Most Maltese streets are and look a mess. Not just the litter, not just the skips and stones piled up outside every few houses or blocks of apartments under construction, not the dust everywhere, but the lack of consistent design makes for a large part of the mess.
The very few streets where little or no development has intruded are still pleasant. These tend to be in our urban conservation areas, but urban conservation areas make up a tiny proportion of our built environment. So what is happening everywhere else where an ultra modern stainless steel and graffiato designed block of maisonettes, alternates with a tex mex style house, and an ornate carving including cherubs and horses on the other?
How is it then that our ancestors whether they were lofty knights or simple farmers, seemed to know, without MEPA, without fully qualified periti, without planners, how to plan a street?
Why has this talent been lost? Why isn’t the look of a street taken into account when we are pulling down homes and building new ones, or indeed when we are building a whole new street or new developments near each other?
Indeed despite much of the justified moaning and groaning about the large developments at the Hilton, Tigne, Fort Cambridge and Pender Place, these projects at least have a semblance of consistency about them.
There will be enormous inconvenience while they are being built, as there was when the Hilton was going up, but nobody complains today, and the Hilton is as much part of our built landscape as any of our piazzas. And although I think the decision to turn Sliema into one big building site with way too many concentrations of development was a wrong one, the larger newer blocks generally look better than the higgledy-piggledy small scale developments that nestle against each other with a total clash of styles, colour and everything else.
It is too late to turn Malta into a rural idyll. It is really one city with some interesting corners and touches. When driving towards any of these jewels, however, you are faced with row upon row of ugliness. Is it really beyond our periti to show a little less individuality and a mite more respect for that which is already built?
In the words of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, architects designing places should “go to bed happy that they are contributing to what is the most influential impact on quality of life: our homes and their surroundings.”
Are Maltese architects going to bed happy with what Malta is looking like 15 years after we started pulling down anywhere and everything in sight? Is MEPA happy? Are you happy? Will our kids be?
We can’t hold back time, but in a country like Malta, where so much of our environment is built up, architects, planners and housing professionals do have particular responsibility to make homes beautiful from the outside and not just the inside.
The outside of Malta’s modern buildings leave a lot to be desired. Planners need to enforce some style discipline in our streets. People should look at their street, and feel part of and proud of the landscape of the whole street. Our homes after all, as we walk or drive home into them are the repositories of that which we hold most dear, our families, our place of interaction. Maltese homes sum up and encapsulate the quality of our lives. If we were to judge them by their outsides today I think we can all agree our quality of life is deteriorating fast, even though we may be wealthier than ever.
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