Architecture faculty member awarded American Academy in Rome fellowship

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Christine Gorby, associate professor of architecture at Penn State, has been named a winner of an American Academy in Rome Fellowship in Architecture for 2019-20.

The prestigious fellowships have been awarded annually by the academy for more than a century in an effort to support innovative and cross-disciplinary work in the arts and humanities.

Gorby was one of six fellowship winners chosen from a pool of nearly 1,000 applicants. While in Rome, Gorby will conduct research at the academy’s 11-acre campus, where she will focus on American architect Robert Venturi while collaborating with esteemed American and Italian artists and scholars.

The fellowship will support the reevaluation of Venturi’s early design work by placing it into dynamic, new interrelation with his Rome, Italy, and other American Academy-based studies; valued collaborations; and influential book “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.”

“I’m very honored to receive a 2019-20 Fellowship in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome, an esteemed institution that supports a creative and intellectual environment where decades of artists, historians and others have been inspired to develop meaningful and consequential work,” Gorby said. “This recognition is also significant because it enables concentrated time for research and for sharing and engaging with the work of others.”

Gorby has been a member of the Stuckeman School faculty for nearly 20 years, where she has taught second-year undergraduate studio, fifth-year thesis design studio, design communication media, research methodologies and architectural theory with an emphasis on urban theory. Her research interests have focused mainly on design, history and theory in the built environment.