To Draw is To See: Drawings from Rome 

A Decade of Auburn APLA Students Study in the Eternal City An Exhibit in Dudley Gallery

The APLA Rome Program was inaugurated in 2005, and is a semester-long place-based experience that allows students the opportunity to live and study in Rome.

Since 2008, the Auburn Program has collaborated with the University of Arkansas Rome Center, established in 1989 as the flagship international program of the Fay Jones School of Architecture in Fayetteville.

Students are in residence in the Eternal City for four months, living in apartments and negotiating the city each day on the way to classes, assignments and meetings throughout the city. They are fully immersed in the activities of the Rome Center, and go to classes together with peers and colleagues from the University of Arkansas, University of Tennessee Knoxville, and Philadelphia University.

In the best Beaux-Arts traditions of drawing from the ancient monuments, students are continually sketching throughout the semester, the better to understand the palimpsest of the modern city and its future.

Students use DRAWING as a way to SEE, to look carefully and seek to uncover and understand the underlying structure and ordering geometries of the spaces and places of the city. Drawing is emphasized as a tool for ANALYSIS. Projects in Design Studio are then opportunities to for SYNTHESIS of the many experiences and exposures to ideas and concepts encountered throughout the semester.

The projects on exhibit in Dudley Gallery are but a few of the many fine examples produced in the past decade of study. Dudley Gallery is open from 7:45 a.m. until 4:45 p.m., Monday through Friday. The “To Draw is to See: Drawings from Rome” exhibit will run through October.

Click here to see photos of the exhibit.