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Between 1892 and 1894 a group of architects and artists including Pennsylvania-born Charles Follin McKim and Daniel Burnham established what came to be known as the American Academy in Rome. The idea was to build bridges between contemporary practices and the city’s classical traditions. To that end, with support from Penn and Columbia, they established fellowships in architecture and art, followed by one in landscape architecture in 1915. Housed in McKim, Mead, and White’s only building in Europe (built over a portion of the 1st-Century Aqua Traiana) and the 1650 Villa Aurelia country estate, the Academy’s Rome Prize fellowship residency program has welcomed generations of distinguished artists, designers, and scholars.
“Penn has been involved from the beginning,” says Weitzman Dean and Paley Professor Fritz Steiner, himself a former Rome Prize fellow in Historic Preservation and subsequent William A. Bernoudy Architect in Residence at the Academy. (He has documented his experiences in both words and images.)
“We’ve had Penn architects, preservationists, and landscape architects earn the prize,” says Steiner. They include Practice Professor Emeritus Laurie Olin, in 1976, and, most recently, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Sean Burkholder, a co-founder of the Environmental Modeling Lab at Weitzman’s McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology. Each receives a stipend, lodgings, private workspace, and chance to commune not only with a vibrant international cohort of creative professionals and scholars but also with the city of Rome itself.
“It’s an amazing collection of people,” Steiner says. “It’s sort of like one imagines an academy to be. Only no students!”
A fellow at the Academy this spring, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Sean Burkholder is deepening his drawing practice as well as his research and pedagogy.
“Technically, we’re all students,” adds Sean Burkholder with a laugh, on a zoom from Rome with Steiner in Philadelphia. He’s referring to the terms of their visa, but also in the sense that winning the prize is an opportunity for accomplished professionals to take a breath and reconnect with the curiosity and experimentation that set them on their path.
Burkholder is in Rome—along with his partner, Karen Lutsky (MLA’11) an associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Minnesota, who also earned a fellowship—to study the landscapes of Lake Bracciano. Coastal landscapes is a shared obsession, and their acclaimed previous book, Five Bay Landscapes (University of Pittsburgh, 2022) documents their exploration of five sites on the Great Lakes.
“It’s kind of overwhelming,” Burkholder says of the Academy experience. After taking a trip to nearby Lake Nemi, where Emperor Caligula built “big party barges,” he was exploring the Academy archives. “There were two chunks of a ship right there, just hanging on the wall!” he sighs. “Every day is just like a firehose of new information and experiences.”
Randy Mason, professor and chair of historic preservation and faculty director of the Preservation Research Collaborative at Penn, had a similar experience during his 2013 fellowship, during which he studied the Roman architect Gustavo Giovannoni. “The Academy offers a clear space to work in an unalloyed way. The space is such an accelerator. I got the chance to dive into Giovannoni’s work and indulge my interest in not being confined by one or another disciplinary boundary. And more than ten years later, the work continues to have resonance and relevance to me.”
Burkholder is already evolving the way he’ll teach, as a result of the time in Rome. “I’ve been exploring counterfactual work in my classes. Some historians are pretty fussy about the use of counterfactuals, but I’ve found a lot of people who are interested in this way of thinking. Talking to people at meals, I found out that there was a whole set counterfactual legal arguments put together to assist in having discussions. Another fellow here, Eva Del Soldato (coincidentally also from UPenn), turned me on to a series of “what if” arguments about Aristotle that I had never heard of before. It has been a popular and influential way of thinking for centuries. I think that counterfactuals can help students focus on and be critical of what has happened in the world, but still have a grasp of how time scales are nestled within each other, and how designers might be able to work within them.”
Karen M'Closkey in her studio at the Academy in 2013
Chance conversations, over what fellows repeatedly praise as some of the best Italian food they have had, can make lasting impressions. Karen M’Closkey, professor of landscape architecture at Weitzman, spent the winter and summer of 2013 at the Academy. “You’re eating lunches and dinners with the other fellows who got the prize in landscape architecture, design, architecture, preservation and so on,” she says. “And then the other half are archeologists working in classics, who tend to be a younger cohort of post-docs or PhD students. And then you have other visiting fellows and scholars cycling through, so you’re talking to different people at each meal. It’s an incredibly unique experience.”
The conversations carry over into Open Studios, where both fellows and the public come through to offer feedback on the work, and also into presentations that each of the cohort share with the group. “It’s interesting to hear what other people’s perceptions are of your work,” she says, “among a crowd of people you wouldn’t frequently be talking to.”
M’Closkey and her partner Keith VanDerSys, a senior lecturer in landscape architecture at Weitzman, eventually turned the work she did in Rome into a book, Dynamic Patterns: Visualizing Landscapes in a Digital Age (Routledge, 2017) “Six months to really focus on the book was critical for me at that point in time,” she says. Their latest book from Applied Research & Design, Media Matters in Landscape Architecture, builds on that work with contributions from over a dozen other scholars and practitioners.
Steiner hosts visitors to his studio at the Academy in 2014.
Burkholder intends to finish his own book with help from his time in Rome. He’s also digging through local archives of volcanic drawings of Vesuvius and Aetna (Bracciano is a volcanic lake), and spending time in the Bass Garden, where in 1611, Galileo first showed people how his telescope worked. He’s thinking of making enormous watercolors. “But I still can’t break out of fussing around with the tiny collages that I always do,” he says.
In the Zoom conversation, Steiner laughs, knowingly. “It’s pretty common to come with one idea of what you’re going to do, and then do something else entirely,” he says. “It’s a life-changing experience.” Steiner’s 22nd book, a study of Penn’s campus landscape co-edited with landscape architect Ignacio Bunster-Ossa (MLA’79), is due out from Penn Press in the fall.
