The Persistence of Italy: the Education of the Architect - [Un]innocents Abroad
An Essay Written In Honor of Professor Thomas Schumacher upon His Death
“The past lives in us and dwells amongst us”
Petrarch, on Seeing Rome
“The finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it”
Sigmund Freud
For American students of architecture, it has become inevitable as it has for those studying other forms of cultural production, to make a pilgrimage to study the heirlooms in Italy. Given this, it is reasonable to ask why in the twenty first century design programs located in the new world and seemingly committed to the modern project, would carry on with this tradition; In short, I want to use this opportunity to focus less on the particular monuments and the methodologies of study and focus instead upon the broader epistemological and existential questions of why and how the University of Maryland, FIU, Syracuse, Cornell and others send our students to Rome, Florence and Genoa and why these programs differ pedagogically from almost all others.
A consideration of the role that study abroad can play in the construction of a school’s pedagogical ethos and ideological identity has occupied my own thoughts for quite some time. My own involvement in architectural study abroad was the instrument that led to my friendship with Tom and Patty. I arrived in Florence in 1991 as the Director of Syracuse University’s Florence program. And this is when I had the profound pleasure of working with Tom over the course of six wonderful years when they shuttled back and forth between Washington and Florence. In 2004 I became the head of a School of Architecture and quickly established a study abroad program (this time in Genoa). I would suggest that Tom Schumacher, Colin Rowe and Werner Seligmann can be jointly credited with the development of a particularly efficacious study abroad model; I believe it to be one of four distinct models for study abroad and it the model that has been deployed by the schools of architecture at U. Maryland, Syracuse, Cornell, and others. Its value is based on its capacity to compel students of architecture to critically interrogate and challenge their faith in the condition of modernity and their own sense of contemporaneity that is a foundational and ideological building block for almost every architectural curriculum with the possible exception of those at Notre Dame and the University of Miami which instill reverence for the past and for tradition as a rationale and ethos for their study abroad programs. (see TS Eliot )
Some facts: 8% of all US study abroad programs take place in Italy.
Over 20,000 students per year go to Italy
135 permanent study abroad programs are located in Italy
10,000 are located in Rome/latium, and 8,000 in Florence/tuscany
Over 25 permanent arch programs (20% of all accredited programs)
+ countless summer programs are located in Italy
Study abroad generates 12% of all tourism to historic sites and generates a revenue of 650 million euros to Italy.
For the sake of argument, I am proposing that there are four epistemic models for American architectural study abroad in Italy:
1. Academic Tourism (Roman Holiday): most schools
In this model for study broad, Italy (understood as a set of spatial, physical and historical conditions) is deployed as an appealing and unfamiliar backdrop against which an untarnished narrative (educational, not a love story) unfolds. The backdrop enriches and informs the experience but it does not challenge it or define it in any fundamental manner. In this model, backdrops are interchangeable - there are always some old buildings and an exoticism, but also enough of “the familiar” to keep the experience comprehensible. And that is precisely the point. Barcelona, Berlin, Tokyo, Dubai, San Paolo, Rome… they are interchangeable because they are simply backdrops to the action (be it a learning experience or something else) and not the protagonist.
“Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.”
Susan Sontag
2. Nostalgic Tourism (Death in Venice) : UM, Notre Dame, Florence Acad.
This model deploys Italy (as a set of spatial, physical, historical, cultural, political conditions) to confirm and validate an evasion of the present (also understood as a set of conditions. This model accomplishes this by wistfully focusing attention on a construction of the past that may or may not have existed and projects it in a totally unmediated manner onto the present. Stimulates a wistful melancholic longing for a lost moment. It is blind to the actuality of the present conditions of Italy.
“Rome is the city of echoes, the city of illusions, and the city of yearning.“
Giotto di Bondone
3. Estrangement (Playtime) :
In this model, Italy and its past are positioned against a contemporary interest in innovation. This study abroad model deploys the sojourn to Italy to help reconfirm the estrangement from the architectural canon and an annulment from the historical sense. Rome and Florence serve as sites in need of the application of “relevant” and “new” architectural techniques and narratives. In an increasingly global and flat landscape, the spatial, historical political and cultural particularities of the Italian city and its past are presented as challenges to be overcome.
“To put architectural students in Rome is to wound them for life. “
Le Corbusier
4. Dialectical Conflict (A Room with a View):
This model - which is the most productive model for study abroad deploys the experience as part of a pedagogy based on reciprocal oppositions (dialectical oppositions). In this pedagogical model, study abroad in Italy is seen as a mechanism to introduce the foil, the retort and the antidote to a blind faith in the project of modernity. Italy insists that the faith in the contemporary moment and the principles of change and progress (often inculcated in the first years of the architectural education) not go unchallenged. Italy serves as a potent mechanism to induce skepticism. The experience forces a confrontation with the dichotomies of before and after, recovery and discovery, permanence and change, the historical sense and the sense of contemporaneity.
