A city rebuilt by journeymen

Architect and scholar Conrad Thake's 'Cut-and-paste architecture' (The Times, June 10) was just right. One could sense the frustration with which he mauled the plans for the 'rehabilitation' of St George's Square. He complained about the water feature, the bizarre lighting, the zigzag benches - the madness of the whole pastiche, in fact.

It would be wrong to think of Thake's as just another retrograde piece pining for the retrieval of a chocolate-box Valletta. For one, he is not known for his bring-back-Barry antics. Besides, he put his finger on a very real urban design issue which has little to do with nostalgia and everything to do with aesthetics, function, and historical-contextual sensitivity.

The government is right to insist that St George's Square is in need of a major facelift. As it is, the daft square-pruned trees, the concrete dunes and Agius's ode to kitsch, blended with the smells from cars' and horses' behinds, make for a most unlovely experience. The sooner it's all hoovered the better. Thank goodness Renzo Piano, who seems to be rather tardy in keeping his promises, was not consulted this time round.

The option, unfortunately, seems to be more junk of the type that has systematically defaced our public spaces. I have in mind Rabat, for example, where someone recently saw fit to plonk a number of what look like woks right in front of St Paul's church. Or Żabbar, where two rusty cannon were deposited on artificial turf below the Hompesch gate. The list is long and tedious, but readers will recognise what I'm talking about.

On the 'traditional' front it's red paving, green-painted bollards, and faux Victorian lamps. More recently we've been seeing bendy lamp posts, moulded plastic benches, and the woks. No matter, the various installations share one logic, which is that of total insensitivity to continuity of context and materials. The result is the creation of what anthropologists have called 'non-places' - spaces, that is, that have been stripped of all meaning (not least because meaning can only exist in context).

The ultimate sin in this headless romp is creativity based on historical research. It's nice and easy to 'cut-and-paste', as Thake put it, and to proceed to buy street furniture off the internet and mass-produce places that look suspiciously similar to a million others found in suburban London, Paris, or wherever. Thake pointed out that the Valletta bendy lamp posts are plagiarised off a Viennese street. Might I do the same for the 'water feature' which, as it happens, is an exact copy of one found in front of the Swiss parliament building in Bern? There, Switzerland in the Mediterranean.

Another thing about the plans which rather bothers me is the whole wi-fi business. First, it shows a lack of architectural imagination. Beyond the 'Web 2.0' and 'empowerment' waffle, wi-fi is simply a more practical form of access to the internet. There is nothing remotely creative about it, at least as far as architecture and urban design goes. Which makes the 'St George's Square to have its own wi-fi access service' headlines look rather vacant, and probably in lieu of any real ideas.

Second, the emphasis on wi-fi belies an instrumentalist concept of space. That is, that space is secondary to the practical things we do in it - the urban piazza as marketplace or car park, for example. There is, however, a strong case to be made for the creation of urban spaces where one can quite simply idle. As Aldo Rossi says of the Roman Forum, "it was like the modern city, where the man in the crowd, the idler, participates in the mechanism of the city without knowing it, sharing only in its image." The best experience that can possibly be had in an urban space is to 'take it in', and I don't mean downloads.

Third, if we think of the internet as a space ('cyberspace'), its presence in an urban piazza effectively means competition. That is, going online is also entering a space which is in direct competition with one's surroundings. Then again, this is perhaps not such a bad idea given the silliness of what is being done at St George's. We do it all the time at airports, which are among the most boring and soulless places on the planet.

There is one other thing to say about the designs. They're ugly. Apart from the dubious aesthetics of the various objects individually, put together their ugliness is greater than the sum of the parts. Not least since they represent a malady called 'cluttering'. The same that makes our sitting rooms look like Versailles without the Boulle and Co. Even if it were beautiful, which it isn't, there is simply too much stuff.

Piano has said of Valletta (and one could extend this to the harbour cities in general) that it is all about compression. Having been brought up there, I see his point. Valletta is tightly packed on a footprint which will not budge, because it is hemmed in by the sea on three sides and a massively fortified land front on the fourth.

Given this context it makes sense to leave St George's Square as bare as possible. No wonder the original fountains and stone benches were mostly positioned around the square rather than on it. Those who have seen Antonioni's L'Avventura will appreciate the magic that open and bare spaces can conjure up in a tight-knit baroque setting.

George Pullicino was reported as saying that St George's Square is currently a 'cemetery of cars'. The idea's in the right direction, if hardly accurate. The bad news is that it seems we're in for a cemetery of architecture.

mafalzon@hotmail.com