From the root: part two

This column is a continued conversation with the incoming Dean of Architecture & Urban Design, Chev. Prof. Marc Bonello. Part one discussed architecture as identity, part two looks at the faculty’s position on design integrity and teaching architecture that works for a warming planet. Commentary follows.

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AD: Malta is neck-deep in a design illiteracy crisis. Architects today working on polite interiors, retrofits and small-scale development are design-led, which is nice, but safe and benefitting the extreme few. There appears to be no such design sensitivity leading large-scale developments, where the damage is greater and far less reversible. Does this schizophrenia start at education level?

MB: No, I don't believe so. Because in the same way that interior architects have the knowledge and expertise to develop their talents, the training we provide our students should give them tools good enough for them to face large-scale development.

The culprits, if you ask me, are threefold: the developer; the architect who is subservient; and certain misguided planning policies. I think it has to do with having good planning policies. And these should not filter down from the planning authority – there should be a wide national discussion that involves all stakeholders, including developers themselves, for us to understand that where we're going is unsustainable. Today's architecture is tomorrow's failure. Unless we're going to correct this, we're going to have a lot of buildings in the next 10 years that are going to be pulled down and rebuilt.

AD: As much as Malta believes it’s exempt from the climate crisis – it isn’t. Carbon is just one facet of building practice that needs moving towards humility, as opposed to the dominance of architecture as occupation, extraction, visual autocrat etc. There are shifts happening elsewhere in the world to this tune. How will architecture education in Malta take on this challenge?

MB: I think students need to, and are being trained to, understand what it means to have buildings where the dependence on energy is minimised.

AD: That’s around climate adaptation/resilience. What about climate consciousness?

MB: I think our students are well aware of the threats of climate change, because they are mentioned so often during lectures, during design tutorials. And a lot of what we teach in this respect doesn't come across in formal lectures, it comes across through design projects.

You're not going to get a course on climate change, it makes no sense. First of all, because it cuts across so many different disciplines and aspects, such as built environment, agriculture, coastal development. So where do you stop? The way we approach this is we tend to focus on these very important thematics in design projects – because that’s where students can feel and understand.

AD: Is the future of Malta’s built environment bright or bleak?

MB: I am an optimist. However bad the situation is, it is in my nature not to give up. The situation is not good. But not good doesn't mean that the patient is terminally ill – it means something needs to be done and soon. Because if we lose our cultural heritage, well that’s what makes us a nation. It's also a very important asset for our economy. I think the future can be bright, but it's not yet. We can only make it bright by putting our heads together and working hard.

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The convolutions to Malta’s urban condition are compound. Mistaken policy has certainly been built into the fabric of our islands. Bonello’s triad of fault – the developer, deferential architect, and bad planning policies – is therefore a fair appraisal of what has gone, and is still going, intolerably wrong.

But it’s not just that. It would be omissive to ignore the fact that, today, a distinct architectural point-of-view is missing in action. Perhaps it’s in the process of being made, in some secret gestation chamber hidden behind the glass-clad behemoths necklacing the islands. Failing that theory, then we must ask ourselves if the goal of design excellence and/or originality has been watered down, either by neglect or – far more sinister – by necessity.

The reality of the myriad of fault also does not preclude individual players taking responsibility of Malta’s shared urban problem, and more explicitly, making it an education objective to fix. Students arguably have the best ideas, crispest energy, most tireless agency. Either that is no longer the case, or something is stopping them from manifesting that traditional zeal.

Shouldn’t design ingenuity (which is what students are trained to muster) be strong enough to outsmart malignant policy? Shouldn’t archi-acumen be geared towards the most urgent nationwide trouble-shooting exercise, i.e. replacing bad building with good? If it’s not reaching this goal, then we need to question whether the bar we set for what makes good architects is set too low. And if it’s less about design rigour and more about sanctity of character, then let’s call it, and teach that more resolutely.

