Giuliana Mosca
Patronage and Architecture by an Emerging Family in Renaissance Rome: New Research on the Santacroce Buildings

As other families in Renaissance Rome, the Santacroce family achieved an important and powerful social position moving from commerce and economic investments to Curial and court life. Among the strategies for the household success was the construction of an ancient and noble identity supported by activities intended to show the family prestige, such as the interest in art and the collection of antiquities. In this process, architecture also played a role, so far that some architectural choices seem to mirror the evolution of the family. Giuliana Mosca’s talk will give an overview of the first results and the open inquiries about her ongoing study on the Santacroce’s architectures in late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Giuliana Mosca is the Franco Zeffirelli/United States Embassy Italian Fellow in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies and an adjunct professor in the Department of Architecture at Università di Roma Tre.

Robert Gerard Pietrusko
The Landscape Imaginary

For the last decade and a half, Robert Gerard Pietrusko’s design practice has explored the narrative potential of spatial data. Topics that are of increasing global importance—climate crisis, a teetering world market, and a looming sixth mass extinction—each require a collective intuition for processes that exceed the spatial and temporal frame of human experience. As such, these topics are all mediated by data that shape our language, our understanding, and our imagination. Beyond their seemingly banal life as “mere” representation, spatial data also contains numerous opportunities for telling counter-stories about the state of our world, and for imagining radically different futures. A foundational and inspiring trope of landscape architecture is the shaping of a public experience of nature. What design approaches are available in response to this new, global nature? In his shoptalk, Pietrusko will present a recent project, In Plain Sight, that grapples with some of these issues, as well as highlight initial research on Italian wine-making regions under the stress of climate change. He will speculate on how different forms of media and data might retain the cultural significance of these landscapes as their ecologies are invariably altered.

Robert Gerard Pietrusko is the Garden Club of America Rome Prize Fellow in Landscape Architecture and associate professor of landscape architecture in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.

The shoptalks will be held in English.

Video is not available for this event.