Italy: Rome from Pantheon to MAAM

About this Travel Course

The Pantheon in Rome is one of the first architectural projects using light as element of architecture. MAAM is a museum of everything but light. Pantheon is one of the historical symbols of Rome. MAAM is the new boundary at the edge of Rome. What is linking these two realities?

Like in Einstein's famous image, in this course we will travel riding a beam of light from Rome's historic center to the final frontier of the eternal city, where tourists normally don't dare to go. Students will explore the connections and dis-connections between center and periphery employing these urban polarities as metaphors of aesthetic and social dichotomies: light and darkness, beauty and ugliness, order and chaos, heritage and urban mayhem.

We will explore the center of Rome in term of art, light, urban and social layers through site visits and tours by local guest lecturers Emanuela Pulvirenti, lighting designer and art, teacher, Marco Frascarolo, director of Master of Lighting Design at la Sapienza, Francesco Careri, urban planner at University Roma Tre and flâneur of Rome periphery, Luigi Filetici, one of the greatest architectural photographer and lover of Rome.

We will understand the importance of daylight and artificial light in architecture, urban planning, and painting, discovering the meaning and use of light particularly during the Baroque period. We will discover the "Great Beauty" of Rome: the great dichotomy between center and periphery. And how periphery can be soil for new artistic adventures and historical city center could become sterile because of the "too beautiful” approach. The final goal of the workshop will be to rethink and reconcile these theoretical and space oppositions, observing Baroque disquieting and disorienting surfaces of shadow and gold from the point of view of Pasolini's 'quartieri'; or, contemporary artistic occupations and social projects from within the Pantheon, as into a gigantic pinhole projecting upside down the conventional picture of this amazing town.

This wintersession will be organized in collaboration with Master in Lighting Design of University La Sapienza in Rome. Up to 4 of the best students of the Master will take part to the wintersession to help RISD students to connect better to the place and to "real life". Students will work in small group and each group will be joined by at least one La Sapienza students. As such, this class proposes a new way of connecting RISD students to the place they are designing for, and giving them new tools of observation and investigation, useful in everyday life to discover a space.