“One day I discovered I was going back to the starting point instead of advancing: the search for modernity was a descent to the origins.
Modernity led me to the source of my beginning, to my antiquity. “
Octavio Paz
This use of this fourth study abroad model at U. Maryland, Cornell, Syracuse and at FIU is no accident. Inducing skepticism for the project of modernity by having students study the urbanism, architecture and landscape architecture created in Italy before the enlightenment was of course central to the writing and the pedagogy of Colin Rowe at Cornell. Initially, this was accomplished through the mediating instruments of the book, the map and the image. While some students were lucky enough to informally travel with Colin during his occasional trips to Italy, it was at other schools where Colin’s former students would create formalized Italian study abroad programs as a central component of the design curricula. The formal development of this study abroad model must be credited to Tom, to Werner Seligmann, and to a few others (many of whom are in this room) who took the lessons from Rowe, took the understanding of Italy as the place of choice to induce doubt in the project of modernity and applied these to the programs they found themselves teaching in and eventually administering. places like Syracuse, University of Virginia, University of Maryland. This study abroad model with its strong ideological motivation of inducing doubt came - ironically be identified with the Cornell pedagogical model – even though Cornell was one of the last of all the schools that deploy this model to create a permanent program in Italy. The personal relationships and the lineage - family tree if you will - are an important aspect of this model and its various incarnations and manifestations
What is clear in this model is that in-situ study of the architectural artifacts in Rome, Florence and Genoa is designed to serve as an antidote to any self-assured confidence in modernity and its identification with criticism, change and progress as its touchstones. To send our students to rigorously and deeply explore the works of Italy is to contaminate their belief in the project of modernity by the contradictory and unavoidable discovery that what had been accomplished and given form long ago in Rome, Florence and Genoa might be a standard lost and that it might be collectively superior to what is being made now and what likely will be made henceforth. This process involves a generalizing qualitative comparison beyond the normal interest in things well made and in beauty achieved. The comparison is between epochs, not individual artists or singular works. The comparison is not rendered meaningless by relativisms, which is to say that the question of artistic value is considered separate from the questions of changing values or historic circumstance. The act of comparative deliberation that is so central to this study abroad model and the presumed conclusion that one’s own moment and it’s forms of cultural production are somehow inferior to what was produced in the past are so rarely explicitly stated or discussed as to be peculiar. However, there is no doubt that these are the operative if unspoken ideological positions.
In the broadest sense, this contestation - which is designed to create a quiet crisis of ideology finds a parallel and maybe its roots - though I am certainly not a social historian – in the major re-organization of socio-political structures on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in the 17th and 18th centuries If our relatives then were re-evaluating class structures and systems of governance and finding them wanting, they were also re-evaluating the artistic and cultural production that those structures and systems had produced and finding them enormously fertile. Was it inevitable that political and social revolution should sponsor artistic fissure? The study of history is concerned with cause and effect, but since I am not armed with such expertise, I can only raise this as a question. Nevertheless, we all know that Western political and social structures changed radically. And we also know that when we go to Italy we go to study art and architecture that was created for the most part before this radical change. (Terragni and a few others being the exception)
As self-assured as we in the contemporary moment and in the new world are of the efficacy of our modern democracies and economies, I think we have also been remarkably unsure of ourselves culturally and these conflicting self-opinions remain as an essential quality of our collective American character. Tocqueville characterized our new world order as the relatively quiet tyranny of mediocrity; but did he also intend to be describing the quality of our artistic production? I am not suggesting that the uncertainty is generally recognized. On the contrary, just as we are adamant – often suspiciously so – that Americans are the custodians of the best political and economic systems, we also go to great lengths to transmit the fecundity of our artistic and cultural production all over the world. My city, Miami is at the forefront of this effort with Art Basel, Design Miami et al. Our effort in Miami at self-assurance is slightly suspect and may point to a general insecurity. At the very least our effort at self-assurance is suspect and that in any case quantity, bigness and media attention should not be confused with quality.
In short, it is little wonder that for some time now Westerners have yearned for the evidence of Beauty manifest in the cultural production of Italy. So we still go to gaze at it.
Uncertainty regarding our epoch’s own cultural and artistic capacity is not the sole reason we send our students to Italy. We should not confuse a possible sense of inferiority with the innate human desire for Beauty that has always existed. The instinct toward Beauty- the yearning for the pleasure it furnishes – is bound up with what we think beauty represents. In the most general terms, this might be described as ‘the good’ or ‘the highest’. It is no mere coincidence that in pre-modern thought less confusion and less discomfort accompanied the discourse on beauty, and yet the word’s usage was less common. Classical philosophy concerned itself with the issue as necessary, as did Renaissance intellectuals such as L.B. Alberti and Ficino. Modernity’s difficulty with beauty stems more from a philosophical redirection than from an apparent problem in creating it. Nonetheless, even within our modern miasma regarding what the idea of beauty might be, we still sense that it maintains a connection with a vague notion of ‘the good,’ so that we are naturally fascinated with ancient or contemporary attempts to create this meaningful quality.
