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Oliver Arditi

Writing all the things.

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Category: Architecture

My grandfather’s hats

It’s a strange privilege to have had a grandfather who was, as he once put it, ‘world famous to five … More

Reyner Banham, Reyner Banham Revisited, Richard J. Williams

For Pete’s sake!

In 1983 or 1984, I had a good look around Charles Jencks’s Thematic House, then recently completed. It is now … More

Reyner Banham, Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech, Todd Gannon

State of the planet

At the age of eighteen I was a dope-smoking, layabout, benefit-scrounging squatter. During this phase of my life I was … More

Foster + Partners, Kim Stanley Robinson, Moving to Mars, The Design Museum

Journey’s end

Eight kilometres to the north, and many lifetimes away from Noto, lie the remains of its corpse. Here was journey’s … More

ancient sites, Architecture, baroque, baroque architecture, buildings, Noto, Noto Antica, ruins, Sicilia, Sicily

History dissembled

Noto, like other cities in the southeast of Sicily, is a near perfect encapsulation of the Sicilian Baroque, built on … More

baroque, baroque architecture, cathedral, Cattedrale di Noto, church, ecclesiastical architecture, La Chiesa Madre di San Nicolò, Noto, Noto Cathedral, Sicilian Baroque, Sicily

The island’s amnesiac heart

At the approximate heart of the island of Sicily there is a site which it is hard not to regard … More

Ancient Rome, archaeology, Classical archaeology, Classical architecture, mosaic, mosaics, Sicily, Villa Romana del Casale, wall painting, wall paintings bikini girls

Traversing epistemologies

The Cattedrale di Palermo is a chimaera of architectural styles and periods. If someone had drawn it from their imagination, … More

baroque architecture, cathedrals, churches, gothic architecture, medieval architecture, Palermo, Sicily

History, re-mediated

‘Palazzo’ is a term that is bandied about quite casually in Italy, and although it is technically cognate with ‘palace’, … More

Arabo-Norman architecture, Capella Palatina, history, Norman Sicily, Palazzo dei Normanni, Palermo, Sicily

The elision of geography

At the age of fourteen I was lucky enough to spend a few hours, one afternoon in Los Angeles, with … More

autopia, freeways, LA, Los Angeles, Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies, Reyner Banham, surfurbia, the plains of id

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 … More

Arabo-Norman archaeology, Arabo-Norman architecture, Castello della Zisa, Palermo, Sicily

A ruptured order

A melancholy sense of lost hegemony and deteriorated grandeur was brought to Britain from southern Europe by the Grand Tourists … More

Orto Botanico di Palermo, Palermo, Sicily

The building which commemorates itself

We were advised by our Airbnb host that the Chiesa del Gesù is one of Palermo’s most beautiful baroque churches … More

baroque architecture, Chiesa del Gesù, Giovanni Tristano, Jesuits, Palermo, putti, Sicilian Baroque, Sicily, Society of Jesus

Moments of erasure

Facing across a busy Palermo street narrow enough to deny its facade any commanding sightlines, the Palazzo Riso-Belmonte is also … More

baroque, baroque architecture, Circle of Life, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea della Sicilia, Palazzo Riso-Belmonte, Palermo, Richard Long, RISO, Sicilian Baroque, Sicily

A life lived among relics

Apparently I’ve been to Anglesey Abbey before, according to everyone else in my family who I am claimed to have … More

Anglesey Abbey, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, National Trust
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