I leave it up to readers to judge the aesthetic qualities of this three/four-storey (up to the time of writing) construction in the middle of a neat row of two-storey houses. The building in question doesn’t only jar with the skyline; it also jars with the side views of the neighbouring houses.

Adding insult to injury, the building style is completely out of tune with the rest of the houses.

I find it hard to believe the Malta Environment and Planning Authority is sanctioning these architectural discrepancies, starting off a trend to spoil yet another elegant characteristic of our architectural heritage.

The unhappy thing about all this is that these conspicuous errors in the construction industry are being allowed to mushroom at a time when the public is becoming more sensitive to an aesthetically clean and healthy environment.

Mepa tries justifying its actions by stating that building vertically is the key to making the most out of land space, which makes a lot of sense. What I find difficult to understand is why such reasoning wasn’t applied in the early 1960s, when the building boom was being hatched and when property was still relatively scarce.

Implementing it today is anachronistic, especially in the light of a recent survey which found there are about 53,000 vacant properties in our islands.

With such a surplus of property literally littering our islands, we surely don’t need four-storey constructions, let alone unsightly huge blocks of apartments.

Unfortunately, we’re still witnessing both. Indeed, the building mania isn’t yet over, because we’re still experiencing the rape of our countryside/land with blocks of concrete.