Black and white portrait of Robert Gerard Pietrusko wearing a sweater, collared shirt, and tie, with his torso facing forward but his head in profile

Robert Gerard Pietrusko

Garden Club of America Rome Prize
January 11–June 14, 2021
Profession
Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University
Project title
Adapting the Viticultural Landscape
Project description

Spatial data is not merely the representation of a landscape, it is deeply entangled with a landscape’s operation and its future. With accelerated global warming, winemaking regions are facing new environmental conditions that make their current operations untenable. In response, winemakers are considering alterations to their winemaking practices. However, these adaptive alterations quickly come into conflict with the strict guidelines of Italy’s wine appellation system. Through these appellations, a regional landscape, its agricultural practices, and the cultural expectations associated with a particular wine are mutually constitutive. This creates a tension between the realities of a physical landscape and its standardization in a classification scheme. This research will explore these dependencies and conflicts through the analysis of material practices in the landscape and the analysis of standardization practices in the institution.