Founded in 1894, the American Academy in Rome was one of several ripple effects of the highly successful “White City” created for the 1893 Columbian Exposition. The brainchild of famed architect Charles Follen McKim, the academy’s mission was to encourage collaboration among young men who would be studying the “classical tradition and the unification of the arts in the spirit of the Renaissance…” Originally offering fellowships in architecture, archeology, painting and sculpture, it was not until the summer of 1915 that a fellowship was awarded to a student of landscape architecture.


Two of the individuals most involved in the establishment and continued success of the fellowship were James Sturgis Pray, head of Harvard’s program, and Bryant Fleming, director at Cornell. A rather unfortunate rivalry had developed between the two prominent programs based, among other things, on the academic location of the departments and the methodologies used in teaching. Pray maintained that only within a program associated with architecture could landscape architects learn the true meaning of design. Cornell’s program, on the other hand, was located in its college of agriculture.

Ironically, the Cornell students experienced unrivaled success in the early years of the Rome Prize competition. Winning the first three fellowships (Ed Lawson, Norman Newton, and Ralph Griswold), Cornellians, by 1940, had taken twelve of the eighteen prizes given in landscape architecture. By the mid 1920’s the fellowship was jokingly referred to as the “Cornell Prize.” Equally ironic is that this success acknowledged Cornell’s attachment to the classical traditions and styles of design which were so endeared to the juries of the competitions. By the end of the Great Depression and World War II, however, the profession of landscape architecture was undergoing a major transformation. The Cornell program, tied to the older traditions and hesitant to move into the world of “modern” design, stagnated, due in part to the very success it had enjoyed.