Gary Hilderbrand, the recipient of the 2017 American Society of Landscape Architects Design Medal and professor in practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, describes landscape architecture’s evolving consequential role in shaping contemporary cities. Urban streets, squares, and parks support the city’s ecological performance and define its spatial experience. Yet much of the city’s living infrastructure remains underestimated or invisible. Hilderbrand’s academic research on the urban forest complements and extends a long arc of design commissions for his firm, Reed Hilderbrand, in New York, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Austin, Columbus, Tampa, and Boston. In this conversation, Hilderbrand will discuss the urban landscape with the Rome-based architect Alberto Iacovoni.

Hilderbrand (FAAR, FASLA) is a founding principal of Reed Hilderbrand, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His firm has been recognized with more than eighty-five regional and national design awards. He is widely published as an author and critic on landscape architecture practice and has written three monographs: Making a Landscape of Continuity: The Practice of Innocenti & Webel (1997); The Miller Garden: Icon of Modernism (1999); and Visible Invisible: Landscape Works of Reed Hilderbrand (2013), published with Douglas Reed. In 2015, Reed and Hilderbrand were voted among the top five “most admired practitioners” by the members of ASLA’s Professional Practice Network.

Hilderbrand is the Mercedes T. and Sid R. Bass Landscape Architect in Residence at the American Academy in Rome in fall 2017.

The event will be held in English. You can watch it live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

The 2017–18 Conversations/Conversazioni series is sponsored by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.

In this event, a collaboration with MAXXI, the Dutch graphic designer Irma Boom, known as “The Queen of Books,” will discuss her collaborations with artists and architects with MAXXI Artistic Director Hou Hanru. Considered by many to be among the world’s foremost book designers, Boom combines what are usually three distinct roles—designer, editor, and art director—into a single person, inventing ingenious ways of achieving desired effects. She has worked with, among others: Rem Koolhaas; De Appel, the contemporary art space in Amsterdam; and the Rijksmuseum. Fifty of her books are part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the age of the iPad and Kindle, Boom continues to make beautifully designed traditional books. They are compelling arguments for carefully constructed printed media in a digital age.

Irma Boom is the William A. Bernoudy Designer-in-Residence at the American Academy in Rome. The event will be held in English.

Conversations/Conversazioni series is sponsored by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and with the support of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

In this conversation, noted scholar of architecture, Nasser Rabbat, and cutting-edge designer, Nader Tehrani, will discuss “fluidity” as a paradigm for understanding the built environment of the Mediterranean world. Moderated by John Ochsendorf (2008 Fellow), the conversation will highlight concepts of fluidity in Rabbat’s groundbreaking scholarship on Syrian architectural heritage and in the innovations of Tehrani’s designs.

Rabbat is the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT and the 2018 Louis Khan Scholar in Residence at the American Academy in Rome. Nader Tehrani is Dean of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, a principal of NADAAA, and the 2018 Resident in Design at the American Academy in Rome. Ochsendorf is Director of the American Academy in Rome and Class of 1942 Professor of Architecture at MIT.

The event will be held in English. You can watch it live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: East and West. The 2017–18 Conversations/Conversazioni series is sponsored by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.​

This event is the keynote lecture for the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: American Classics.

Ping Chong is an internationally acclaimed interdisciplinary artist and pioneer in the use of media in the theater. The recipient of a 2014 National Medal of Arts award, since 1972 Ping Chong has created over 100 works for the stage which have been presented at major theatres and festivals worldwide including the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the RomaEuropa Festival to name a few. His work encompasses puppetry, dance, documentary theatre and multimedia spectacle and has explored subjects ranging from the Black Lives Matter Movement to modernization in China to the experiences of Muslim youth in post -9/11 America. Throughout, the common thread is a unifying commitment to artistic innovation and social responsibility.

In this lecture with media, Ping Chong will discuss his career in relation to the evolving political and cultural movements of the last five decades. He will show excerpts from two recent works BEYOND SACRED: Voices of Muslim Identity (2015) and COLLIDESCOPE 2.0: Adventures in Pre and Post Racial America (2016) as well as take questions from the audience.

Ping Chong is the Mary Miss Artist in Residence at the American Academy in Rome in the fall 2016. Hou Hanru is the Artistic Director of the MAXXI.

The event will be held in English.

The 2016–17 Conversations/Conversazioni series is sponsored by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: East and West.

Ever since Edward Saïd, scholars have alerted listeners to the ways in which composers of Western classical music have dipped into other traditions in order to dress up a musical Other with which to converse and compete. This can range from the use of formulaic exotic signifiers to direct quotation, but also includes the more diffuse assimilation of styles, ideas, and genres.

With every successive generation of composers untangling the counterpoint of musical signifiers, our readings of them become more complex: how do we hear, for instance, a twenty-first-century work alluding to Benjamin Britten’s infatuation with Balinese music? And how do composers today negotiate concerns regarding cultural appropriation?

