The Rome Prize Fellowship will provide the foundation for research and development of an exploration into an embodied poetics of light and architecture, public and private experiences of space, for a live performance/installation. The recent demolition of the massive progressive-era Welfare Hospital for Chronic Diseases, renamed Goldwater Memorial on Roosevelt Island NYC (1939–2015), moves me to explore the rich, unknown histories of this radically designed public-health hospital, its context and legacy. The hospital’s designer, the Russian Jewish immigrant architect Isadore Rosenfield (1893–1980), is coincidentally my cigar-smoking grandfather. Rosenfield spent the year 1922 in Rome, studying architecture, art, and light. My research begins by tracing his itinerary, visiting buildings, sites, and artifacts central to his life’s work, first manifest in his design for Welfare Hospital. My research in Rome will form the substance and structure of the project.