New Piano community (1)

Mark-Anthony Falzon is well-read; erudite, perspicacious, incisive and with a dose of dry wit.

His column entitled 'The importance of being Renzo' (The Sunday Times, June 28) fitted the usual bill.

There is one point, however, that I would like to take up with him. He describes the various 'communities' that have an interest in Piano's plans for the regeneration of City Gate, and informs us that he belongs to the 'let Piano do as he pleases' community. Admittedly, he is talking only about the latest scheme of things, and what he says makes a lot of sense in the current context.

I understand where he is coming from. Indeed, he is in good company with his fellow university colleagues and others who have professed this view ever since the City Gate saga commenced some two decades ago. But time has shown the pitfall of always having adopted this position of abject subservience to the master. Were it not for the vociferous objections raised by those belonging to the 'do not let Piano do as he pleases' community, the plan for City Gate of 20 years ago would have gone ahead and wanton and irreparable destruction would have taken place at City Gate.

Piano had planned to destroy the 16th century Knights' bridge spanning the ditch to the gate (probably built by Gerolamo Cassar), and he had also planned to destroy more of the bastion face wall.

His plan was also an aesthetic disaster. The scheme was to erect two large pylons flanking the gate, towering above the fortification line, as if at the entrance to some Egyptian temple. He also planned, unbelievably, to apply cladding to the bastion face wall.

All this was accepted blindly by the 'let Piano do as he pleases' community. And that is what we would have been lumped with today, and who gives a brass farthing about the Knights' bridge?

Well, as it turned out, Piano does. Having been alerted to the fact by the 'do not let Piano do as he pleases' community, that the old Knights' bridge survives in situ, he decided to preserve it and incorporate it in his new scheme.

This new scheme, unlike the old one, has the merit of not destroying anything original of the Knights' fortifications. It is also commendable, in that what is unavoidably new now fits harmoniously with the old. The integrity of the line of the bastions has now been maintained. Gone are the unsightly pylons and the awful cladding. There is now a strong sense of conservation and reversibility blending with the contemporary.

Having seen the latest plans, I am now joining a new community (one not referred to by Dr Falzon), and that is the 'let Piano do practically as he pleases' community.

The community that Dr Falzon belongs to, of course, is equally pleased with the latest plan as they were with the one containing the original sins. It must be very comforting to be a part of that community, rather like having an infallible Pope as one's leader. One's dogma is laid out, and there's no real point in questioning it.

Thankfully, Mr Piano is not the Pope, and he knows it. He played ping-pong, and he listened, and he came up with a far more acceptable solution than that which he had first proposed two decades ago, no thanks to the 'let Piano do as he pleases' community. Twenty years is a short time in the history of the gate, and it's been well worth the wait. Full speed ahead now.