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim is the Critic in Residence at the American Academy in Rome and music critic for the New York Times. Nico Muhly is the Paul Fromm Composer in Residence at the American Academy in Rome.

The event will be held in English. You can watch this event at https://livestream.com/aarome.

The Conversations/Conversazioni series is sponsored by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.

Please join us in New York City for the first 2015 Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome, featuring renowned composers David Lang, FAAR’91, and Nico Muhly, who are reshaping the landscape of contemporary music with their innovation and creative energy. In addition to sharing current and in-development work, Lang and Muhly will discuss their creative processes as composers, including where they seek inspiration for individual and collaborative projects.

Lang is one of America's most performed composers. He received a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for “The Little Match Girl Passion”, was named Musical America’s 2013 Composer of the Year and is a recipient of Carnegie Hall’s Deb Composer's Chair for 2013–14. Mr. Lang is cofounder and co–artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can, and currently serves on the faculty at Yale School of Music.

Muhly has composed a wide scope of work for ensembles, solo artists and organizations including the New York Philharmonic, Paris Opera Ballet, Boston Pops, Bjork, Phillip Glass, and Anthony and the Johnsons, among others. Muhly’s first full-scale opera, Two Boys, premiered to wide acclaim at the English National Opera in 2011 and debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in 2013. The first recording of the piece, from the Met production, was released on Nonesuch Records in 2014.

This event is free, but reservations are required and SEATING IS LIMITED.

This event is part of the series New Work in the Arts & Humanities: American Classics.

In this conversation, part of the Academy’s ongoing series of events dedicated to American Classics, David Lang and Nicola Piovani will discuss their respective work for cinema, considering the importance of contemporary music to cinematic narrative.

Pulitzer-Prize winning composer David Lang contributed the songs “I Lie” and “World to Come” to the soundtrack of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza), an ode to the Eternal City, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013 before going on to win the Oscar for best foreign language film at the 86th Academy Awards. In the opening scene, a women’s chorus sings a Minimalist sacred composition by Lang within the vaulted spaces of the Fontana dell' Acqua Paola, on the Janiculum Hill. Lang was nominated for an Oscar for the haunting “Simple Song #3,” which he composed for Sorrentino’s La giovinezza (2015). The song sums up the complex emotional life of a retired conductor, played by Michael Caine, on vacation at a Fellini-esque spa in Switzerland. David Lang is the Paul Fromm Composer in Residence at the American Academy in Rome in the spring of 2017.

Maestro Nicola Piovani, is one of Italy’s best-known composers of film scores, with over 130 film scores to his credit, including The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982), Kaos (1984), both directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, and Federico Fellini’s Ginger e Fred (1986), Intervista (1987), and La voce della luna (1990). In 1998, Piovani won the Oscar for Best Original Dramatic Score for his work on Roberto Benigni’s celebrated film La vita è bella.

The event will be conducted in English and Italian with simultaneous translation in both languages.

The 2016–17 Conversations/Conversazioni series is sponsored by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.

PLEASE NOTE THIS LECTURE HAS BEEN CANCELED.

Martin Maischberger, deputy director of Antikensammlung Berlin, and Lynne Lancaster (2002 Fellow), Andrew W. Mellon Professor for the Humanities, American Academy in Rome, will discuss “The Pergamon Panorama in Berlin: Where Tradition and Digital Innovation Converge.”

The conversation will be held in English.

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2019–20 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.

The first Conversations/Conversazioni of the calendar year will feature David Nirenberg (2021 Resident), the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Distinguished Service Professor of Medieval History and Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where he is also dean of the Divinity School, and AAR Director Avinoam Shalem (2016 Resident).

“Ghetto” emerged as a word to describe a specific late-medieval phenomenon: the creation in Christian cities of segregated and walled neighborhoods in which Jews were required to live. Today its meanings are vaster, and it serves as a metaphor for many different types of containment and segregation. How did these urban spaces emerge? Why did they prove so useful as marginal spaces and a metaphor? And what work do the phenomenon and the metaphor do today?

This conversation, to be presented on Zoom, is free and open to the public. The start time is 6:00pm Central European Time (12:00 noon Eastern Time).

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2020–21 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.

Please join us on Friday, April 23 as we announce the 2021–22 Rome Prize winners and Italian Fellows at the virtual Arthur and Janet C. Ross Rome Prize Ceremony.

The program also features a Conversations/Conversazioni with acclaimed architect Sir David Adjaye OBE (2016 Resident) and AAR Director Avinoam Shalem (2016 Resident). Elizabeth Rodini, the Academy’s Andrew Heiskell Arts Director, will introduce the discussion.

The ceremony and conversation, to be presented on Zoom, is free and open to the public. The start time is 1:00pm Eastern Time (7:00pm Central European Time).

The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation is the 2020–21 season sponsor of Conversations/Conversazioni: From the American Academy in Rome.