Decisions 2.0

The church bells struck six in the morning, cutting through the birdsong. The sun rose slowly over the town of Ħal Safi.

Winston was already awake. Breakfast done. Coffee in hand. 

“Alexa, play my classics,” he commanded, lifting a paintbrush from the jar beside the sink.

Frank Ocean drifted through the house. Then Alicia Keys. Music that transcended him to another state.

The morning light filled his studio with a deep orange glow. Frosted glass and breeze blocks broke it apart, casting fragments of colour across the bedroom wall, almost like a kaleidoscope. The glazed façade brought in direct sunlight until noon. In the afternoon, the light softened, filtered through a narrow internal shaft. It was enough. Enough to paint.

He had always been good at painting. Perhaps that was what first drew him to architecture. But it was only during his student years, and now, in retirement, that he had the time, and the patience, again for it.

Perit Winston Rapa had been one of the most commissioned architects on the island. His studio, PWR Architects was known for delivering results. Permits approved. Projects cleared. His work moved efficiently through the system.

Over time, efficiency became a method. Permits were applied for piecemeal. Drawings softened. Language stretched. Policy was read closely, then bent. Ambiguity did the rest.

Eventually, Winston was invited to write policy himself.

Developing the Outside Development Zone: Guidance and Standards 2060 became one of the most debated documents in Maltese planning history. It was still in effect today.

This morning, he struggled to concentrate. The sound of construction from across the street had grown louder.

He had acquired the townhouse years earlier, after assisting a client in securing approval for a large residential development along a valley in Gozo. The building rose where fields once lay.

When his wife fell ill, they decided to leave Sliema. Air quality warnings had become routine. Her breathing worsened.

Finding a townhouse proved rather difficult, even for PWR. The typology was almost extinct from the Maltese environment. However, they had found a modest two-storey townhouse on the urban fringe in Ħal- Safi. The property was retained by previous owners, boasting its original 1970s characteristics.  The townhouse enjoyed views of undeveloped agricultural land adjacent to its façade, while a view of the Church was enjoyed from the small back garden. 

In their first few months, Winston had intervened on the weathered limestone façade. Keeping the flaking stone, he enlarged the apertures and introduced a series of breeze blocks and frosted glass. His interventions were delicate. Winston carried out the work himself. His almost surgical implementation process was as if he did not want to remove the chipping paint from the stone.  The project was never listed under PWR. It carried his personal name.

His wife would tend to the back garden until her passing a few months after moving into the townhouse. It seemed that the fresh air filtered through the house was not enough, despite the house boasting extremely intricate ventilation grills, etched in limestone stacks on the roof. 

In his mourning, Winston returned to painting.

He built a series of small wooden boxes into the façade of the studio to store his supplies. Rectangular. Repetitive. A detail not unlike those used in many of PWR’s apartment blocks.

Nowadays, Winston would sit in his studio for hours. 

He drew every blossoming flower, every crack in the dried-up soil and every wetted leaf that he saw in the field in front of him. 

Today, he painted quickly.

The field beyond his window no longer offered the same scenes. What had once shifted with the seasons was now replaced by timber shuttering. Then concrete slabs. Repeated, floor after floor.

He carried his canvas and speaker to the roof.

It had been years since he last climbed the limestone spiral staircase. The view was still there, open and wide. From the roof, he recalled that one could just make out the church of Mqabba in the distance, rising faintly above the land.

Winston squinted his eyes, looking for the Church. He leaned over the sides of the roof, his arm extended and resting on the neighbouring apartments party wall. The new development had blocked his view of the Mqabba Church, sticking out like a sore thumb in the Maltese landscapes. 

Frantically, Winston turned around to look at the view of the Ħal- Safi church. The townscape was interrupted by long, thin party walls of apartments, scattered throughout the village core. 

He stood still.

As the sun began to set, the music shifted. Bob Dylan’s voice carried across the roof.

“How does it feel?”, sang Bob Dylan.

Winston did not move.