I refer to Fr Eugene Teuma’s Talking Point ‘Detrimental developments’ (January 7).

It features the ability of ‘developers’ to ruin our traditional and well thought-out environment, urban and rural.

We need to care much more about architectural harmony and aesthetics (our search for beauty).

Over the last 10 years, the quality of the environment in Swieqi deteriorated beyond belief. We are becoming experts at uglifying our formerly beautiful island. And Gozo too is starting to experience this environmental crisis.

Our ‘developers’ only seem to have speed as their first priority and, of course, money. But ‘man does not live by bread alone’. 

To ensure harmony even in the environment there are many other considerations to be made.

Rounded doorways and windows seem to have gone out of fashion since concrete blocks or bricks are usually rectangular and it is cheaper to use bricks rather than stone, which can be worked and fashioned to cater for good taste and harmony in the built environment.

This fast-buck syndrome is killing our islands. Everybody is afflicted by it, all acting selfishly and foolishly.

The Knights of St John would be shocked and angry if they were to see our modern or contemporary urban and rural environment.

It is a real shame that the former Aesthetics Board no longer exists.

Why this inordinate hurry, as the saffron-robed Buddhist Dalai Lama observed about western civilisation? Why all this hurry? Are we simply unable to get our priorities right?

We just have to be wiser.

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