Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Hybridity reified: a cosmopolitan architecture

    Hybridity reified: a cosmopolitan architecture

    Like the gardens of the Orto Botanico, the formal beds and pathways through which one approaches the facade of the Castello della Zisa are parched, dry and brown. They are not effaced by a chaos of growth, however, but scourged with an excess of order, a ground whose geometries are violated by no figure. Or Read more

  • A few wooden buildings

    A few wooden buildings

    Places have memories. This is not to propose the pathetic fallacy that they have feelings, consciousness, thoughts or intentions, but that in the same manner that a certain synaptic pattern preserves a trace of experience in the brain, features of landscape and cityscape preserve traces of biography. Of course subjective experience can only be imaginatively Read more

  • A ruptured order

    A ruptured order

    A melancholy sense of lost hegemony and deteriorated grandeur was brought to Britain from southern Europe by the Grand Tourists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and profoundly informed the aesthetics of the Gothic and Romantic movements, as in the archetypically Gothic edifice of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, a crumbling mansion set in a Read more

  • A memory of speech

    A memory of speech

    We speak, and sometimes we are heard. An impression remains in the memory of our auditors, and although it is not our speech, we and they treat it as such. Eventually, that recollection is occulted or extinguished, in both speaker and auditor, and for the most part, no trace remains of the utterance. This is Read more

  • The truths between instants

    The truths between instants

    ‘The camera cannot lie’ is a phrase that has had currency since the last years of the nineteenth century, although it may well struggle to retain any utility in our present era of  the digitally constructed image. It was always founded on a stark misunderstanding of visual experience. The camera, rather, can never speak truthfully, Read more

  • The city’s invisible family photographs

    The city’s invisible family photographs

    The Galleria d’Arte Moderna Sant’Anna is housed in what was once a Franciscan friary. I can’t remember entering it, or how it presents itself to the street; I can simply recall being in it, and how it looks inwards, from all sides, onto its cloistered central courtyard. Where once a lush and intensively cultivated garden Read more