From the front: part two

This column is a continued conversation with the President of the Kamra tal-Periti, Andre Pizzuto. Part one discussed regulatory rigor and enforcement. Part two looks at public interface and the chamber’s role within an ecosystem of built environment players.

Ann Dingli (AD): Let’s talk about the council itself. You were elected in 2020 and re-elected in 2022. Was there ever a mandate around how long presidents could serve?

Andre Pizzuto (AP): I was elected in December 2020 and was vice president for two years before that. At the time there was a leapfrog system that had been agreed in a general meeting whereby there would be alternating presidents. Every two years the vice president would take over. But that system is not in the Kamra’s regulations.

When we started undertaking professional conduct with increased focus and issuing suspensions more frequently, my concern became that the composition of the chamber would be challenged, because it wasn't [composed] according to law. I shared my concern with the council, and they agreed that it was risky. That’s why we reverted to holding elections according to the chamber regulations, which require that an election is set every year, and that the council appoints different roles. There were also 12 council members, where the regulations required 10.

So, we reverted to the system in the regulations. Then if needs arose, we could amend them – but we don't just take the law into our own hands and freewheel elections without compliance. Because it would be ironic if we were trying to uphold regulations on others, and not follow them ourselves. There is no limitation in the regulations on how long the council can appoint the president for, or anyone.

AD: Do you think there should be?

AP: I'm conflicted on it. I think one of the weaknesses that the Kamra had for a long time was that it didn't have stable leadership – it kept changing leaders. Other organisations like the MDA have had their leader for a good 9 or 10 years.

AD: Is that a good thing?

AP: Ultimately, if there's a democratic system in place where if I bother everybody, they can chuck me out – and I think that safeguard exists…

AD: The council looked quite different when you first took over. Most notably, the already sparse number of women forming part of it decreased. Recently there was an education exchange spearheaded by the Kamra made up of mentors from the profession – all were male. From the outside, it's easy to conclude that the council’s composition influences its endeavours. Do you think the chamber's council and activities represent the genuine make-up of the profession?

AP: No. And we’ve tried to head towards more women joining the council. It's been difficult. We’re very mindful of gender balance. With our awards, for example, which we’re re-launching, we're making sure to have a three-two number in favour of women on the jury. I understand the issue and I don't feel comfortable with having such a male dominated council this year. But they're all valid people and I don't really have any control over the nominees.

AD: Your focus has been to bring the profession up to regulatory speed. But what about the more ceremonial side to the KtP? The Premju Emmanuel Galizia hasn’t been around for a while.*

AP: We used to have our own awards, since 2017 – I was the organiser of the first two editions. Then COVID struck and they couldn't happen. We didn’t want to do something online because the point was to reflect the spirit of the profession. What happened also was that the planning authority started organising their own awards, which began basically killing off one of our major sources of income.

AD: Having the planning authority distribute awards in the way it currently does is anyway a conflict.

AP: How do you mean exactly?

AD: Planning awards should reward strategies of integration within urban systems – the acumen required, often from composite groups of experts, to best incorporate spatial benefit and address programmatic and urban needs within ratified parameters. The problem with the local version is not that the planning authority runs them, it’s that it runs them as architecture awards – which is a conflict. You can't award the same projects you are adjudicating. Planning awards can exist, they just have to do the right thing. Which would also mean not competing with the KtP’s.

AP: Rather than competing, we should be doing things together.

AD: The chamber's international outreach has recently focused on education. What about architecture education locally – teaching students in Malta about social and civic responsibility?

AP: One of the things we’re working on is setting a syllabus for graduates. Our plan is to give a broader formation on aspects of the profession that are not taught at university – management, leadership, ethics, human resources. I think ethics is the most important, because if members of the profession don't understand that our work is based on empathy, then there’s a big problem. And when I say empathy, it’s about trying to understand not just the needs of clients around maximizing profit, but the lifestyle of the people inhabiting buildings.

So much of our activity is based on understanding the needs of others, that if there isn't a mindset of empathy cultivated as early as possible, it will cause problems. Young architects need a bit more support from our side. But it applies to more than architects, it’s the whole of society.

