writing, it is just used as a neutral descriptor.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Spolia outlived the empire that made it famous. Wherever the Romans built stuff, later civilizations found their materials and put them to new uses. Roman tiles showed up in medieval churches in England. Charlemagne installed Roman stonework in the chapel in his palace. And across the Islamic world, mosques were built with columns salvaged from Roman temples. But spolia is really just one expression of a much older and more universal human instinct to reuse. After the Second World War, for example, when European cities lay in ruins, people picked through the rubble and used what they found to rebuild.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  That wasn't really spolia, because it wasn't about symbolism. It was just necessity. But still, the underlying logic was the same. For most of human history, reuse wasn't some special thing. It was just how people built.

• 21:21Roman Mars?

  But it's not how people build anymore. That's when we come back.

• 21:28Speaker 04

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• 21:58Roman Mars?

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• 22:42Roman Mars?

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• 23:25Roman Mars?

  Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Today, the vast majority of construction involves demolishing what's already there and starting from scratch with all-new materials that are uniform and predictable, with no history and no variability. It's often cheaper and more efficient than reusing the old stuff.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  But now, a growing number of architects and researchers think that reuse is a practice we need to relearn. Because it turns out that making everything from scratch with raw materials is something the planet can't sustain.

• 24:18Speaker 05

  As we look into the future, we're not going to be in an extract and throw-away world.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  This is Kate Simonin, a professor of architecture at the University of Washington.

• 24:28Speaker 05

  I mean, by requirement, we're going to need to reuse the things that we have made previously. Otherwise, ultimately, we would run out.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  The labor and fuel expended in creating even a single brick are enormous. And Kate says that it's worth sitting with what it actually takes to make something new.

• 24:48Speaker 05

  So in order to make a brick, you have to excavate the clay material from the earth. And in doing that, you're using an excavator that's burning diesel. And so as you're burning that diesel, emissions go up into the atmosphere.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  So that's step one, just digging the clay out of the ground. Then you have to shape it, and that's often done with a machine.

• 25:07Speaker 05

  And that machine might be using electricity, making that electricity has emissions.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Then the brick needs to be cured. And that usually means burning natural gas to fire the kiln.

• 25:16Speaker 05

  And that natural gas then releases emissions into the atmosphere.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  And finally, you have to transport the brick to wherever it's needed, which requires a truck, or a train, or an airplane.

• 25:28Speaker 05

  And that then is also, again, likely burning diesel, which releases emissions.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Now consider, every brick, every steel beam, every panel of drywall, and every pane of glass in every building in the world, there's just an enormous amount of materials and labor and what's called embodied carbon in the built environment.

• 25:52Roman Mars?

  Which is why a growing number of architects and engineers argue that we basically need to practice spolia at scale.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  And that sounds like a great idea, but it's actually very hard to do. When you salvage something like an old steel beam, it's hard to know exactly what you've got, like what it's actually made of and what loads it can carry. There is no reliable supply chain for reclaimed materials, at least not at the scale we really need.

• 26:22Roman Mars?

  And most buildings aren't designed to be taken apart. It takes a lot of time and effort to deconstruct an old building piece by piece so that the parts can be used again.

• 26:32Speaker 05

  How we make buildings today has influence on how easy they will be to take apart in the future. And not that many building owners today are asking their design teams to make it easy to tear down my building in 60 to 80 years. That's not really their top priority.

• 26:50Roman Mars?

  In other words, it's hard to get out of that emperor mindset that buildings must last forever.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  There are some traditions that better understand a building's transience. For example, Japanese temples used to be built without nails or screws. Instead, they were supported by interlocking wooden joints so that they could be taken apart and reassembled. And there are modern examples, too, like the Olympic Village during the 2024 Paris Games that was designed to be converted to housing after the competition. So there are buildings, here and there, being designed with their next life in mind. I asked Kate what she thought about the Roman connection, how they took their crumbling buildings and used them as raw materials for something new.

• 27:40Speaker 05

  I think those buildings actually had fallen apart. You know, they were the debris of previous civilizations. And so ultimately, our lives will be the debris for other civilizations.

• 27:53Roman Mars?

  There are a lot of ways to think about what makes building materials valuable. Kate thinks about it in terms of scarcity. The earth is finite. There's not an endless amount of clay, sand, and stone. We have to be careful not to exhaust the materials we have.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  The Roman emperors thought about value in terms of prestige. Placing old materials in new contexts allowed them to communicate something about continuity and power.

• 28:21Roman Mars?

  And the residents of Granby in South Liverpool measured value in a different way. They cared about the history of their neighborhood. And when they worked with Lewis Jones and the team at Assemble, they didn't just see old and dilapidated houses. They saw the raw materials for something new.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Granby Rock, the product they made from the neighborhood's debris, was a way of insisting that the community still had worth.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  It was important to put these things into the houses that would express the, you know, yeah, love and care and attention that had gone into renovating them.

• 28:58Roman Mars?

  But since the early days of the Granby project, Lewis and his collaborators have started thinking much more about reuse in the context of climate change. The Granby workshop didn't close when the renovation was finished. Instead, it grew into something bigger, a manufacturing studio in the neighborhood that's still running today. It produces architectural tiles and ceramics out of recycled materials. They fire these tiles at lower temperatures to reduce their environmental footprint, and they use electric kilns.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  So what started as spolia in the oldest sense has evolved into something more like what Kate Simonin advocates for. The workshop now helps other projects turn their construction debris into new building materials. It's reuse that involves symbolism, but it's also a practical recognition that we can't keep extracting raw materials forever.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Every project always starts with trying to understand what's already there and how to be really like resourceful. And so reuse is a big, big part of that.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  I asked Lewis what Granby looks like today, more than a decade after Assemble joined with the community land trust to renovate the first houses.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Granby today still very much has the same spirit. I think it had, you know, when I first visited 15 odd years ago, there's still a kind of sense of wildness there. You know, there's still like furniture on the street, there's plants in the pavement, there's the odd painting on the wall, whatever it is. But obviously, you know, amongst that, there are a lot more people living now.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  Lewis described kids playing on the streets where not too long ago, every house had one of those signs, the ones that said, "All items of value have been removed from this property."

• 30:54Roman Mars?

  Those signs were, of course, wrong. The materials of the past are never worthless.

• 31:13Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible was produced this week by Delaney Hall and edited by Emmett Fitzgerald, mixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Real, fact checking by Sona Avakian. Kathy Tu is our executive producer, Kirk Colstead is our digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, LaShma Dawn, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradly, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our own Discord

• 31:57Roman Mars?

  server. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

• 32:11Roman Mars?

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• 34:18Roman Mars?

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