My Kind of Town: David Kohn on Milan

Founder of David Kohn Architects, whose current projects include a community arts centre and A Room for London, a temporary installation on the roof of the Southbank Centre, designed in collaboration with artist Fiona Banner.

architecturetoday.co.uk, 13/01/12

The island of Sicily retains a sense of having once been at the centre of the world. Due to its strategic position midway between the Atlantic and Red Seas, and between the European and African continental landmasses, it was the prize of numerous mediterranean empires from the Carthaginians to the Romans, from the Phoenicians to the Spanish. Consequently, Sicily is dense with architectural treasures.

Perhaps because of the over-abundance of crumbling historic monuments, modern day Sicilians treat them as so much more background to daily life. Contemporary urban and sub-urban development happens where it must. Petrol stations irreverently jostle for street frontage with aristocratic pallazzi; a seemingly oversized and underused motorway system steps over much of the rural countryside on stilts only coming to ground at major cities. The Sicilian landscape is pervaded by the bathos of apparently incompatible things existing cheek by jowl.

Each element within a landscape is of a type which has an appropriate setting of its own. Monuments in public piazzi, ships in the sea, petrol stations in expanses of asphalt and Cyprus trees in rows. It is when such things are forced to occupy close quarters, with little or no threshold between them, that the awkwardness of their adjacency is thrown into sharp relief.