Now and only now is the right time to take in hand what the country has been delaying for sixty years: doing something about the Royal Opera House at the entrance to Valletta.
It is practically the only remaining bombed out site in all Europe now that even the Dresden Frauenkirche has been restored to its glory. While Berlin’s Memorial Church has been left half in ruins to serve as a vivid memorial of the ugliness of war, the Opera House site at the entrance to Valletta is a symbol of our inability to take care of our heritage and to correct the ravages of war.
It is only now, at the beginning of a legislature, that such an undertaking, an undertaking with national overtones, can be taken in hand. It can, it should, become a project for the whole nation to take part in and to get impassioned about. Hopefully, and if managed well, it may also end up as something we can all be proud of, which is not at all what has happened to the innumerable attempts that have taken place: the fascist architecture given to City Gate so that King Carnival can pass through, the housing estate built overlooking the bastions, Freedom Square itself with its uneven marble floor and its drab and dirty arches; and so on and so forth to the Piano plan that was rejected by a philistine Malta, and the latest attempts to do the site which petered to nothing.
What should come first is the decision to do something and to do it now and to create something that will encapsulate what is best in our nation in 2008.
Around that decision must come all those who want to help and all those who want to lend a hand. Lines of communication must be clear and democratic: as many people as possible must be involved in the decision-making process. The worst scenario would be for such a project to be taken on board by a select group that intends to keep everybody else out and that intends to foist its plan on to the population as a whole. It will be the nation that will pay for such an enterprise and it is the nation that ultimately has to decide.
If such a group can come together and if the government gives it its whole backing, then things start moving along a logical line, first what is the building going to be for, and then what is the building going to look like. Then onto the works and the building rises up like a phoenix from the ashes of neglect.
There have been two schools of thought regarding the possible use of this building. Some have argued for Parliament to be re-sited here; others for an opera house.
In favour of the Parliament option there is the indisputable case that Parliament as presently housed in the President’s Palace is short of space, cohabitation damages both sides, and is also, conceptually wrong and implies a subservience of Parliament to the President which is not there at all and should not be there. Also there is no other place of similar importance to house Parliament in, certainly not at the Mediterranean Conference Centre as has been suggested nor at St Elmo.
In line with this objective we have the Richard England design for the building which to many is a very dignified building which incorporates the old Opera House design and modernizes it a bit.
What we would call the purists would have none of this and would instead rebuild the Barry Opera House as it was and as those who remember the pre-war years well remember it. It is sometimes objected that the Manoel and MCC are struggling to survive and that to build a third venue would be the kiss of death for all three.
It would seem that, bar these two options, there are no viable alternatives: certainly not the mix of uses or multi-use, unless it is proved to the contrary, certainly not the mix of private business and public use for experience clearly teaches this is impossible to achieve. Certainly too, it is equally possible to build a parliament with Barry’s designs and to build an opera house with Prof. England’s designs. It is only the public who can decide and no one should decide in its stead.
But at least let’s get going. Give enough time for all sides to express themselves and then decide in the most open and democratic way possible, even if with for instance a non-binding free vote in Parliament as long as it is made clear right from the beginning how the decision is going to be made.
A second level of decision-making should then identify which kind of building will it be, whether the re-creation of Barry’s Opera House or Richard England’s creation.
At this point in our history it should not be too difficult to find the necessary funding, especially if it is estimated to cost some Lm15 million, as long as the estimates are done properly and cost over-runs kept to a strict minimum. We have just come out of the Mater Dei saga, which followed the MIA and the Delimara Power Station ones and we should have learnt by now the nation hates cost over-runs and delayed works.
As in the case of the Frauenkirche help could also be obtained from the tourists who visit us and also from specialized exhibitions detailing the works in progress. And why not, as the Frauenkirche example teaches us, from Germany as well.
It is a poor judgement on our population that in a country that throughout its history was obsessed with building and re-building, at the gateway of our capital city stands a site we have been unable to re-build.
Then, having successfully tackled the Opera House site, let us then tackle the City Gate. But not everything at once for we risk mixing two very different issues and getting once again crossed lines in abundance.