UW Design in Roma 2006

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The UW Visual Communication Design Program is pleased to offer its second seminar in Rome during Summer Quarter 2006. Rome is a legendary crossroads of ancient and modern culture, its history defined by the monuments of the imperial past and the magnificence of the Roman Catholic Church. Monuments such as the Colosseum, the Arch of Constantine, the Pantheon, the ancient Roman Forum, and the artistic treasures of the city's many museums and churches have attracted visitors to the Eternal City for centuries. Rome has always been a powerful symbol during its rise as an empire, but also in the 20th century as symbol in literature, culture, and history. It is a city of contradictions—acting as the center of Roman Catholicism and pre-Christian paganism, of immense beauty and infamous ruin, and of opulent antiquity and contemporary extravagance. Few cities in the world can provide students with such an inspiring and memorable landscape to work from.

The seminar will be based at the University of Washington Rome Center, housed in the 17th century Palazzo Pio in the heart of historic Rome. Built on the foundations of the Theater of Pompey, ancient Rome’s first permanent theatre (dedicated in 55 B.C.), the Palazzo adjoins the Campo de’ Fiori, site of Rome’s most attractive open air market. The Center provides classroom and studio space, a library, a computer lab, as well as logistical support.

Program Directors

Christopher Ozubko
Professor of Design & Director of the School of Art

Lisa Schultz
Art Historian

Courses fulfill a total of 8 credits in art/design/art history that will apply to Autumn Quarter 2006.

Type | Form | Function:
A Typographic Survey of Rome

Instructor: Christopher Ozubko, 5 credits

This course is a presentation of the typography of Rome. Particular focus is placed on the relationship between letterform, context, and the means in which it was created. Rome and other locations in Italy will be the physical and material settings of the course. This enquiry will include ancient to contemporary examples of typography as it is applied to stone, tablets, manuscripts, books, and signage. This legacy demonstrated in typographic letterform will be explored in the museums, monuments, piazze, palaces, villas, monasteries, and streets of Rome.

The Power of Images:
The Art of Propaganda

Instructor: Lisa Schultz, 3 credits

In this course students will study the interaction of art, politics and religion in Rome through outstanding representative monuments that show both continuity and change over the major epochs of the city’s history. Specifically, students will examine how art and architecture functioned as a tool of propaganda to advance the goals of the state, the church, and the individual. With the city of Rome as their classroom students will study the works of art and architecture in their original settings to gain a deeper understanding of their place in art history and the history of civilization in Italy.

Students will take an active role in presenting key monuments to the class based on advance preparation and research begun in Seattle.