Professor Carl Smith Serves as U of A Affiliated Fellow at American Academy in Rome

Artwork by Carl Smith

Piazza del Popolo drawn not as the great urban space of architectural history but as perceived and experienced. Despite the magnificence of the basilicas, the piazza's scale suggests something ominous and uncomfortable. (Mixed media: charcoal, graphite, pastel, watercolor, on vellum and 100 gsm sketch paper)

Carl Smith, a professor of landscape architecture at the U of A, spent four weeks of the spring semester at the American Academy in Rome, as the U of A Affiliated Fellow.

Smith, who was in Rome from late February to late March, stayed and had a studio in the main academy building, designed in the early 20th century by the noted American architecture office McKim, Mead & White. The high-ceilinged space was equipped with a bedroom, as well as a full-size drawing board and layout space, providing Smith the space and quiet to think and draw.

The fellowship allowed Smith, a faculty member in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, to continue his trajectory of scholarship focused on place through experiential drawing. His work is concerned with the perception of place rather than space that can be measured, and how one's connection to the landscape can impact human behavior and attitudes.

"It's drawing your experience of a place, rather than simply what you see — as is the case in traditional architectural drawings," Smith said. "In that sense, these drawings are more about impressions, perceptions and associations. They absolutely take into account what can be seen, but also other senses and impressions in the moment, and what you bring to the site based on prior experiences."

His fellowship resulted in a series of drawings centered around two critical points of focus: Rome as a subject for aesthetic interpretation of place and Rome as a living 21st century city, with ongoing urbanistic challenges.

Smith is personally interested in the Rome-based work of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), a prolific British landscape painter. In Rome, Smith focused on two locations drawn by Turner during his first sojourn to the city in 1819: the south face of the triumphal Arch of Constantine, situated between the Colosseum and the Palatine Hill, and the Piazza del Popolo at the northern convergence of Via del Babuino, Via del Corso and Via di Ripetta.

During his fellowship, Smith walked, studied and drew these sites in a topographic style (not unlike Turner's 1819 drawings) with graphite on drawing paper. The significant time spent creating these and other studies on site allowed Smith to gain a gradual understanding and curiosity about place history, use, meaning and associations. Further drawing and reading at the academy provided Smith with more information and formal or spatial understandings.

"These drawings and investigations make excellent jumping off points for a range of research and practice endeavors," he said.

Smith is not just interested in the well-known, iconic, historic urbanism of Rome, which has been mapped and drawn for centuries. He's also curious about the overlooked stories that lay hidden to most tourists and visitors, yet might be uncovered through drawing.

"I'm also fascinated by the everyday urbanism of the Roman periphery, which has historically been somewhat disjointed and dislocated physically and perceptually from the main fabric of the city," he said.

This kind of work and collaboration has important implications for community involvement and collaboration in design and planning projects, he said.

"I'm interested in working with communities to create drawings that capture their sense of place — particularly in environments that are apt to sometimes rapid and wholesale change," Smith said. "I've worked with stakeholder groups from Arkansas to Tajikistan to raise up the oft-overlooked perspectives of local communities. It's completely feasible for communities to lose a sense of identity and become displaced from their own home environment without ever moving their location and geography."

As far as the Roman periphery is concerned, he said that his work is more about catalyzing speculations that test what these areas might become. "At this stage, it's about place drawing and curiosity, but my hope is that, through the design to follow, that gets sharpened and focused as place-appropriate urban design."

In particular, Smith explored the neighborhood of Pigneto, located about 2 miles southeast of Termini Station, which developed quickly and through varying stages of urban formalization from the late 19th century until today. He again created topological drawings in the field using graphite or black ink on paper, spending copious amounts of time on site to understand the moods and rhythms of the place as a lived experience. Later, through a desk study of maps of the area from the late 19th century until the present day, he was able to dissect each era into layers of critical landscape and urban change, such as water courses; field patterns; roads, railroads and paths; and homes and industrial buildings.

"It allows one to understand what has changed and what has stayed the same," he said. "It allows one to speculate on what physical fabric contributes to the lived quality of the neighborhoods, and what might detract from it."

For his work in Rome, he traveled with the intention of focusing on drawings created from his own impressions, that would then spark curiosity around issues of history, land use, architecture and ecology — and, ultimately, generate ideas about how to solve for societal and environmental challenges. He expects that he will take this approach into a design studio, with the goal of having students speculate and create their own ideas.

Though his time in Rome was limited, Smith felt that he was very productive. At the end of his fellowship, he produced a short report that collected 10 of the drawn pieces he produced while in Rome and described the work he intends to complete as his next steps.

"The whole four weeks were an intense but highly rewarding cauldron of discovery," he said. "Beyond discovering more about the places I was drawing, there was the discovery of like-minded individuals and ideas and — I hope, through that — friendships and collaborations."

As Smith continues this exploration, he looks forward to returning to Rome.

"There is still so much to discover and draw — stories to be discovered and questions to be asked," he said. "I'll be looking for opportunities to return to the city, both as a venue of discovery and questioning for my own work of drawing possible futures with and without communities, but also as a place offering so many exciting, contradictory, knotty and inspiring dilemmas to be tested by my students' design work. I also want to continue to develop and test drawing approaches that could really open the eyes of non-design students of all disciplines to the experience of Rome."