In the course Parks and Fora of Imperial Rome, students pound the Roman pavements, looking for clues to elaborate gardens built more than 2,000 years ago and lying 10 feet below.
For Kathryn Gleason's students, a stroll through the streets of Rome is an exercise in time travel.
More than 2,000 years ago, Pompey the Great built the first of what would become a series of urban parks within the city. Thousands of Roman citizens would take their leisure in these luxurious swaths of green or walk through them enroute to the centers of commerce-a welcome refuge from the hazardous and noisy streets. Only one of the 12 parks has been excavated. The rest will lie forever buried 10 feet below today's apartment buildings, offices, and restaurants.
Gleason-a 1979 ALS graduate and a pioneer in the field of landscape archaeology-wants her students to imagine what the other parks looked like.
It's a tall order. There is nothing in the students' academic training to prepare them for the task.
"Architects, lawyers, and physicians all know their professions go back to early civilization, and that's equally true for the designers of gardens and public parks," says Gleason, chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture. "Yet most of our students think the idea of the park began with Frederick Law Olmsted."
Olmsted's Central Park isn't much help in conjuring up the gardens of antiquity. Rome's imperial gardens were more the size of Bryant Park, the 8-acre green space in Manhattan created to accompany the New York Public Library. (Central Park is comparatively gargantuan at 843 acres.)
What's more, Rome's urban parks were completely enclosed by colonnades. These decorative pillars supported a roof giving shade from the blazing Mediterranean sun. This architectural form was called a portico, the Latin from which our word porch is derived. While some porticos were attached to buildings, ancient Rome's parks were bounded by them, as a way of keeping out slaves and of controlling crowds of citizens during times of civil unrest, while simultaneously protecting the invaluable plants and objects displayed within.
Inside the garden, there were architectural structures covered with marble, fountains, and plants. These were not flower gardens; the Romans preferred trees and clipped and flowering shrubs. Cut flowers were woven into fragrant garlands hanging between the columns.
The ancient parks were used very differently than are contemporary parks, which typically house botanical collections and sports facilities and are used for ornamentation and recreation. From well before the first millennium B.C., the rulers of antiquity created parks as a powerful tool for spreading propaganda.
"In the days before television and other forms of mass media, a ruler needed to communicate to his people that he had a right to rule," Gleason explains. "By demonstrating control over the often unpredictable forces of nature through collecting plants and animals-and building irrigation and other centralized systems to allow them to flourish in a non-native climate-he showed he had the gods' favor."
These oases of manicured green were also used to convey the triumphs of empire building. In Roman times, victorious generals and emperors brought back the spoils of war and housed them in small buildings in the parks. Plants (the Judean balsam was a particularly prized exotic), as well as statuary and paintings collected from throughout the empire, were displayed for citizens to admire and learn about the wider world. (Making knock-off copies for private gardens was big business.)
Stories of conquest came to life when prows of ships, weapons, and armor of the vanquished were right before the citizens' eyes.
"When Titus's legions had triumphed over Jerusalem in a prolonged and bloody battle and he wanted to get the news back, to make it vivid, he used a garden," Gleason says.
The Templum of Pacis, or Forum of Peace (in the sense of pacification), was built to celebrate the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem. It housed the menorah and other sacred objects soldiers had pillaged.
Gardens have always been displays of international power. We Americans take for granted that we can get trees from wherever in the world we want, which is a sign of cultural or economic domination. For example, all the 240 trees in Bryant Park are London plane, a hybrid of a native and non-native species.
To assist her students' imaginings, Gleason gives them excerpts from the writings of Roman historians, poets, and novelists that offer hints as to what the parks looked like and what went on there. She also provides photographs of a map of Rome in the third century A.D. that the emperor Septimius Severus had inscribed on 151 slabs of marble. Since historians have yet to reach consensus as to what the horticultural and landscape notations on the map mean, Gleason's students are contributing fresh ideas on the question. (Their original research will be published in a catalog of all the known gardens and parks of the Roman Empire.)
During spring break, Gleason takes her students to Italy for two weeks of walking Rome's streets (replete with clues as to what is buried beneath them), visiting the Italian excavation of the Temple of Peace (where the botanical remains of roses were found), and getting their own hands dirty at one of Gleason's digs-the villa garden of the lyric poet Horace.
"What we find in Horace's garden are subtle changes in the color and texture of the soil that are evidence of where plants were planted and stake holes placed," Gleason says of the remains of this first-century courtyard garden located in the remote hill town of Licenza. "Although we may never know for sure what plants were there, we can work out the garden's design."
Students are fascinated to see how nature has taken its course over 2,000 years on highly developed architecture that is now a ruin. And they are surprised by the sophistication of gardens in classical antiquity, realizing that there is no such thing as a "primitive" garden.
"American education is so much about the teaching of progress that students think these gardens from an unimaginably long time ago (5,000 years) were very primitive," Gleason says. "Yet they were as elaborately designed and as beautiful as any gardens today."
In the end, this idea of the immensity of time itself is what Gleason hopes will enlighten her students' sense of their influence as professionals. "People think of gardens and parks as ephemeral," Gleason says, "but that's not true. They are large, bold designs that remain in the landscape for thousands of years."
- Metta Winter
The Department of Landscape Architecture will be celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2004-2005. The faculty, students, and alumni are planning a series of events to explore the life of the department's founder, Liberty Hyde Bailey, as an important force in the early development of professional education in landscape architecture. While Bailey remains a much-venerated figure at Cornell, his influence on the profession deserves greater recognition. Long before founding the department, he instructed some of the great pioneers of modern landscape architecture, including the first African American landscape architect, David Williston.
In 1904, Liberty Hyde Bailey made Rural Art one of the departments of the new College of Agriculture. What he founded was, in fact, a department of landscape architecture, but during his years of teaching design as part of his offerings in horticulture at Michigan State and Cornell, he had developed a particular vision for this new department. According to Professor Daniel Krall, who is writing the history of the department, Bailey felt that landscape architecture needed to be brought to the agricultural heartland of America, where excellent design was needed for parks, recreational spaces, and public civic spaces, as well as well-planned home design. The young profession of landscape architecture was too elitist, he felt, too grounded in urbane European traditions.
While the students were called landscape architects or designers, the department shifted names from Rural Art to Landscape Art and Landscape Design, as the faculty struggled to find a title that combined Bailey's particular vision with their professional realities.
Today the Department of Landscape Architecture has fulfilled Bailey's vision. Most design courses and faculty research address the planning and design needs of upstate New York's communities. In a series of lectures, student events, alumni reunion activities, and publications, Bailey's legacy will be celebrated and brought to the attention of the broader profession of landscape architecture.