Mepa CEO Johann Buttigieg said last week that the authority was thinking of resurrecting the long-departed aesthetics board. At first glance, and given the quality of a good chunk of what we see around us, this sounds like a good idea.

There are however many reasons why I am not entirely convinced. First, one could as well set up a whole herd of aesthetics boards, and they would still be stuck with the quality of what is brought before them. It is on drawing boards, not in boardrooms, that good architecture and design are produced.

To expect wonders from an aesthetics board is rather like handing the Man Booker judges a bunch of potboilers and expecting them to come up with a winner of outstanding calibre.

Second, I’m not sure an aesthetics board would manage to tell ugliness from soullessness. Lots of what is thought to have no heritage or aesthetic value turns out to possess a quality which admittedly can be hard to define, but which makes that building or place rewarding to inhabit, so to say.

Mġarr offers up an excellent example. The bulk of houses in that village were built by people on modest incomes and few if any genteel aspirations.

They were not beautiful or historically-important in any way. The planning authority had no problem sanctioning their destruction, and the village is now a maze of apartment stacks.

Which doesn’t mean it is less beautiful, simply because the old houses weren’t beautiful in the first place. What they did have, however, was soul and atmosphere.

Hard to put one’s finger on, but a dog’s bark sounds different in a street lined with old low-profile houses. That is now gone, and I’ve a feeling an aesthetics board wouldn’t have objected.

There’s a third reason why I’m not too keen on Mepa-spearheaded aesthetics. Simply put, some of the worst examples of architecture and design have Mepa’s fingerprints all over them.

In other words, intervention seems to be inversely related to sensible results. I am not being churlish, just factual.

Take two examples of design in which the wise obviously played a big part. The Cottonera waterfront project is generally seen as a paragon of successful practice.

The locals are in love with their redone waterfronts. The Dock One bit in Cospicua is particularly significant.

First, it was finished by a Labour government and to many Bormliżi symbolises the efficiency of the present as opposed to the cluelessness of the past.

Second, it is seen as a refreshing departure from the city’s image (not necessarily fair, by the way) as shoddy and dilapidated. I can understand and sympathise with all of that.

I live in Cospicua and share the sense of departure in the right direction. I also happen to know that the design was partly in the hands of some of the most competent people on the island. The sort of people who might find themselves on an aesthetics board, in fact.

Only every time I pass by, I like the place a bit less. Given that I walk there every single morning, my dislike is now close to medication levels.

Individually, some of the spaces and forms make perfect sense. The steps that lead down to the dock past the old workshops, for example, are a masterpiece. The footbridge is equally a pleasure to look at and walk across.

I’m not sure an aesthetics board would manage to tell ugliness from soullessness

As a whole, however, the place is god-awful. One of the things the aesthetes really got wrong is what Peter Zumthor (of Therme Vals fame, among others) calls ‘material compatibility’.

The Dock One stretch in particular is a hotchpotch of turf, wood, concrete, and the inevitable water jets.

Not to be outdone, the Couvre Porte area in Vittoriosa now bristles with ghastly street furniture and lights that seem to be left-overs from a shopping-centre lot in Croydon. All are planted on turf, of course.

That, and the whole place is an open-air museum of the bollard. There are literally hundreds of the damn things in all shapes and sizes. What little atmosphere there may be left is ruined every evening when the whole place is floodlit to look like an airport car park.

The second example calls the usual suspect to the box. The design for the Naval Clinic development in Sliema is horrible.

And, ironically, the most horrible thing about it is the bit that Mepa insisted on, namely the preservation of the façade.

It makes it look like a block of flats was dropped from a great height and landed on a house.

Now I know that the juxtaposition of different styles can work well. Only this doesn’t. Nor do the many similar examples along the Sliema front. To me they look like a mockery, in brick and mortar, of Mepa’s urban design policies.

The point is that the first example is that of a public space, done up at the taxpayer’s expense by people who habitually scoff at the bad taste of private developers.

The second is that of a Mepa intervention, again intended to stop evil contractors from ransacking what’s left of Sliema’s visual appeal.

No wonder my eyebrows shot up when I heard about the aesthetics board. To paraphrase Sandro Chetcuti, it seems to be the case that contractors love aesthetics more than aesthetics experts do.

mafalzon@hotmail.com