The OCCAS studio course Moving Monuments: Rome, continuing in its ninth year, invites a novel take on historical monuments. It traces a selection of monuments through history – as well as history through its many mediations. “Moving” may refer to the actual transportation of
architecture but also to the circulation and recreation of monuments in various media and materials, from print to plaster, across the ages. Through lectures, field trips and archival research, the course aims to show that a monument is anything but a solid structure. Rather, it forms along the way and becomes what it is through exhibitions, publications, interpretations, canonizations and re-adaptions.

The OCCAS core members join forces to present a variety of perspectives on past monuments and a variety of methods that enable us to think, write and talk about them. The students are asked to select one monument related to Rome and to work with their selected building
throughout the term, studying it from increasingly sophisticated historiographical perspectives. This fall the monuments include the Tiber and its flooding, the Septizodium, the Via Giulia, Serlio’s Terzo libro, Michelangelo’s house, the Trevi fountain, the Pincio, and Giuseppe Terragni’s Danteum.

The field trip to Rome is realized in close collaboration with AHO’s partner institution, The Norwegian Institute in Rome, and offers exclusive visits to the National archive of prints and copper plates (Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica) and the Forum Romanum. Invited guest
speakers this year count Christopher Siwicki, Anna Blennow, Tommaso Zerbi and Eirik Bøhn.