Clemson landscape architect wins prestigious Rome Prize

Published: April 21, 2010

Case Brown image by: Clemson University

CLEMSON — A Clemson University assistant professor of landscape architecture has been awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Case Brown is the recipient of the Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize for landscape architecture.

Brown, currently on leave from Clemson to serve as principal researcher for a design group at MIT, was awarded the prize from the national academy on April 15. As a recipient of the 114th annual Rome Prize Competition, Brown earns a fellowship that includes a stipend, a study and room and board for one year in Rome, Italy.

The Rome Prize is awarded annually through an open national competition that is juried by leading artists and scholars. Established in 1894 and chartered by an act of Congress in 1905, the American Academy in Rome is a leading center for independent studies and advanced research in the arts and humanities.

“This is as big a prize as there is in architecture and landscape architecture,” said Clemson University President James F. Barker, himself an architect. “The Rome Prize is a feather in Case’s hat and it brings a great deal of recognition to Clemson University.”

Brown said the prize is liberating to a scholar.

“To compose thoughts, explore their trails of consequence and arrive at their ramifications is an age-old process in the sciences and the humanities. To do so without distraction, and in the company of some of the major emerging artists, scholars and designers of today, creates the perfect fertile environment for idea stimulation and germination,” he said. “The Rome Prize provides that mental and institutional space to pursue ideas more organically, without the traditional disciplinary silos or boundaries.”

Brown will use the year abroad to work on his proposal, “Villas: Landscapes of Speculation,” an exploration of the first example of a fairly developed market economy. It’s a look at the villa system, the ancient Roman agricultural complex that spread the empire, fed the armies and grew the surpluses to make senators rich. Originally a farm, the Italian villa during the Renaissance came to be associated with a rich country house.

Brown is interested in the boom-and-bust cycle of any economy and the way it forges landscapes. His investigation will map the phenomenon “as a kind of bizarre behavior that continues today globally.”

That is where the landscape architect’s creative artistic/design background will enter: the mapping of the cycles and how they relate across space and time.

“The rise and crash of the Roman villa system reads eerily like the modern story of American foreclosures — profit schemes of land speculation, securitized and excessively mortgaged properties, rapid expansion and even more rapid decline.  … As a system, they provide a marvelous example of combining a food economy infrastructure and an elite leisure system, all the while staking claim to an enormous empire. How did this economy operate and did the Romans overextend their land ventures as many have in the modern United States?” Brown asks.

He saiid it is the nature of these markets to bloat beyond their own means, and the tendency continues today with such examples as oversized American vacation homes, elaborate golf course communities in China or ambitious skyscrapers in Dubai.

“We tend to overextend markets with gluttonous consistency. All these forms of extra-urban development, ancient and modern, draw on a common set of market-exploitation tendencies. Fertile land, urban respite and profit have provided the skeleton for centuries of speculation. To be able to document the birth of this trifecta could reformat our current landscape speculative practices,” Brown said.

The American Academy in Rome awards the prestigious Rome Prize to a selected group of artists and scholars invited to Rome to pursue their creative goals in an atmosphere conducive to artistic innovation and progressive scholarship. The academy provides a multidisciplinary environment aimed at bringing groups of talented and ambitious artists and scholars together to contribute to the artistic movements and scholarly culture of their time.

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