Karen M’Closkey

Karen M’Closkey

Garden Club of America Rome Prize
4 febbraio–5 agosto 2013
Professione
Assistant Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Pennsylvania
Titolo del progetto
A Field Guide to Rome: Baedeker and Beyond
Descrizione del progetto

The publishing giant Baedeker compiled the first English-language guidebooks for Europe. These pocket-sized books were indispensable accoutrements for the Grand Tour, which culminated in Italy. The Baedeker guide highlights the must-see monuments with an asterisk, oblivious to the mechanisms that enable the journey from asterisk to asterisk. My proposal is to produce a supplement to Baedeker’s excursions beyond the city center, focusing on the productive and waste landscapes of the Roman campagna. This alternative guidebook will link the specific cultural sights with the sites—the physical, material, and natural processes—that facilitated their development. I will focus on places of extraction (quarries, aquifers) and deposition (landfills) that lie beyond the city center. As these sites reach the end of their useful lives, they open up opportunities for intervention, provoking a challenge to rethink their potential linkages to new networks, both ecological and touristic.