In 1513 Tommaso Inghirami, who had studied with Laetus, had a freestanding temporary hall built to house just such an academic theatre in the Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome.
The 750,000-square-foot complex includes 47 courtrooms, 110 holding cells, grand jury rooms, judges' chambers, offices for the district attorney and city agencies, a virtually freestanding circular jury assembly hall in which some 600 prospective jurors can gather and a 200-space garage.
To the east lies Eustace Cole Hall, America's first freestanding laboratory for horticulture.
The first public theatre in Italy was built in Venice in 1565, but it is not known if it was a freestanding theatre or one in an existing hall.
They are arranged in one vast top-lit hall the size of a football pitch, on freestanding plinths, forming islands and room-like clusters that allow you to walk around the work.
These include Eustace-Cole Hall and Marshall-Adams Hall, America's first freestanding laboratories for horticulture and bacteriology, respectively.
An open hall at the Sumerian city of Uruk (biblical Erech; modern Tall al-Warkāʾ, Iraq) contains freestanding and attached brick columns that have been brilliantly decorated in this way.
Most Hindu temples are freestanding.
