For NCSU architecture students, Ancient Rome is the syllabus
What began with a YouTube discovery has quietly become one of the more distinctive programs in American design education.
Five years ago, NC State University alumnus Dan Smith stumbled upon Ancient Rome Live through social media and reached out to ARL founder Darius Arya with a proposition: bring NCSU’s College of Design architecture students to Rome for an exploration of architecture through ancient history. Since hosting its first session in May 2022, ARL has welcomed a new cohort of NCSU students to the Eternal City each year.
The weeklong immersive program, made possible through the generosity of Dan and Glynda Smith, embeds a small cohort of architecture students directly inside the city that arguably invented the discipline. No lecture hall. No textbook stand-in– just Rome itself in a layered, living curriculum that no campus can replicate.
Smith had a clear vision from the start. “An NCSU Rome program could create a distinctive academic experience grounded in direct engagement with the built environment, urban history, and contemporary city life,” he says. “The relationship between coursework and place becomes immediate and operative rather than abstract.”
For Arya, who has spent his career making Rome’s ancient fabric accessible to new audiences, the partnership with NCSU opened an unexpected perspective on the city he knows intimately. “There’s a saying that archaeologists look down — always reading the ground,” he notes. “Architects look up. Their training orients them toward light and shadow, toward contrast, toward the conversation between details and the whole.”
That difference in orientation proves generative. Architects notice what’s working and what isn’t, whether its the proportions of a window to a door or the rhythm of columns. Archaeologists read the accumulation of decisions embedded in the ground itself. Together, the two perspectives triangulate something neither fully achieves alone: an understanding of Rome as a system that has persisted, been repurposed, and remained operational across radically different civilizations and political conditions.
What also sets the NCSU students apart, Arya observes, is how they look. “They still draw by hand. They don’t just photograph — they analyze and commit that interpretation to paper. That’s a fundamentally different kind of attention.” In a city saturated with cameras, a student pausing to sketch the cornice of a Roman temple is doing something genuinely rare.
Over five years, the program has grown considerably in scope. It has expanded well beyond Rome proper, taking students to Ostia Antica, the remarkably preserved port city south of the capital, and out into the countryside to Villa d’Este and Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli. “The range has expanded,” Arya says, “and with it, so has what the students take home.” The program now reaches into the suburbs and the Roman countryside while still anchoring itself in walking tours through the heart of the historic city.
For NCSU’s five-year master’s track in architecture, the experience offers something the standard curriculum structurally cannot: the chance to test ideas against one of the world’s most complex and consequential built environments. Rome’s layered urban fabric — where ancient infrastructure sits beneath Renaissance piazzas, which sit beneath contemporary street life — compresses thousands of years of design decision-making into a single walkable city. For students of architecture and urban design, that compression is the education.
Smith, reflecting on what he hopes students carry back to their practice, frames it in terms of temporal depth rather than stylistic influence. The goal is not for students to return home inspired to build like Romans, but to understand how urban form persists, how it is repurposed, and how it continues to function under radically different cultural and political conditions. That is a lesson Rome teaches better than anywhere else on earth.
Five years in, the 2026 session, held May 16–22, marked the program’s fifth anniversary and a fitting milestone for what started as a boutique experiment: a benefactor with a vision, an archaeologist with a city, a cohort of curious students. It has become a model for what design education can be when the city itself does the teaching.
Ancient Rome Live is proud to continue this collaboration with NC State University College of Design.
