Those of us who are not wildly stimulated by the Budget debates could do worse than turn to Conrad Thake’s Contemporary Architecture in Malta. Launched a couple of weeks ago in the apt setting of Piano’s parliament, the book documents and comments on 15 examples of the state of the art.
They include homes, public and private office and commercial buildings, as well as one-off projects like the Barrakka lift, a religious complex in Santa Venera, and the interpretation centre at Ġgantija.
The book’s closest relative – indeed its natural companion piece – is Petra Caruana Dingli and Alberto Miceli-Farrugia’s Modernist Malta, published a few years ago by the Chamber of Architects. As the titles suggest, the two works cover different periods and styles. They have at least three things in common, however.
First, both are examples of high standards of research and production. Thake’s is the bigger and more colourful object, but the essays and black-and-white photographs in Modernist Malta are certainly nothing to feel bad about.
Second, both deal with a kind of architecture (a range of kinds, to be exact) that is popularly seen as the opposite of what the discipline ought to produce, and that is treated accordingly. This is a country where the gypsum lion is the king of the urban jungle, and where people eat pasta at night to raise funds to build pseudo-baroque fantasies in village squares.
It is hardly surprising that Piano should be dismissed as a builder of dovecotes and a maker of cheesegraters, that University should systematically desecrate its 1960s core, or that the White Rocks complex should be left to the whims of vandals and paintball warriors. The two books in question make a convincing plea for a radical rethink and revaluation.
The third similarity is the least obvious, and also perhaps the most telling. Richard England’s chapel at Manikata has always struck me as a triumph of form, texture and atmosphere. One could spend days looking at it from different angles, getting a feel of its bits of exposed concrete, and watching shafts of light as they transform the interior.
Even so, it was only a few months ago that the last and all-important piece fell into place. Walking towards Manikata from Miżieb, I chanced upon a species that will soon be extinct: a view of the chapel unhindered by the mass of buildings that is very swiftly eating it up.
Swathes of Malta are so ugly that the only way buildings can work is by turning their backs on it all
Which brings me to context. The photographs in Thake’s book especially are as puzzling as they are mostly wonderful. With the exceptions of Ġgantija and the Valletta projects, they pay very little visual attention to context. The emphasis throughout is on the buildings themselves.
Neither the author nor the photographers are to blame. Thake himself gives us a clue, when he writes about architects who do their best ‘against the odds’. Among the many odds I’m sure he had in mind, context sits in top rank.
Increasingly, architects find themselves having to work by what we might call an oasis model. That is, a commitment to high standards for individual buildings, in spite of their surroundings. Swathes of Malta are so ugly that the only way buildings can work is by turning their backs on it all.
A sobering thought, because if context is so crucial, and if contemporary architecture in Malta can only work by renouncing it, it follows that no matter how good the architecture, it is condemned to miss the point.
Except it isn’t. On the contrary, good architecture has the power to redeem itself as well as its context. More broadly, it can even change the way we do all spaces – built or not.
A few years ago, the Faculty of Architecture at University became the Faculty for the Built Environment. The name change was anything but cosmetic, because the word ‘built’ here means ‘transformed’. That includes homes, churches, offices, shops, roads, and so on, but also places like fields and nature reserves.
One of the problems with standard environmentalist arguments in Malta (as elsewhere) is that they depart from the wrong premise. They set up two opposing camps: built-up areas (il-bini), and those that look natural (l-ambjent). What follows is a zero-sum game in which one side’s gain is another’s loss.
If that equation were useful, Thake’s book would be a divertissement, a scholarly contribution at best. Good contemporary architecture would begin and end with the footprint of the individual buildings, and would have no bearing whatsoever on the surroundings.
Only the equation is not in the least useful. Both il-bini and l-ambjent are transformed spaces. Roads are spaces that have been transformed to enable transport, fields to enable agriculture, nature reserves to enable some version of nature to thrive, and so on. There is no opposition at all.
If this sounds like so much pointless twaddle of the kind you might find in an academic book, it isn’t. On the contrary, to think of il-bini and l-ambjent as one is to realise that a commitment to good architecture is part of the solution to the problem of deteriorating ‘natural’ spaces (fields, valleys, and such). In this sense, books like Thake’s offer a glimpse of what could be.
Good architects are not usually people who see l-ambjent as empty space which might be filled with buildings. When England designed the chapel of Manikata, he did not just have the chapel in mind, but rather a whole landscape. It is only when the chapel is devalued that the rest is thrown out.
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