Routes, Realms, Ruins: Roman Landscapes in the Modern Imagination

Harvard GSD

This seminar examines how ancient Roman place-making, visual culture, and landscape practices have been invoked, appropriated, and reworked in North American thought, design, and visual history. Framing Rome as both a material and conceptual resource, the course foregrounds counter-histories and questions of agency, ownership, and power: Who shapes the land, and who claims the classical past?Through weekly readings, discussion, and close study of sites and objects, we will consider how Roman…