Craig Dykers, along with Elaine Molinar, his wife and business partner, spent two months sketching, questioning, and engaging with new ideas at the American Academy in Rome. Both remarked on the spontaneous cross-disciplinary connections they were able to make with Fellows and other Residents during their stay. In public lectures, informal events, and impromptu conversations, Dykers was generous with his time as a mentor, colleague, and collaborator.

For example, Dykers, along with Fellow Joseph John Viscomi and John T. Sargent Writer in Residence André Aciman, coordinated an event prompted by their shared connections to the city of Alexandria, Egypt. Aciman described the now lost Alexandria of his youth in his memoir Out of Egypt (1995), and Viscomi is reconstructing the final years of Italian communities in Egypt during the 1950s and 1960s in his dissertation. Dykers’s firm Snøhetta designed the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in 2002, and the building was movingly defended by citizens during the upheavals of early 2011.

Dykers also participated in a talk at the Casa dell’Architettura that brought together speakers and audience members from the MAXXI Architettura, the Norwegian Institute, and American Academy in Rome. He was also a featured panelist in an AAR ConversationsIConversazioni event with Pippo Ciorra, senior curator at the MAXXI, where he spoke about nature and human nature in the context of projects designed by Snøhetta, including the Norwegian National Opera, the Alexandria Library, and the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York. Dykers revisited and expanded on those thoughts for the AAR community in the less formal setting of the Lecture Room, where he shared observations about what he called the “fleshiness of architecture” vis-à-vis the materiality of human experience.