Minister rails at architectural trends

Are Maltese architects really professionals worth their salt or have they sold themselves to selfish developers who are merely interested in exploiting every precious square inch of their land?

This was the essence of the debate held at The Malta Financial and Business Times Radisson SAS business breakfast yesterday.

Environment Minister George Pullicino, an architect by profession, claimed that the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Malta was just producing "mechanics" and not "architects with a brain".

"It's a problem of education. The Faculty of Architecture needs to be revamped. It is clear that the level of professional ethics held by the newer graduates is by far lower than the values upheld by the older generation of architects," Mr Pullicino told an audience of architects.

The speakers, including Lawrence Mintoff and David Felice from the Chamber of Architects and Labour spokesman for infrastructure Charles Buhagiar, questioned whether a national policy for architecture, being discussed within the chamber, was a viable approach to tackle hot potatoes such as excessive development in open spaces, unbearably congested urban areas and uncontrolled development.

The main speaker, Mr Pullicino, said issues such as "pencil development" were compromising the homogeneity of our streetscapes.

He said that due to the subdivision of properties, normally by inheritance, a single block or field with a sizeable frontage was being split between a number of different owners with the result that each owner then constructed his site in accordance with his needs and taste.

"Mepa should encourage developers of adjacent sites to come together and provide a similar façade treatment," he said, calling on architects to advise their clients on whether a design would complement the rhythm and scale of the surrounding buildings or whether it would stick out like a sore thumb.

"If an old building is allowed to be demolished and re-built it must not only retain the same architectural style and materials of its surroundings but it must also retain the rhythm; if there is a cornice line this must be respected; if there is a rhythm of a timber balcony arched door and window this should also be respected.

"Unless a building relates to the site where it is located, it is a construction without a soul," Mr Pullicino said, adding that a building which does not draw its conception from our roots and our local ethos could never succeed.

He said the economic factor of the construction industry was, on many occasions, contradictory to the needs of architecture. In the past there was a sense of fulfilment; today money speaks out too loud and this shows negatively in architecture.

"We are all aware of the problem but nobody is ready to compromise," whispered a member of the audience between one speaker and the next.

Mr Felice said "good" architecture was not a planning issue, as the minister had put it, but the responsibility of the individual architect guided by certain principles.

In an earlier intervention, Mr Felice said it was not too late to draw up a policy on architecture that expressed the present cultural and social needs. He said, however, that a sustainable approach was necessary for this to be possible.

Launching a revamped version of The Architect, the Chamber of Architects' official journal, Mr Felice quoted J. Quentin Hughes and Peter Richardson, two architects who, after having published a survey in 1969, said:

"This survey is concerned with ways in which Malta can be preserved, because what it has now is its greatest value and quite unrepeatable. The unthinkable alternative is that Malta should choose to neglect her heritage and join the development rat race. Yet she is already trying to do this.

"If Malta accepts laissez-faire development, the whole island will be obliterated by buildings. And this will take very little time. It will happen unless the planners, architects and legislators take action very soon. Malta could lead Europe into a new era of environmental and cultural re-evaluation, or it could become, through a laissez-faire attitude, just another blighted area of exploitation."