THE TOUMBA BUILDING AT LEFKANDI: Preliminary Results of a New Architectural Analysis

The University of Notre Dame School of Architecture and College of Engineering present THE TOUMBA BUILDING AT LEFKANDI: Preliminary Results of a New Architectural Analysis, in partnership with New Mexico State University and the University of Illinois. This event was recorded on May 9, 2022.

Built in the first half of the 10th century BC, the Toumba Building at Lefkandi is one of the  earliest-known monumental structures built in Greece following the end of the Bronze Age. According to J.J. Coulton’s 1993 reconstruction, the building had a “veranda” of wooden posts around the perimeter, which therefore established the Toumba Building as the earliest-known local antecedent of the peristyle of later Greek temples. This conception was widely accepted by scholars and went unchallenged until 2015, when Georg Herdt called it into question on structural grounds. Subsequent studies have therefore been divided, with some retaining Coulton’s peripteral reconstruction, and others rejecting it as “structurally questionable.”

This colloquium presents the preliminary findings of a new architectural study of the Toumba Building that began in 2020 at the ISHA Lab—Laboratory for the Interdisciplinary Study of Historical Architecture. A team of architectural historians, civil engineers, and aerospace engineers from the University of Notre Dame, joined by scholars from other institutions, has reassessed the structural feasibility of Coulton’s peripteral reconstruction. 

For more information visit the event website.