Malta's Most Obvious Problem

 Jul 2023

My pessimistic attitude towards the profession of working formally as an architect began with concerns arising from the disparity between the academic work we strive to inform and confine ourselves by, and the material world we build in. I often find myself reflecting and rewriting this phrase.  When looking at the Built Environment in Malta, it pains me that whenever I gaze through a window or step outside, I am confronted with constructed images of an inferior architecture. My eyes are immediately drawn to the uneven, narrow, blocked-off pavements, the prolific construction waste, the cheap plastered finishes, the white aluminium window and door frames and the construction dust residue resting along neighbouring properties.

The construction industry locally has built up (quite literally) a bad reputation. The country's size has exacerbated this. For clarity and conciseness' sake, I will discuss the construction industry's reliance solely on developable area. Despite influencing political agendas, engaging in perpetual lobbying, property speculation, and facilitating housing demand, architecture as a profession has been criticised solely due to the lack of space on which its physical manifestation is based. Let me explain.

The profession's conviviality relies on building and rebuilding Malta's finite three-hundred-sixteen square kilometres. To put this into perspective, an older figure from the National Statistics Office indicates that of this total area, approximately one hundred square kilometers falls within a developable zone. The remaining regions are agricultural and natural zones, or officially stipulated as unzoned.

Malta is broken down into fifty-three districts, ranging from small towns to villages. Due to its hilly topography, the distinct limits of these districts/ villages are clearly visible from any high point, comprising a dense cluster of housing. In more densely populated areas, such districts merge through continuous development running through the entirety of the district, blurring the extent between them. Each district has been zoned to preserve a particular character, attract business, designate tourist and lesiure areas, preserve older Urban Conservation Areas, etc. It is precisely such zoning enforced via Policy and Local Plans that gives rise to complexities and contradictions in architecture and the built environment. The general population have a liking for older, seemingly more traditional Maltese masonry structures, and rightly so. I will not explain the merit of craftsmanship and its stark difference to today's workmanship. Creative architectural hybrids respond by attempting to preserve and complement older, more architecturally rich dwellings by ironically constructing directly on and adjacent to it. A Cultural Heritage officer introduced me to the term, facadism.  As the term implies, it involves preserving the façade of older buildings, which justify their preservation responsibility in their development. I paraphrase his statement;

‘‘Facadism is not good practice in conservation, but in a situation where we are losing everything, that is a way forward’’

Architectural work can be summarized so consist of excavation, demolition and construction works. Given the physical or visual proximity of these activies to older built heritage, there is an unescapable visual impingement. Take Malta’s currently redefined highrise skyline. Zaha Hadid’s signature twist pierces the Maltese skyline at a modest one-hundred twenty-two meters. Its alien form, although situated within a justifiable ‘high rise’ area, could be seen throughout the island. Even in such a designated zone, did the building engulf an older colonial British communications tower. My intentions in describing this building are not to critisize its comprehendible, literate architectural response to its immediate surroundings, but rather its surrounding effects on a regional scale.  One could notice the tower in various locations throughout the island. This scale of the tower is best seen when driving along the north-eastern  coast road, or through a series of southern arterial roads. St Lucy’s street in Valletta, in particular, frames the twisting tower through older, UNESCO protected streetscape in the capital. Views of the tower can also be on sister island Gozo.

The Maltese perception of northwestern European countries is that they have their priorities set. They have established far better systems for education, transport, building, quality of life, development, green and blue infrastructure, public space etc, the list goes on and stops at food. Maltese find pride in their Mediterranean cuisine. Advanced capitalism, deeply rooted in the construction sector reigns. In these countries, however it is less evident due to their vast stretches of land, sometimes completely flat, that allow them to retain a perfect urban landscape or picturesque streetscapes where desired. This vastness serves as a natural canvas for allocating contrasting districts and zones. It is true that in Malta, building regulations might be somewhat looser and allow for a more inferior quality when building; however, globally, the appetite for building remains the same.

Overseas, ambitions to build are zoned off and sectioned around suburbs of major cities, or placed along business districts, allowing for a condensed high-rise area.

Locally, therefore, we face a strong contradiction and suffer direct consequences of such practices overseas to a higher degree. Correlated to Malta's challenging topography, condensed development areas and complexities in road infrastructure, Malta has had it more difficult from the get-go. This calls for more complex, precise planning, zoning, and decision-making. Wholistic planning on political, social and cultural levels. Given that planning in Malta hasn’t really been grasped, and urban planning yet to be practiced, attentiveness and care must be carried out on the small-scale projects. Here, architects must be more attentive, conscious and particular on their decisions. Questioning the brief, challenging convention, and details become pivotal to a unified image in Malta. Not only does scale haver a huge impact on such a dense, close proximity built environment. For instance, should an architect allocate designated areas for air-conditioning units, facades would indeed look different. Now say passive ventilation was properly catered for, allowing a block of apartments to be cooled via a back garden and larger shafts, the streetscape would take on a completely different approach. Given that the project has now done away with nominal pinterest fluted wood beams to hide air-conditioning units on the façade, and the concrete finish on the façade given a brown-ish pigment, this gives the streetscape a different image.

In conclusion, small architectural decisions play a huge role in an overall unified image. An image that can complement and evoke a sense of architectural richness in a streetscape, which in turn complements the village, and the village with the neighboring town, and the neighbouring towns with Malta. Architects must therefore dissect, examine, inform and disseminate their small-scale projects as if they where a surgeon carrying out an acute operation. An operation that, although small, demands attentiveness and care, not to compromise the complex biological system.