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Architecture in Rome Course Offerings

Architectural Design

ARCH 3100 / 4101 / 4102 / 5101 DESIGN STUDIO (6 credits)

Instructors: Jerry Wells and Davide Marchetti

Architectural History

ARCH 3820 THE TOPOGRAPHY AND URBAN HISTORY OF ROME IN ANTIQUITY AND THE MIDDLE AGES (3 credits)

Instructor: Jan Gadeyne

Rome is a prisoner of its past. The entire city confronts the student with almost 30 centuries of urban and architectural history. This course intends to reconstruct the urban history of Rome from its origins through the Middle Ages (10th century BC–12th century AD). The purpose of this course will be to discover the layers of Rome, combining archaeology with literature, architecture, and urban history with art history. The goal is a thorough and direct knowledge of the Roman and Medieval urban landscape, and the way this landscape has sometimes survived until today.

Special attention will be given to Roman and Medieval building typology, both private and public, and the development of the urban infrastructure (street system, water supply, fortifications, etc.). Strong emphasis will be placed upon continuity, use / reuse and transformation of buildings and spaces, etc. Every week different regions will be explored that are typical for a particular moment of the urban history. Visits to sites outside Rome also will be used to address the issue of urban history in Italy in antiquity and the middle ages.
ARCH 3819 SPECIAL TOPICS IN THE HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE & URBANISM: Urban Design, Architecture, and Art in Renaissance and Baroque Rome (3 credits)

Instructor: Jeffrey Blanchard

While this course will focus principally upon the Renaissance and Baroque phases of Rome's history, we will initially survey the city's urban history and structure from its origins to the present, a span of almost 3,000 years. Throughout the course, we will often turn our attention to those earlier and later sites and developments, without an understanding of which the Renaissance and Baroque periods would be only partially intelligible. Our goal is to learn to "read" this complicated city, in which the rich stratifications and juxtapositions often involve many different phases of Rome's long history. We will explore the city and its constituent parts, from street systems and urban spaces to buildings and the works of art adorning them, using tools of analysis appropriate to these diverse categories.


While the overall organization of the syllabus is essentially a chronological one, each class session tends to reflect other criteria of selection as well: topographic (a particular zone of the city); typological (a particular architectural type, e.g. the 16th-century palazzo); monographic (the work of a single artist). Teaching occurs in large part on site, and along our itineraries our major focuses will often be interspersed with secondary sites and themes that contribute to a fuller understanding of this uniquely complex city.

Fulfills URS A requirement.

Architecture Theory / Visual Representation

ARCH 3308 SPECIAL TOPICS IN THEORY OF ARCHITECTURE:  (3 credits)

Instructor: Jerry Wells