50 CONTEXT 188 : JUNE 2026 The Cappella Palatina, Palermo (Photo: Urban, Wikimedia) the floor hierarchy, the recessed arches, the restrained decoration, the wrought-iron balconies, the brick ground floor, the decorative Flemish bond, the elegant wall-towindow proportions, the different fan lights, the verticality, the slim glazing bars, and, thanks to the Building Act 1707, the judicious use of ornament. This combination is as close to perfection as it gets. Your favourite place? As a complete experience, Palermo, Sicily: the chaos, the heat, the noise, the fullness of life. I love the stone streets, the cheek-by-jowl buildings, the streets and squares. And it is on the coast. Its buildings stand testimony to what all healthy societies should be: a crosspollination of the best of different cultures, each culture standing proud while learning from, rather than ignoring or destroying, its neighbour. The Cappella Palatina, a mix of Byzantine, Fatimid and Norman, stands testimony, for example, to the tricultural state of 12th century Sicily. Your favourite book? The first one that pops into my mind is Alain de Botton’s Architecture of Happiness. Another favourite is Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, one of the funniest books on architecture I have read, and one of the most irreverent and astute, without being hostile. Wolfe is a master of observation and neologisms: the Bauhaus becomes memorable to the non-specialist, with its Mieslings, Silver Princes, non-architecture, the ‘bourgeois’ (said with the utmost disdain), the COMPOUND, and the White Architects. The Mieslings were appalled, but really the book is a masterclass in how to disdain with some kind of reluctant appreciation. At the moment much of my reading comes in the form of listening to audio books to and from site visits: currently Diana Darke’s Stealing from the Saracens: how Islamic architecture shaped Europe. What do you do in your spare time? To successfully complete my urban design MA, I am teaching myself to draw, learning architectural software, obsessively measuring height-to-width ratios, plot coverage, plot ratios, dwellings per hectare, floor-to-ceiling heights and, most important, deciding what shade of pink marble my architectural flourishes are going to be in. And I love a good tweet (X), twittering with like-mindeds and, if necessary, having hopefully constructive twittering with notlike-mindeds. What organisations are you a member of? IHBC (of course), SPAB, Urban Design Group, London Society, Southwark Conservation Area Advisory Group and Historic Towns and Villages Forum (trustee). Which one issue would you particularly like the IHBC to campaign on? To use Article 4 directions to protect locally listed buildings from demolition. Tanya Szendeffy is senior conservation officer at South Downs National Park.
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