For 11 of the 21 years I have been happily and gainfully employed at DiMella Shaffer, I have had the additional privilege of co-leading a long-standing summer study abroad program with a friend who works at the Boston Architectural College.  Over the years, we have taken more than 120 students to Paris, Florence, Madrid, and Rome — with excursions to nearby cities, and even cities in England and Germany, to enhance their education.

“I want to see therefore I draw.”
                                            — Carlo Scarpa

While it has been a unique challenge to fit into my project work schedule the elective task of preparing a month of pre-departure class work even before the month-long program can begin in situ, it has been equally rewarding to arrive at our selected destinations primed with a sense of expectation and purpose, with empty sketchbooks waiting to be filled.  Indeed, I reveled in every opportunity to sketch alongside the students while engaging in conversations about history and design. It was during our most recent program, based in Rome, that the relatively quick watercolor sketch — neither a rendering nor a wash — became a compelling technique to document what I love about this eternal city.

Treating the city as an open-air classroom that summer, spanning from ancient forums with imperial monuments to what felt like every cobblestoned piazza in between, I got to reflect on how manifest ruin and decay become layered into one’s appreciation of Rome as eternal. Gazing upon a once triumphant arch or vault, long enough at least to sketch it, the students and I engaged in the way these symbols of empire garner significance today: suspended in a state of ruin, devoid of their intended architectural program, signifiers of a once and future civilization whose subsequent cultural contributions – be they in support or defiance of a vaunted past – ultimately are what can be considered everlasting. In this context of longevity through adaptation, the 12th century church of San Clemente, whose foundations incorporate the excavated layers of earlier republican era buildings, and Richard Meier’s 21st century museum for the Ara Pacis, an altar from the 1st century B.C., perform the same act of balancing tribute and invention.  And whether it’s due to or despite Rome’s relative wealth in extant material from antiquity, it is the treatment of this material less as phenomenon and more as practical fact that shapes both the contemporary city and my fascination with its eternal, unselfconscious reanimation.