Clemson Landscape Architect Case Brown Wins Rome Prize

Case Brown, a Clemson University assistant professor of landscape architecture, was awarded a fellowship to study for a year in Rome.
Photo: Clemson University

Case Brown, a Clemson University assistant professor of landscape architecture, is the recipient of the Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize for landscape architecture from the American Academy in Rome.

The prize is a fellowship that includes a stipend, a study and room and board for one year in Rome.

Brown is currently on leave from Clemson to do research for a design group at MIT.

The Rome Prize is awarded annually through an open national competition 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 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 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 for a scholar and a perfect, undistracted environment for ideas and working with emerging artists, scholars and designers.

Brown will use the year abroad to work on his proposal, “Villas: Landscapes of Speculation.” It’s a look at the villa system, ancient Rome’s agricultural complex that fed the armies, grew surpluses and helped expand the empire. The Italian villa was originally a farm, but during the Renaissance came to be associated with a wealth 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.”

Brown says 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.”

He observes that the villa system combined a food economy infrastructure and an elite leisure class, 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 believes it is the nature of these markets to bloat beyond their own means, and sites examples such as oversized vacation homes in the U.S., elaborate golf course communities in China or ambitious skyscrapers in Dubai.