As Architecture Project’s participation in the Venice Biennale looks at its recent past successes, CEO Tom Van Malderen tells David Schembri that the future looks “interesting”.
The clue is in the name. In choosing theirs, architecture firm Architecture Project set out parameters which went beyond the norm on the restricted space called Malta.
Instead, they chose architecture as their domain, and years later, the world is standing up to notice. As we speak, the firm is rubbing shoulders with the likes of Norman Foster and Ricardo Bofill at a collateral event in the Venice Biennale’s 14th International Architecture Exhibition. They are the first Maltese architecture firm to have the honour. It is, as it were, a landmark in the firm’s increased global recognition.
“It’s definitely a sign of recognition, of working for many years, of caring deeply about the built environment,” Tom Van Malderen, the firm’s CEO says from its Valletta office. “I think AP has been getting increased exposure in the past years for the work it has been doing abroad. We receive more critical acclaim abroad than in Malta. Over the years we’ve been published in many magazines, we had an exhibition in Paris... it kind of builds up. We’ve won a few significant awards, which are always bigger and bigger in scale.”
A building is not just about the square metres, there’s an added value to whatever you build
Among the projects that the firm has received global attention for is the re-imagining – and subsequent implementation – of the Barrakka lift, which caught the eye of various design blogs and opened the door to increased attention from the international design community.
“From our point of view, it’s a kind of stepping up on a larger stage, people discovering you, with being intrigued by what’s happening in a relatively small territory and starting to ask more and more. That, I think, is where the invite came.”
Entitled Fundamentals, the architecture biennale looks at the histories and architecture’s current state, in order to attempt to speculate on its future.
In the case of AP, the baggage they’ve carried to the biennale is three of their recent projects: the Barrakka Lift, the double-helix staircase of a building on St Barbara Bastion and the “super furniture” of Stanhope Gardens in London.
Rather than present the standard fare of a rendering or a painstakingly-made scale model of the project, the firm’s exhibit, called Year 2225-a triptych, has a video, drawings and oil paintings representing the three different projects. These all depend on the different artists’ interpretation of the way the design deals with space, as well as the interaction the realised design has with its inhabitants and surroundings once it is out in the wild.
The oil paintings, with their old-fashioned technique, displace the modern designs AP have created to a time past; the films, on the other hand, place people in relation to the places.
“The project protagonists in the films and paintings (a lift, a staircase, and a cupboard) were selected for the intensity of experience and memory, which is derived from the spaces they create. These are both physical and metaphorical, distant or hidden, inaccessible or overlooked, like the forgotten apartment that Tancredi and Angelica discover in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s book Il Gattopardo,” AP wrote in the promotional material announcing their participation in the Biennale.
To this end, the exhibits are placed at different heights on the wall, further participating in the exploration of spaces and “accentuating the dichotomy between contemporary experience and the influence of its re-experience through the plurality of media”.
“May you live in interesting times,” goes the apocryphal Chinese curse. And times are indeed interesting for architecture. The discipline is not merely the already complicated marriage of art and engineering, it is also susceptible to very human concerns, such as money and the environment.”
Money, in particular, is one of the biggest enemies of architecture locally. Van Malderen believes that one hidden blessing in the economic crisis was that it pulled the brakes on the craze of trying to fit in as many apartments as one could, with no regard to aesthetics.
“People become more conscious that a building is not just about the square metres, there’s an added value to whatever you build. As a firm, we are blessed. We have a lot of interesting clients who are proving that there are people who are willing to spend a little bit more to get a building that might last longer, that might give you more joy and often more revenue. Some of our clients take a bigger risk, but their resulting revenue is much higher,” he says.
Architecture has a place in society too, and part of its role is to face up to the challenges the world is facing today, including the divide between the rich and the poor.
“I think that’s going to affect our profession a lot. If you simplify, the wealthy are those who have money to invest, but if they’re going to make something out of it they’re going to have to sell it to people with less money, and there’s going to be a big tension,” Van Malderen says.
“Take climate change; it is there whether we want it or not. I think collectively we’re still ignoring the facts, that there is drama in the air, that we need help from clients and governments to take it to the next step. We all know that we can drive our cars on different forms of fuel, but we don’t seem to make the change. We don’t seem to question mobility, because while we can work from home we still want to move more than before.
“We want to fly more, and all these things will affect architecture too, because architecture will have to be more responsible, eventually, to consume less CO2,” the architect says.
“I think there are huge, interesting challenges, where there will be much more of a blend between engineering and social engineering, and that whole question whether you should do it or whether you can do it, because there’s still a debate.
“In the 1960s, people believed architecture could change social behaviour. That has kind of collapsed, but now it’s coming up again and the question becomes more relevant. I think we find that quite interesting.”