“An architect can transform an inhabited space beautifully only by understanding how the territory has been shaped through time, first by nature and then by humans.” Guido Masè, an architect and professor of urban planning at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, expressed this view to The Times this week.
He deepened this limpid thought further and drew an interesting comparison. An architect who designs and builds independently of the history of the land resembles an athlete trying to do the long jump without a sprint. “Architecture,” he added, “does not reinvent the wheel. It is a reinterpretation of a context which has already been transformed by societies before us.”
Beautiful, inspiring words indeed. If Maltese architects had been inspired by them over the last few decades we would not inhabit the architectural nightmare we do today. Because we live in it, we have become immune to Malta’s unsightliness preserved in stone. But it is there, always there, dulling the senses. For the most part, Maltese architects have sold their professional integrity at the altar of short-sighted financial gain. They either pander to their private clients’ worst tastes or have turned themselves into jesters in a building contractors’ court.
Taking, as it were, a bird’s eye view, large parts of this country lack any sense of architectural wholeness and are devoid of any coherent sense of the collective. Many of our towns and villages no longer hang together as places which members of a community call home, where they live together. Depressingly they are fast becoming places where houses happen to be built next to each other, almost haphazardly.
Go to any village or town square, park the car and take a walk towards its periphery. With each block it gets increasingly depressing. With your own eyes you can see this country’s history in stone being mercilessly erased. You then see it written over by a distasteful carnival of graceless ‘terraced’ houses, box-like maisonettes, faux Texan bungalows, faux Spanish haciendas and blocks of flats which could easily double up as incarceration centres. Houses of no character indeed.
Most of Maltese architecture of the last half century has not been a well-thought interpretation of the environment it was born in. In painful contrast to Guido Masè’s advice, it long jumps without sprinting through history. Free from the restraints of nature, history, memory and a sense of community, Maltese architecture does whatever it wants. The past is thrown down the toilet and architectural styles which have absolutely nothing to do with this small rock in the middle of the Mediterranean are imported with wild abandon.
Like all human activity, architecture is not practised in a vacuum. It is an embodiment of a country’s cultural values, or lack thereof. Ultimately, our architecture is us, who we are. In this sense, Maltese houses are monuments to the homegrown breed of rampant anti-Christian individualism. The notion that what is truly mine and what I belong to can be found only mill-ghatba ‘l gewwa, is what local architecture is all about.
Unlike its forebears, a Maltese house built over the last half a century huddles next to others – uncomfortable, irritated and indignant. If an Englishman’s house is his castle, a Maltese man’s is his fortified bunker to keep his neighbours at bay. When Margaret Thatcher said that society does not exist but only individuals and families do, she should have been instantly made an honorary Maltese citizen.
Needless to say, this is not an argument for freezing Maltese architecture in some sort of golden age. I am certainly not arguing that we should do nothing but reinvent the traditional Maltese farmhouse and townhouse. Change, even of the radical sort, is not only inevitable but desirable. New architecture even transforms its old surroundings for the better precisely because it is different. That is why it is so frequently controversial.
As Professor Masè himself noted, when in 1889 it was proposed that the Eiffel Tower was to be kept to celebrate the centennial of the French Revolution, the best Parisian minds considered it an abomination. Emile Zola, Alexandre Dumas, Guy de Maupassant and architect Charles Garnier even circulated a petition to oppose it. They called it “useless and monstrous” and “a disgraceful column of bolts”. Yet eventually, Le Tour Eiffel became the city’s most distinguishing landmark.
The problem then is not change per se, but change without ungrounded thought. Many Maltese architects disrespect their history and seem to be blissfully oblivious to contemporary trends. This is the lethal combination which explains their heinous creations. Inventing change without the past and without the future they create a present which goes everywhere and nowhere at the same time. This is the intellectual rot that has ruined most of the natural and historical beauty of this country.
Given Malta’s miniscule size and exceptionally high population density architectural matters are of national importance. We have nowhere
to hide ugliness. Each new freak building becomes everyone’s eyesore. And unless we reclaim land from the Mediterranean, the only place left to build is up. Unless a new breed of imaginative architects with a sense of history embracing bubbling albeit divergent visions of the future take over, we are doomed to continue building houses of no character.
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