Each year the American Academy in Rome awards the Rome Prize to support innovative and cross-disciplinary work in the arts and humanities. This year’s winners included PennDesign faculty and alumni: Architecture Lecturer Jonathan Scelsa and his partner Jennifer Birkeland were awarded the Mark Hampton Rome Prize for their project The Roman Roof-Scape, The Atrium as Landscape-Urban Infrastructure. Alumnae Alison B. Hirsch (PhD’08, MLA’11) and Aroussiak Gabrielan (MArch’10, MLA’10) were awarded the Prince Charitable Trusts/Rolland Rome Prize for their work on Rome Real-and-Imagined: Cinematic Fictions and Future Landscapes. They were awarded the prize under the Landscape Architecture category.
Scelsa and Birkeland, partners in the firm op.AL, had this to say about their winning project:
“Water management was a central ideological tenet to the formation of Roman urbanization, wherein the external ground of the street, the internal ground of the home and the city’s roof-scape were conceived as a single infrastructure device. The modern city has lost sight of some of these basic Landscape and Architectural ideas, offsetting much of the rain-water problems to the street and the overburdened combined sewer of increasingly dense urban centers. The aim of our work in Rome will be to revive an understanding of a trans-disciplinary methods for conceiving urban water management.”
Hirsch and Gabrielan described their winning project:
“Centuries of artistic visions and written narratives of The Eternal City tell stories of Rome’s triumphant past (and decay), filling the voids between fragmentary facts with imaginary fictions. The city as it exists today–in both the social imagination and in physical manifestation–is shaped by the accrual of these stories through time. Relying on landscape’s affiliation with narrative and the cinematic, we aim to disrupt the tension between legends of the ancient city and realities of everyday life by unearthing non-dominant narratives – in the city and in the archives - and playing them out in the landscape using immersive cinematic techniques including “live” renderings projected in situ. These cinematic experiments will be complemented by writings on Rome as a landscape shaped by its particular social realities and its cinematic imaginaries.”
Among the other Rome Prize winners and Italian Fellows for 2017-2018 were acclaimed artist Sanford Biggers; Ashley Fure, Assistant Professor in the Department of Music at Dartmouth College, who is using digital technology and textual research to study animation in medieval art; and Emilio Rosamilia, who is preparing a monograph on the overlooked ancient Greek city of Cyrene during the classical and Hellenistic periods.
The jury was chaired by PennDesign Cret Chair Professor of Practice in Architecture Thom Mayne. Among the jurors from PennDesign were Randall Mason, Associate Professor and Chair of the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation, Landscape Architecture alumna Lisa Switkin (MLA’02), and Architecture Lecturer Tom Wiscombe.
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