*Between the time of interview and publication, the Premju Emmanuel Galizia awards have been re-launched and submissions can be accessed at https://premjugalizia.org

From the front: part one

Architecture regulates behaviour – from the way a home’s environment impacts a child’s development, to how the architecture of cities shapes whole cultures. But what prevents architectural malice and the misappropriation of this regulating power?

Architecture itself needs regulation. Malta’s Kamra tal-Periti (KtP) or Chamber of Architects and Civil Engineers describes itself as “a body for the self-regulation of one of the oldest established professions”. This two-part interview with its president, André Pizzuto, asks what it takes to be architecture’s watchdog.

Part one covers disciplinary influence over professional standards, conflicts, design reviews, and the need for joint venturing. Part two addresses the Chamber’s operations, representational parity, and the role of awards. 

Ann Dingli: The KtP has focused on regulatory issues under your leadership. Do you think the public understands where the profession stands with regulation?

André Pizzuto: I suspect there's a sizable amount of people aware of what we're trying to do. But I think there's others who associate us with the negativity the industry is projecting. And that’s partly perhaps a failing in terms of communication, but also ‘guilt by association’.

The counterpart to this argument is that to fight this negative perception the profession must hold power of disciplinary action – meaning addressing issues through formal proceedings. The power for the KtP to regulate was introduced into the new political act of 2001, which we didn't have before – it’s now one of the functions of the Kamra.

I don't think the public understands sufficiently that we’re campaigning to safeguard public interest. There may be skepticism in some instances because of our perceived conflict. People might think we have an interest in keeping things as they are, or that we’re promoting reforms biased in our favour, which is absolutely not the case.

AD: What does regulatory power look like in practice? How do you deal with conflict-of-interest within the Kamra itself – which is made up of practitioners and figures from a tiny industry? Even if you decouple responsibility from the government, the Chamber’s sovereignty is still corruptible.

AP: One of the first instances of regulatory power for the Kamra was when we issued a directive to safeguard buffer zones of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Malta. Our mindset was: this is the standard we’re setting for the profession, if something doesn’t meet it, we’ll launch disciplinary proceedings. There are also certain provisions and recommendations, such as the use of Eurocodes*, that don’t require government involvement – and they agree that we should adopt the codes as professional standards.

We want to accompany those codes with design guidelines. The industry would benefit from a central reference document for all operators. Like with loading capacities – if we're going to talk about the loading capacity of stone, do we know what the different forms of construction require? A lot of it is not specified locally. The follow-up would be an impact assessment of the codes’ implementation. Because while in design the codes may be being applied, they may not be in construction.

With regards conflict, we do [an internal] conflict check every time we open a disciplinary case, verifying that nobody has any business interests or friendship with parties involved. I don't recall an instance where there was any hesitancy to discipline anybody when necessary. Our conduct processes also require two thirds majority.

AD: You’ve discussed the introduction of Design Review Panels (DRPs) nationally, saying they should be independently adjudicated by the KtP. How will you support a workforce to run this? Are you proposing that the KtP oversees all DRPs for the entire country, which is inundated with development proposals?

AP: We’re not suggesting DRPs should be mandatory, we’re saying they should be optional. But resource is a fair question, and I wish I could give a detailed response. But let me step back and explain what we’re trying to do in general about local architecture.

Our intent is to form a joint board with government, specifically tackling architecture and urban design issues – because I don't think it’s something we can do on our own. There are already existing examples of these partnerships between industry and government. This joint venture would address the development of an architecture policy. We’re one of two EU countries that doesn't have one, and it's tragic.

The DRPs could potentially fall under that board. But I'm not suggesting that all projects go through a DRP – it would be impossible to handle. The ones that should are sensitive sites or projects with significant impact, like towers etc. Some of this could be funded by permit applicants – because it's a service we'd provide. Aside from DRPs, the KtP still needs employees. Currently, we are working to set up a completely digitized system, but we still need people to drive the things we want to do.

*Eurocodes are the ten European standards specifying how structural design should be conducted within the European Union (EU).

