It’s a strange privilege to have had a grandfather who was, as he once put it, ‘world famous to five … More
Category: Architecture
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
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
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
History dissembled
Noto, like other cities in the southeast of Sicily, is a near perfect encapsulation of the Sicilian Baroque, built on … More
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
Traversing epistemologies
The Cattedrale di Palermo is a chimaera of architectural styles and periods. If someone had drawn it from their imagination, … More
History, re-mediated
‘Palazzo’ is a term that is bandied about quite casually in Italy, and although it is technically cognate with ‘palace’, … More
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
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
A ruptured order
A melancholy sense of lost hegemony and deteriorated grandeur was brought to Britain from southern Europe by the Grand Tourists … More
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
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
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