Dear colleagues,

we would like to invite you to a conference at the Karman Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Bern, Switzerland, to be held from November  9-12, 2006, on the occasion of the Karman Center’s research project on the Pantheon which was instigated in 2005. For more information about the project and the conference, please refer to our website where you may also find the program.


To open up new opportunities for in-house and external mulit-disciplinary research on the Pantheon one of the means of the Karman Center’s project is to create a web-based research network by establishing an online data resource in which as much information (text, graphics, photographs and other images) as possible is collated.

The project was launched in December 2005 when the entire Pantheon was scanned using advanced laser technology, from which a data set of 541,000,000 measuring points was created. We are currently working on transforming the data into a three-dimensional digital model of the building.

Another important objective of the Pantheon Project, and of the Karman Center as a whole, is to promote free and open access to materials for the scientific community. To this end, the Pantheon Project wishes to foster international and multidisciplinary collaboration among scholars in different fields in order to encourage research on the building.

Therefore, this conference will bring together scholars from many disciplines – archaeology, art and architectural history, history of construction, engineering etc. – to examine the main issues concerning the Pantheon and the perspectives for future research.

We would be delighted if you could participate in the conference by contributing a paper discussing the latest findings on the Pantheon and/or open questions in your field or in other fields of study, including – if possible – suggestions as to how to solve these issues with the help of a collaborative network.

Michael Heinzelmann / Markus Wäfler / Gerd Graßhoff
Institute of Archaeology / Institute for Philosophy

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Bernd Kulawik

Karman Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities
Falkenplatz 16
CH-3012 Bern