This two-day international conference explores topics in Roman construction and design, urbanism, the architectural impact of Hadrian, and more generally, the nature and legacy of classicism. The conference commemorates the work of William L. MacDonald (1921–2010; FAAR, 1956) who exerted a powerful influence on the field of Roman imperial architecture, shifting its study in significant new directions. The conference is organized by a committee led by John A. Pinto (FAAR, 1975; RAAR, 2006), Howard Crosby Butler Memorial Professor of the History of Architecture at Princeton University; Fikret K. Yegül, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara's School of Art and Architecture; and Diane Favro, a professor of architecture and urban design at the University of California, Los Angeles.

John Pinto is the Howard Crosby Butler Memorial Professor of the History of Architecture in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Pinto was educated at the Overseas School of Rome and earned his BA and PhD from Harvard University; he has been a faculty member at Smith College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pinto was a Rome Prize Fellow in the history of art, 1973–75, and returned as a resident in 2006. The author of numerous scholarly studies on Italian Renaissance and Baroque architecture, Pinto is best known for two books published by Yale University Press: The Trevi Fountain (1986) and Hadrian's Villa and Its Legacy (1995). Coauthored with William L. McDonald (FAAR, 1956) Hadrian's Villa won awards from the Society of Architectural Historians, the Art Libraries Society of North America, and the American Institute of Architects.

Diane Favro is a professor of architecture and urban design at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her BA in art from San Jose State University; her M. in art history from the University of California,Santa Barbara; and her PhD in architectural history from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the urbanism of ancient Rome, archaeological historiography, women in architecture, and the pedagogy of architectural history. Her publications include Streets: Critical Perspectives on Public Space (University of California Press, 1994; revised in Turkish 2007); The Urban Image of Augustan Rome (Cambridge University Press, 1996); and numerous writings on ancient urban issues including architectural laws, ritual processions, construction traffic, and digital humanities. She is director of the Experiential Technologies Center, which creates real-time digital models of historic environments and promotes humanities research using new technologies. Favro is currently the executive director of research for UCLA's School of the Arts and Architecture and she previously served as president of the national Society of Architectural Historians.

Fikret K. Yegül is professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara's School of Art and Architecture. He received a BArch from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey; a BArch from Yale University; an MArch from the University of Pennsylvania; and a PhD from Harvard University. Yegül is an architectural historian specializing in Roman art and architecture; he has long worked on the Sardis Archaeological Expedition. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow at CASVA in Washington, DC. His books include The Roman Bath Gymnasium Complex at Sardis (1986); Gentlemen of Instinct and Breeding: Architecture at the American Academy in Rome, 1894–1940 (1991); Baths and Bathing in Classical Antiquity (1992), winner of the Society of Architectural Historians' Alice Davis Hitchcock Prize; and Bathing in the Roman World (2010). Yegül is currently working on a folio publication of the Temple of Artemis at Sardis, focusing on a real-time digital modeling of the monument.

The mission of the American Academy in Rome, founded in 1894, is to foster the pursuit of advanced research and independent study in the fine arts and humanities. The American Academy in Rome awards the Rome Prize to a select group of artists and scholars, after an application process that begins in the fall of each year. The winners, announced in the spring, are invited to Rome to pursue their work in an atmosphere conducive to intellectual and artistic freedom, interdisciplinary exchange, and innovation. The encounter with Rome represents now, as it has done since the Academy's inception, something unique: a chance for American artists and scholars to spend significant time interacting and working in one of the oldest, most cosmopolitan cities in the world. The richness of Rome's artistic and cultural legacy and its power to stimulate creative thinking served as the initial impetus for the Academy's founding. Today, those tendencies live on, transformed as ever by the dynamism of the Academy's constantly evolving community. The community includes fellows, residents, visiting artists and scholars, and, come June, members of academic summer programs.