Gloomy Winner

Fifty years ago U. S. art students headed for Rome in a fever of esthetic excitement. "I went reeling and moaning thro' the streets!" said Henry James of his first visit. If art students reel less easily nowadays it is not because Rome is less intoxicating, but because they have a harder time freeing their minds of the parlous state of art in the modern world, the parlous state of the world itself. Last week a 27-year-old architect named Erling Frithjof Iversen, winner of this year's Prix de Rome, revealed the sobriety of his generation when he took the occasion of his victory to comment darkly on the dark outlook for modern architects.

The Prix de Rome is the choicest plum for U. S. art students who are under 30 and unmarried. It gives them two years at the American Academy in Rome, from $1,400 to $1,500 a year, studio and materials, freedom to travel. To win it, Architect Iversen got through preliminaries that eliminated 74 entrants, then worked for a month on a set problem in competition with eight other finalists. The problem : to design an open-air theatre for a city of 500,000, in an amusement park on the westerly edge of a hypothetical lake, with the stage mounted on a barge. Said Winner Iversen, unflushed by his victory, "I don't think I could get a $30 a week architecture job here right now."

Born in Manhattan of Norwegian parents, big, chubby-cheeked Erling Iversen is a graduate of New York University, lives in Brooklyn, studied this past year at Princeton's Graduate School. His fellowship requires that he spend some six months each year in Rome, but the rest of the time, far from reeling and moaning through the streets. Architect Iversen intends to travel--"if they keep the peace," he said gloomily, "which I doubt."

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