Rome Drawings

Rome: Continuity and Change provided the opportunity to travel and study the buildings of Rome through the act of drawing, culminating in a week-long, extensive drawing of a chosen site.

I was interested in studying Peruzzi’s Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne because of the way in which the front and back facades communicate with their respective streets and how the space between becomes a world of its own. Unlike the centrality and symmetry of many of the prominent buildings studied throughout the city, the interior organization of Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne negotiates with and gives way to the surrounding urban fabric. Peruzzi skillfully creates enchanting and complex spaces through contrasts in light and shadow, compression and release, along a series of winding courtyards. In the drawing, the unfolding of the elevations over the plan force the viewer to hone in on specific details, much like how it is impossible to understand the entire space of Palazzo Massimo all at once.

The later spreads are sketches done at various sites over the five-week period that built up to the independent study. Through observing and drawing these buildings, I became interested in discovering the different and unexpected ways architects used details to reveal or defy architectural rules and organizations or how current inhabitants have built upon and occupy these spaces today.

All drawings were completed on site.

In The Shape of Doubt, Marina Montresor and Stephan Lando discuss the building and how “Architecture is by its intrinsic nature a never-ending process of negotiations between diametrically opposite, sometimes paradoxical forces and – often constrained or reckless – conciliations.”