As for the romance with the past, it may in part depend on assumptions that age confirms validity; that what endured deserved to, and what disappeared didn’t. Yet it is more complicated than that, for we also experience a kind of superiority over many aspects of the past, treating it quaintly but ultimately with more tolerance or amusement than respect and appreciation. Except with art. When we choose to send our students to learn from works in Italy, it is not based on their ‘oldness’ It is not the patina of Palazzo Macarani’s façade that gives it value nor is it the age value of the Medici library that captures our attention. It is simply the undeniable quality of the work itself. Quality that was born with it. But let us leave the past for future discussions. There is another aspect more specific to this consideration. This is the particular nature of coming from America, the continent we call the new world – the continent that is ineffably linked to modernity, to change and which we call home.
Inevitably, children become curious about their parents when they come to the realization that to know them is to begin to know themselves. And so, even if Europe and Italy no longer represent starting points for much of America’s population (as they once did) – as we nonetheless must understand that our continent is in a fundamental way the child of Europe. As multi-variant as America becomes – and my school is located in one of most multi-variant and culturally complex cities – There are very few of us who can claim to be true descendants of the new world. So collectively, we will always have a most basic connection back across the ocean and to a journey – some forced, some chosen. We enact a kind of reversal of the effort that was made in leaving all that one knew in order to begin something new. Now I am not suggesting that we are even aware of this process but It occurs nonetheless. It happens at many levels of consciousness (or sub-consciousness), but whether we admit it or not, in looking at life in the ‘old world’ we seek to reconfirm the validity of having left it behind; we seek renewed belief in the new world. In this way, poetic, potentially liberating and potentially damaging, The study abroad experience is not merely a comparison of quality – though it is certainly that – it is also an existential search for and confirmation of self-definition. To know where we are now, we establish where we started from and how far we have removed ourselves from it. To know who we are, we confirm who we no longer are. This is a condition peculiar to the people of the new world and to people of colonies. It is a condition that Italians, for example, can never experience when they travel, since they understand inherently what Italy is, what it always has been and what it means to be Italian. This centeredness may be merely a function of historic time, but I think it is more than our national youth alone that encourages this quintessentially American process of an ongoing self-assessment and the insecurity that must accompany it.
I believe that this search for self identity is a consequence of our idea that to have come to America (to the new world) is to have created the chance to begin again. In this sense it is the future that we seek and history that we do not want. This lends poignancy to our student’s re-emersion and confrontation with it in Rome, Florence and Genoa.
No matter how alluring we may find it, we are also ambivalent about it, since to embrace history fully is to relinquish the chance to evade it. It is also to admit that we might not be doing better.
So there is this tension between our desire to emerge from the past and the impossibility of doing so. This dualism need not be only negative; yet it does demand a strategy for reconciliation. And before we can attempt to formulate a reconciliation, we must clarify what is being rejoined; the past and the liberation from it. The clarification – or identification - is facilitated by displacement to Italy. For, although familiarity breads intimacy, which is a kind of knowledge and expertise, it also hides many things. Often visitors teach us about our homes, and cities; things we hadn’t noticed, had forgotten, or didn’t make the effort to learn. When we travel ourselves, we activate our sensory perception in ways that we don’t normally do within the routine of our everyday lives. As well, there is great value to the perspective gained from distance, where the broader horizon envelops a much larger picture, giving understanding of things in relation to each other.
This is what happens to our students in Rome, in Florence and in Genoa. No matter how they much they focus on Italy and its past, they unavoidably understand it as Americas and in relation to America, and in relation to their own sense of contemporaneity. From Italy, they see America a bit differently, perhaps more critically, perhaps with more appreciation for our social, political and cultural experiment and perhaps with a newfound forgiveness.
Thus, Students who are the heirs of Tom’s teaching in Italy and of the study abroad model he helped to shape have never and will not go to Italy in quest of answers to America. But most have left and will leave Italy unsure of their beliefs and values and with a few important new questions about America and what it means to be an American. So while it is true that a lifetime is indeed not enough to comprehend Italy or even Rome, that goal is still only a means to yet another impossible goal which to understand America. It is this pair of unachievable and intertwined objectives that were constants in Tom’s life-journey. The presence of those objectives as touchstones in one’s life are also Tom’s greatest gift to us all. I already miss him as a companion on my own journey.