The erstwhile shape of hope

This column has been on hold for just over a month. During that time:

The Gutenberg Press building in Tarxien was eyed for conversion into a shopping mall, its current owner filing a permit application to demolish the two-storey printing press – built in 1996 to a decent limestone design, and today still visible as an everyday landmark of rare temperate scale along the drive from Marsa southwards following the length of Tal-Barrani road. The application sought replacement with three storeys above ground and four floors below of retail provision, promoting unity with regional Scotts and LIDL outposts sited within a kilometre’s distance.

Next, a study shedding light on the dominance of landlord ownership was released publicly, declaring two fifths of Malta’s rental properties to be owned by a tenth of the islands’ landlords, and 16 out of 400 interviewed landlords to own more than 10 properties each – shedding light on the monopolised landscape of national real estate. A protest on the adjacent issue of private accretion onto public realm, or the “Siege of Public Land”, fittingly followed, with a press conference in Valletta held to launch the Il-Bankini Taċ-Ċittadini campaign.

Meanwhile, local NGOs in their dogged – if oft fruitless – vigilance, raised alarm on two separate environmentally menacing episodes. Firstly, a spat of seemingly ecologically hostile and officially unpermitted activity in Armier Bay of the concrete-poured-over-sand-and-natural-habitat variety; and secondly, around the hear-said danger of ODZ policy changes being introduced to allow countryside and/or agricultural buildings to be converted into hotels. Both claims were fully denied by authorities, becoming another two vague chips hacked off the nation’s collective sanity around the integrity of both its natural and built environment. Like many other refuted claims, they delivered a double dose of ambiguous threats to which we know no beginning, no end, and have no understanding of the boundaries of accuracy.

Then at the end of last month, on April 20th precisely, the tragic news of the death of Bari Balla – a father of six – came through our feeds. Balla’s vulnerability to another construction nightmare symbolises the darkest, most damning reminder of all the problems we have categorically failed to fix. Its deepest horror? Admission into the incorporeal cycle of anaesthesia that now characterises any news – good or bad – connected with Malta’s urban story.

During this column’s very brief hiatus, the act of mourning these development calamities individually has felt more and more like a fool’s endeavour. Critique presents as yet another component to the dense and blindingly compound problem of Malta’s grand act to bury itself in more of itself. Our condition of ‘hypernormalisation’ – a term coined by anthropologist Alexei Yurchak to describe the condition of knowing that a system is failing but not being able to imagine or enact an alternative, the powered and the powerless all subsequently resigning to a charade of functioning society – is so entrenched, that outlining the ongoing list of urban malaises feels like pouring water into an already overflowing glass.

But if in the space of just a few weeks an island of 316 km² can undergo a torrent of policy, ownership, heritage, ecological and mortal crises of this kind of consistency, then that list still needs making. Because nothing is new, none of these stories are surprising or atypical – but their true terror is their paralysingly additive effect, reinforcing the belief that nothing can ever, or will ever, change.

That, however, would be the biggest mistake of all: believing that the agency and resources necessary to convert bad into good have been depleted. They are there, they are ours, they just need taking.

Architecture and place-making is, in its purest format, the literal shaping of progress. Its aim is to give infrastructure to the diverse ambitions connected to societies and civilisations. If people want to be better educated, architecture makes schools and universities that will uphold the right type of learning required to do so. If people want to know more about their own cultural psyche, museum and library buildings give space for them to look directly at it. If governments want to support democratic discourse and law-making, courts and chambers of authority are shaped for them to do so.

A while back, from the early 00s over a decade or so, Malta hit an architectural sweet spot. Sizeable swathes of heritage regeneration established a promise of legitimate cultural tourism (City Gate; Dock One; Cittadella); smaller piecemeal projects by local practitioners showed signs of veritable innovation (M&S Valletta; 2 22; St James Cavalier Centre of Creativity, now Spazzju Kreattiv); and the pedestrianisation of parts of the capital gave credence to a signal of people-first development. These, and other examples, became built beacons of identity and national aspiration.

Where are these kinds of projects now? Why are good architects being buried in home conversions and vanity expeditions? Real progress is achievable – it’s been realised time an

d time again in our past. The unmitigated consequence of gluttony has all but converted former scenes of hope into a tenuous mirage. Our job is to wade our way out of it, keep calling out the wrongs, and continue looking for the truth of what can be good.