Chapter 3 focuses on the mechanisms through which certain special temple buildings were invested with an essential "prospective" role for empire and how in the face of crisis—especially the physical destruction of the buildings along with the challenge to the claims for continuity and security that came with them—those mechanisms were renewed or transformed.

Buildings frequently change over their lifespans as they are adapted to new needs and affected by damage and decay, yet our approaches to architectural history often fail to account for the material and cultural effects of interventions on existing structures or to pursue the critical questions they raise about temporality and urban environments. The book’s Introduction orients readers to diachronic approaches to architectural history, that is, beyond the moment of initial construction, oriented to the perspective of historical actors. In recognizing moments of architectural revision and rebuilding as inflection points, it stresses the importance of accounting for architectural fabrics composed of variously dated elements and of examining the ways that architectural change shapes audience perception of the site’s history and their own era’s relationship to it. Close examination of two exceptionally long-lasting structures, the Pantheon in Rome and the Hagia Sophia/Ayasofia in Constantinople/Istanbul present a compelling contrast to most modern forms of architectural restoration and illustrate central themes of the book. The chapter situates study of historical architecture within current approaches to cultural time and to material culture and places architectural change in dialogue with text-based approaches to Roman temporality.

The first set of chapters operates at the level of patrons and their communities—imperial and local—to grapple with architectural rebuilding as a mechanism through which shared pasts, presents, and futures were articulated and substantiated. Chapter 1 examines architectural rebuilding as an ideological virtue. In particular, it looks to evidence from Roman and late antique histories, coins, and inscribed statue bases to chart the place and shape of architectural rebuilding (in comparison with and juxtaposition to new construction projects) within the broader commemorative landscape of honor and virtue in cities across the Mediterranean.

Moving from revised buildings’ monumental texts to their material surfaces and spatial arrangements, the book’s final section expands our investigation into "unmarked" ways in which new contexts reframed old elements. Chapter 7 argues that change over time was regularly characterized and symbolized in terms of vividly contrasting architectural substances, in which marble (especially) was used to chart (and critique) urban progress and to modulate a balance between tradition and innovation.

The suite of chapters comprising Part II homes in on monumental building inscriptions as central means through which individual buildings shaped perceptions of their own architectural histories and of temporal change more broadly. The first of these, Chapter 4, investigates assemblages of epigraphic records of architectural interventions that accumulated on buildings over their long ancient lives. The chapter’s analysis of these encrusted epigraphic environments charts a range of strategies that benefactors adopted in setting up their own commemorative texts vis à vis those of earlier patrons and considers the effects of those decisions on the inscriptions’ reception by contemporary audiences.

In these pages we have witnessed the deep degree to which architectural rebuilding, as a practice distinct from new construction, was embedded in the Roman patronage system and served as powerful social currency in cities throughout the Mediterranean in the centuries spanning the early imperial to late antique periods. Overall, architectural rebuilding continued to be publicly celebrated as an honorific virtue through the sixth century, though the reach and impact of architectural euergetism shrank as patronage patterns changed, the overall volume of architectural construction declined, and spending on it was increasingly directed toward ecclesiastical and monastic architecture. This, I suggest, was principally due to the unique ways in which rebuilding leveraged site- and audience-specific connections to past and future communities. The high public value placed on rebuilding was also due to the opportunities it offered emperors, bishops, and other patrons to inflect cyclical celebratory calendars that enacted present order and implied future stability through their regular renewal and reperformance. While events of architectural destruction sorely tested that stability and regularly signaled divine displeasure to contemporaries, rebuilding concomitantly asserted current and future security through the reaffirmation (and simultaneous opportunity for reframing) of the empire’s pious relationship to their god(s).

Chapter 2, a pendant to the first, argues for the importance of temple anniversaries and other festivals associated with rebuilding for writing, experiencing, and synthesizing chronologies in time and space at the lived, local level.

The book’s final chapter turns to questions of spolia and converted buildings. Its discussion reorients conventional approaches to these debated topics by exploring architectural reuse through the lens of lived experience. Focusing on evidence for original doorways blocked in later phases of a building’s occupation at a series of repurposed sites, a case is made for studying conspicuous traces of a building’s former use as a window into social and somatic modes of temporality not captured by official commemorative inscriptions or building histories.