Color photograph of the head and torsos of two people: on the left is a light skinned man with his head turned slightly but still looking at the camera with one hand in his pocket; on the right is a dark skinned woman wearing glasses and looking at the camera with her arms folded across her chest; both are wearing black clothes and stand against a black background

Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers

Rome Prize in Architecture
September 5, 2022–July 14, 2023
Profession
Founding Principals, Dream The Combine, Minneapolis
Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of the Practice, College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, Cornell University
Project title
Wandering Stars, Vanishing Points: Overwriting Spatial Imaginaries of Rome
Project description

Rome contains fragments and dreams, palimpsestic projections of desire where the world has been made and remade throughout centuries. That Rome has also been invested—as the locus of power for various empires—in the promulgation of its own images and mythologies is without debate. Rome and its histories have conditioned so much of what we see. Rome was the vanishing point from and toward which so many movements would flow—of people, beliefs, power, and culture. Our past work operates as a kind of overwriting, acknowledging the site- and social-specificity of context yet often projecting another imaginative space overlaid on this environment. Our proposal for Rome is to look for evidence of superimpositions in architectural contexts—sites of simultaneity through which cultural meaning is made. We aim to make large-format drawings, short films of public life, and models of projection systems that draw out various forms of overwriting in the city. By examining public spaces and image construction in Rome, we hope to reveal depths within the social geometries that condition this place.

The photograph of Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers is © Rik Sferra 2021.