BY ZACH MORTICE
Rosetta S. Elkin Live Matter exhibition and publication, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, with support from Harvard Arnold Arboretum, 2015. Image courtesy of Rosetta Elkin.
On April 20, the American Academy in Rome announced its class of 2017?2018 Rome Prize recipients, which includes the landscape architects Rosetta Elkin and Alison Hirsch with Aroussiak Gabrielian.
Chosen by a jury chaired by the architect Thom Mayne of Morphosis (and featuring the landscape architects Lisa Switkin of James Corner Field Operations and David Fletcher), Elkin, Hirsch, and Gabrielian will join a multidisciplinary cast of architects, historic preservationists, historians, writers, artists, and composers to pursue independent research at the Academy?s Villa Aurelia in Rome. Rosetta Elkin. Image courtesy of Rosetta Elkin.
Elkin, an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, will use her Rome Prize fellowship to investigate plants that ?[identify] a region culturally, but also become a kind of naturalized indicator of changing and shifting conditions in the living environment,? she says. Her research proposal, called Shorelines: The Case of the Italian Stone Pine, examines how this tree?an iconic and emblematic piece of Roman culture?has evolved to meet changing ecosystems and biome ranges over time. The source of the Italian staple of pine nuts, stone pines (Pinus pinea) line the Via Appia, Rome?s ancient and expansive road, and are an i...