I was standing in a derelict courtyard in Palermo last Tuesday, watching a team of contractors prep a site for what the local news was calling a “revolutionary” urban regeneration project. They were talking about seamless integration and synergistic spaces,…
I was standing in a crumbling courtyard in the outskirts of Naples last Tuesday, watching a contractor try to patch a structural fissure with nothing but cheap, grey cement and a prayer. It’s the same way politicians approach the concept…
I was surveying a small, nineteenth-century farmhouse near Ravenna last Tuesday when I saw it: a jagged, ugly seam where a new housing development had simply slapped itself against the ancient boundary wall. There was no transition, no respect for…
I was surveying a mid-century renovation in Ravenna last Tuesday when I found myself staring, not at the beautiful frescoes, but at the junction where a new drywall partition met an old stone lintel. It was a mess of cheap…
I remember standing in a damp cellar in a crumbling palazzo near Palermo last autumn, my flashlight catching the jagged edge of a sixteenth-century limestone block. A developer was there, waving a glossy brochure and talking about “seamless integration” and…
I was standing in a decommissioned textile mill outside of Biella last autumn, watching a developer walk through the main hall with a stack of glossy renderings. He was talking about “minimalist aesthetics” and “stripping back the soul” to make…
I was standing in a courtyard in Florence last Tuesday, watching a group of tourists marvel at the sweeping, glass-and-steel curves of a contemporary wing, completely oblivious to the fact that the entire structure was fighting a losing battle against…
I was standing in a dusty courtyard in Ravenna last autumn, tracing the uneven way a medieval mason had notched a limestone block, when I found myself thinking about the sheer noise surrounding modern high-tech architecture. People talk about Renzo…
I was sitting in a small café in Milan last spring, staring at a piece of laminate that looked like it had been rejected from a fever dream, when it hit me how much we misunderstand the chaos of the…
I was standing in a drafty, half-renovated palazzo in Palermo last autumn, staring at a structural intervention that was being hailed in the journals as a masterpiece of “innovation.” It was nothing more than a clumsy, expensive attempt to force…