Further up from our street they’re building a new house. We’ve been following its evolution since the first stone was laid, and it has now reached shell form stage.

At the risk that the new neighbours won’t be inviting me around for drinks when they eventually move in, I have to say that every time I look at the shell of this house, I do a double take.

How might I describe its style? Maybe Greco-Romano-Maltese-with-a-touch-of-‘stil modern’? There’s balavostri, circular rose windows, tiny square windows, and pointy porticos. I don’t want to look at it but I want to look at it. It’s like when you’re watching a cringe-inducing movie and you just can’t leave the theatre because you’re hoping that surely it can’t get any worse. But it does, my friend, it does. I am now waiting for the sculptures to decorate the façade, with perhaps a master stroke in the shape of a real size, scowling, bronze lion perched on the balavostri of the roof.

Which brings me to Tommy Diacono’s interview in MaltaToday last week about his restaurant and other things. (Disclaimer: I am huge a fan of NYB for the simple reason that they do vegetarian burgers which for once do not taste of cardboard and soggy jablo, so although he’s saying he’s packing up to set up shop abroad, I hope that his veggie burger is staying put.)

Back to the interview, Diacono said: “Look at the new buildings: cheap aluminium, graffiato, the same ugly colours… A tree? [swear word]. Trees are a hassle, you have to water them. You know what we’ll do? Put a giant [swear word] ceramic lion outside. That’s a good idea. This little maisonette in Birkirkara, and he puts a lion outside.”

I chortled when I read it because bronze (or ceramic, or cast iron, or marble) lions about to jump off the roofs of Maltese houses are my pet obsession. Instead of threatening guard dogs, we plonk threatening lions.  It’s our way of dancing the Haka war dance, a show of strength.

And so it is that we build one shopping mall after the next and we pull down houses to squeeze in 10 flats

Diacono is right, the lion symptomises what is awkward with Maltese architecture from the 1980s to now. It is the ‘mhux xorta itfa’ hemm’ architecture. The client drives past the Roman Villa in Rabat, yelps “illostra!” and tells his architect that he wants a door like that “but bigger” and the architect sighs and shrugs and says “mhux xorta”.

Firstly: where is this lack of sense of style stemming from? I wonder if it is the fact that we have no idea of heritage. We do not know where we’re coming from and we do not have the sense that where we came from shaped us into who we are today. Which is why prestigious shop windows are destroyed, why we keep bulldozing old houses with rare and exceptional architecture to build block upon block of flats, where we have to share the minute space in our balconies with the airconditioning unit or where – as in the case of some luxury apartments in Sliema – the dividing walls are so thin that the guy next door can actually hear you fart.

Secondly: there is the little issue of shift in society values. In a medieval village, people lived in poky houses, but the minute they stepped out, they were exposed to proud, grand, beautiful, dazzling architecture. Most of it was built and paid by people over long periods, in communal spirit. Now as a society, we spend first and foremost on ourselves: on clothes, food, grooming, gadgets and cars. We are not a collective society; we are officially an island of individual consumers.

It’s not just a Malta problem. Jonathan Glancey writing in The Guardian said: “Today, we simply can’t, or don’t want to, afford the price of meticulously wrought buildings… For the most part today, we aim to build as cheaply as possible.”

And so it is that we build one shopping mall after the next, we pull down houses to squeeze in 10 flats and penthouses in towns where planning is non-existent. I wonder Girolomo Cassar what would have made of, say, Swatar?

I am no architect and never studied architecture but I have a sense of aesthetic and, increasingly, when I look around me, the ugliness of the structures that I see is blinding my soul. Surely, an architect’s business is to ensure the creation of aesthetically pleasing buildings? Or not? Or is it merely to get the pay cheque and the end of the month? Because I am tired of being told “Oh, we architects have to do what the client wants” or “We all have to eat at the end of the day”.

I wish more and more architects adopted Amanda Levete’s – the Stirling prize award-winning architect – approach to work. “You have to have passion,” she says whenever she’s interviewed. She does not do the thing first she’s asked to do, does not take the easy way out and most of all she uses nerve and persuasion to get people to agree to things often against their better judgement.

Now more than ever, with Mepa being practically rules-free, developers and contractors are having a field day. So we can do nothing except to beg architects: please give us buildings that make us go wow when we walk along the streets, please give us houses where walls melt into floors, please give us structures that take us to another dimension. We simply cannot afford having more of this architecture without architects.

And can we ban those lions?

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @krischetcuti