The death of Roger de Giorgio a few days ago has been described as a “sad day for Maltese modernist architecture”. That’s because he was for some time part of Mortimer & de Giorgio, a partnership that gave us the church of Our Lady of Fatima in Guardamangia and a good 1950s house in St Julian’s, among other places.

Thing is, pretty much every day is a sad day for modernist architecture in Malta. If it’s not architects dying, it’s their buildings. Simply put, anything that doesn’t look florid and ancient is thought to be worthless, and destroyed or brutalised.

The clue is in how we come to value architecture. Certain buildings – Castille, say, or St John’s – seem to be valued by default. They have behind them a popular cultural momentum that classifies them, automatically and without any need for schooling, as places that are worth our respect and awe. To question their value is unthinkable.

Modernist architecture works the other way round. It is presumed guilty until proved innocent. That proof requires years of unlearning. A degree in architecture is likely to help. If that can’t be had, books like Alberto Miceli-Farrugia’s and Petra Bianchi’s landmark Modernist Malta, published by the Chamber of Architects in 2009, do part of the job well. The rest must be down to looking, and to ignoring the popular wisdom (and Prince Charles).

Take that much maligned species, concrete. A good chunk of the resistance to modernist buildings is down to a dislike of concrete as a building material, to the extent that ‘concrete jungle’ is a byword for an undesirable and badly built mess. Funny that the word ‘jungle’ should be used in this way by the very same people who campaign for green spaces and such, but never mind.

I do not have a degree in architecture. It has taken me many years to overcome the quasi-primordial collective horror of concrete and to appreciate it for what it can be, in the right hands.

Concrete is a world of sheens and textures. It lends itself to all manner of shapes. It can age beautifully, as when, for example, the cement wears away and exposes the aggregate.

It feels good, too. Few things feel as magical as lying on a hot, salt-stained concrete platform by the sea in summer. In St Paul’s Bay, a whole generation grew up around such a platform. It was, possibly still is, called is-Simenta.

The university’s interiors… have been brutally ripped out and replaced with a disparate mess of bits and pieces that make the place look like a rubbish dump of flatpack rejects

The cultural devaluation of concrete, and of the type of architecture associated with it, has two dire consequences. First, it means a cavalier disdain of modernist buildings.

Of the very many examples, three in particular are worth talking about. The first is the church of St Joseph in Manikata. Widely thought by people in the know to be Richard England’s Ronchamp, there are two things that make it special. First, the building itself is a masterclass in the use of form, texture, and light. It invites us to look at it from different angles, at different times of day, and to run our hands over its surfaces.

Second, and very aptly for Manikata, England’s chapel is what we might call a truly topophilic building. It doesn’t just ‘sit comfortably in’ or ‘blend into’ the landscape. Rather, it draws on the landscape for its value even as it values that landscape. Take it out of its context of rubble walls, giren (stone huts), and open garrigue (xagħri), and the spell is broken.

Sadly, that’s exactly what has happened to it. It took me two hours last week to try to find a half decent angle from which to photograph it in its proper context. The place is now a jumble of roads, flats, ugly walls, and some carbuncle the local council brazenly calls a garden. The chapel, conceived simultaneously as an ode to the landscape and a plea for its valuation, has largely become an academic footnote.

The second example is that of the Army Married Quarters in Baħar iċ-Ċagħaq, better known as the White Rocks Complex. Built 50 years ago, it is a prime example of excellent architecture that is also sensitive to its context. Like England’s chapel, and perhaps surprisingly for such a sprawling place, it does not do the slightest hint of disservice to the landscape. It has also weathered beautifully and generally aged very well indeed.

So well, in fact, that it has been left to rot and collapse away. The last time I passed by I ran into a bunch of people in fatigues playing some kind of war game. They seemed to think the place was a good simu­lation of a war zone, and I don’t blame them.

The sad state of the art is also good news for land-grabbing developers – dilapi­dation has a funny way of turning into a convincing argument for demolition.

The third example is particularly distressing to me, as I go to work there every day. Norman & Dawbarn designed the University of Malta at Tal-Qroqq as an eminently usable place that was also very good to look at. The use of the past tense is important, because the various alterations to the 1960s structures have not generally been kind to the place.

New buildings aside, what especially bothers me at the university is the total lack of respect for the original ones. The inte­riors, so essential to the function and value of architecture, have been brutally ripped out and replaced with a disparate mess of bits and pieces that make the place look like a rubbish dump of flatpack rejects. The mindless vandalism goes on as I write.

The second consequence of the collective dislike of concrete is born out of a mad contradiction. Even as we despise it, we produce and pour millions of tonnes of it every day.

Globally, the figure is about one cubic metre of concrete for every person on earth each year. I’m told Malta enjoys much more than its fair share.

What that means is that we have taken to building in a material that we think has no aesthetic value whatsoever. It doesn’t require a huge logical leap to understand the implications of that.

I’m not surprised that Roger de Giorgio’s death went largely unnoticed. It’s all part of a composite malady that dismisses modernist architecture, builds in an undervalued material, and produces stacks of horrors as a result.

mafalzon@hotmail.com

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.