Bascom Hall is undergoing a face-lift, starting with its pillars that have been temporarily replaced with steel girders.
\Actually, the better term to use is columns, not pillars,"" said William Aylward, UW-Madison assistant professor of classics, noting ""pillar"" is a general term for any vertical support, whereas ""column"" is the preferred architectural term for specifically round, ornately designed structures.
If you watch the workers who are renovating Bascom Hall, with their heavy equipment and modern tools, you might wonder how the ancient Greeks and Romans managed to create such magnificent marble structures 2,500 years ago without the luxury of machinery such as cranes.
Actually, as it turns out, they did have cranes-treadmill cranes that relied on Flintstones-like human power rather than diesel power, according to Aylward. These cranes helped workers raise the heavy marble blocks.
""The earliest monuments probably used wooden columns,"" Aylward said, ""but after 600 B.C., marble and limestone became more common.""
The marble, shipped in from distant quarries by boat or cart, had to endure a bumpy ride that could cause the blocks to become chipped or cracked. So stonecutters cut the blocks a few inches thicker than necessary; the excess would be carved off anyway so it didn't matter if it got chipped. This excess width led to a convenient hoisting method.
""When the masons chiseled down the excess coat, they left projections-handles-on two or four sides. They'd wrap ropes through the handles, tug the block up with pulleys, and once the block was in place they'd cut the handles off,"" Aylward said. Archeologists know this because on some ancient buildings that remain standing, those handles are still in place, perhaps because the constructions went over budget.
Wood and brick were also used as raw materials, but primarily for building houses, Aylward said. The Greeks made large public buildings, especially monuments, from marble, an elegant stone whose strength was necessary in what is an earthquake-prone region.
As Rich Slaughter, director of the UW-Madison geology museum, pointed out, ""Marble was probably preferred [as a raw material] because it's durable but it could still be worked.""
Despite their ornate appearance, the columns of Bascom Hall are made of wood, according to Jim Draeger, deputy state historic preservation officer. The building, called University Hall when it was built in 1859, originally had a dome that was later destroyed.
""There was a fire in 1916, and the building might have burned to the ground, but there was a water tank on the roof that was meant to be a reservoir for fighting fires,"" Draeger said. ""The dome caught on fire and fell into the tank, and the fire was extinguished."" So indirectly the reservoir served its purpose.
The current renovation is to restore the front portico and to repair water seepage damage. The renovation should be completed some time this fall.
Dinesh Ramde is a graduate student in journalism. His columns appear every other Tuesday. You can forward science questions to him at dramde@wisc.edu.
