Thank you, Rome. We became stars!
There is a Us Colony in the heart of the eternal city where intellectuals and artist grow
(Specchio, September 03, 2005)The Jefferson Memorial in Washington, the Australian Parliament House in Canberra, and the Freedom Tower which will rise above Ground Zero—they all have one thing in common. They all have been designed by artists who have been inspired by staying at the Academy.
The American Academy in Rome is made up of ten buildings and eleven acres, and it is situated on the Janiculum Hill. Inspired by a group of artists at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in 1893 in Chicago, celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus, this is where the first Italian Director of the Academy, Carmela Vircillo Franklin, born in 1949, will begin her term.
The President of the Academy, Adele Chatfield-Taylor, says that since the foundation of the institution, it has always had a mission to chose people, mainly Americans, who are particularly gifted, and then send them to Rome for a period of time to give them the possibility to work independently on their projects.
Each year eight juries review applications and announce the winners of the “Rome Prize”
which includes a stipend and a small bedroom and study/studio.A few people know that the Academy has had a huge impact on the intellectual and cultural life in America.“Once the artists return to the US they begin to bloom,” says Chatfield-Taylor, “sometimes it happens immediately, sometimes after some time, some become famous scholars, painters, and artists.
INDEPENDENT OF POLITICAL LIFE
Among them there are famous artists and scholars: Robert Penn Warren and Ralph Ellison among the novelists, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, and Ned Rorem among the composers, Chuck Close, Richard Meier, and David Childs (member of the Board of Trustees since 1984), designer of the Freedom Tower among the artists and the architects. The Academy is represented by Michael Sovern, former President of Columbia University, and by Anthony Grafton, historian at Princeton University.
“The list of names who marked the American culture, by investigating further the roots of the US within Western Civilization, fills our hearts with immense pride,” the President, Adele Chatfield-Taylor remarks during our recent meeting at the elegant US premises of the Academy on East 60th Street in New York, where a giant bronze she-wolf stands out.
In the annals of the Academy, there is also the first Rome Prize Fellow in architecture, John Russell Pope, who lived in Rome from 1895 to 1897 and then designed the neoclassical Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D. C., taking the Pantheon as his model.
Another “flower” of the McKim Building and the Villa Aurelia, where the Academy has its activities, is Anthony Grafton, who, together with a team of experts, has designed an exhibition on the most distinguished minds of the Renaissance at the Library of Congress in Washington.
The influence of the Academy has been strongly felt in Italy as well. This is symbolized by the work of the Roman architect Romaldo Giurgola, who after having been at the Academy in the seventies, created together with his colleagues---a team of artists who bid to design the Australian Parliament in Canberra, and they won.
In this context, the special link between the Academy in Rome and New York is witnessed by the several buildings designed by “McKim, Mead, and White.”
Charles F. McKim himself in 1894 founded the new Institution, at a time when there were only four graduate schools of architecture in the United States, with a Fellowship Program in architecture which he wanted to be located in the most beautiful city in the world—Rome.
McKim was a fan of the neoclassical architecture which he deemed to be of democratic inspiration, as opposed to the gothic style, which he considered to be more of an expression of a hierarchical vision of human society, and McKim saw in Rome the very origin of such a democratic style. When someone asked him why he chose Rome—where he lived at the Torlonia Palace in the heart of Rome—rather than Paris, London or Athens, McKim remarked that the young American Republic from the very beginning followed the example of the Roman Republic.
The American Academy is the only one among the thirty foreign academies in Rome not directly government-supported. It relies on the financial support of private donors—the annual budget is about ten million dollars—and among the philanthropists there are J. Pierpont Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, William K. Vanderbilt and Henry Clay Frick. The Academy does not have financial or political ties to the United States government.
“Being independent offers some advantages,” remarks President Adele Chatfield-Taylor. “We can represent and symbolize that American culture goes beyond foreign affairs and hamburgers.”
The American Academy in Rome ( via Angelo Masina, 5 ) offers accommodation for 67 artists and scholars in small apartments, a lecture room and a library of more than one hundred thousand volumes. There are twenty kilometers of computer cables. The ten buildings of the American Academy in Rome, and particularly the seventeenth-century Villa Aurelia on the grounds, are surrounded by huge gardens with cypresses, pine, and olive trees, and magnolia and fruit trees, where Roman couples can celebrate their wedding.