I share Bonello’s predisposition for optimism, and am heartened that his will be what steers the essential ship of architectural education through Malta’s urban storm. My hope, however, is for a faculty-wide mandate to reinstate the islands’ defected architectural nerve. The technical side has been granted due focus. Now it should be a matter of dogma – an agreed creed for designers-in-training to become champions of what is architecturally good, right, and maybe even inspiring.

From the root: part one

The conflation of blame around Malta’s built environmental bedlam is self-consequential – there is no single force that can independently evade the prison of its collective design. We build badly because design bends itself to misguided policies. They’re misguided because forces that manipulate them are corrupted. The corrupt are emboldened by kinship they find with those who design for their schema, and the cycle goes on.

When separated out, players embroiled in this caterwauling of culpability are plagued with inertia, defensiveness, or plain despair. Like schoolchildren caught in a wayward act, the contesting eyes of developers, planners and, yes, architects, dart around at one another, clambering to rest on one sole offender.   

Very soon, a new Dean of Architecture & Urban Design will take his term at the University of Malta’s Faculty for the Built Environment. Chev. Prof. Marc Bonello – who graduates from his role of Deputy Dean – will become responsible for priming of one of the most important actors in Malta’s development cycle. This interview (which will be covered in two parts), looks at the role of education within national architectural fate.

AD: There’s no discernible contemporary architectural vernacular on the islands. True or False?

MB:  Certainly in the recent period, by and large – very true. I suppose the last architect of repute who tried to bring up the vernacular in architecture was Richard England. But in the past 30 odd years, very little of that has been achieved in Maltese architecture.

AD: Is there an architecture today that reads ‘Malta’?

MB: No. But we also have to be fair to say that this is a problem that’s not confined to our islands, even though we tend to be insular in our approach, this is the truth for many other countries around us. Architecture today has become very internationalised – renowned firms now have commissions all over the world. So they export their architecture. Think of Dubai, if you look at the old vernacular construction and then look at the city centre and ask yourself, where is the building coming from? These are designs from American, European architects. There is no sense of place or attachment.

AD: Let's talk about education. Heritage is a strong focus, but how will your tenure tackle the architect’s mandate to shape today’s identity? How do you teach that responsibility?

MB: I don't think I should be reinventing the wheel. This ethos already exists. Professor Torpiano has been fostering this for the past 16 years. As a faculty we try and instil in our students a sense of good design principles. And by this I mean not just stylistic architecture, but also architecture that is grounded in sustainability as its underlying basis. More than anything else, it's about quality over quantity.

When our students graduate, a few of them will work in the public sector, some might be tempted to go freelance, but a number will work for offices. Private sector gets its work primarily from developers, and the problem is developers locally – at least most of them – tend to be very aggressive in their approach. For them, maximization of profits means maximization of area. At the end of the day, they’re watching their bottom line. What is the outcome of such an approach? Poor quality architecture and an oversupply of the same building typology.

For fresh graduates, it's not easy to tell the developer – look, this is what I'm suggesting and if you don't like it go elsewhere. They need to make a living. This is the ethical decision they need to make. Do you want to be led by your convictions? Or are you going to become a slave to your clients?

Coming back to the faculty, our task is not only about providing our students with tertiary education – so the tools to design and put a project together – but about the philosophy of design, the work ethic, the principles needed to use in future.

AD: If I told you I believed there was a national conspiracy to train architects into complacency / obedience, what would you say?

MB: Our academic members of staff are all committed to giving students the best form of training as to what it means to be a good Perit. I don't believe there is anyone pushing any other agenda. We have some architects who are employed by developers, some by contractors, some are developers themselves. Some are employed by private sector firms, some are freelancers.

Freelancers I would imagine have freedom to decide on what to do. If they lose work because they refuse to do what the developer asks, that impacts their pockets, but they should know what is right and wrong. I think selling yourself to somebody who's asking you to do something that’s not right is not the way forward. Even if it means sacrifice and takes longer to get where you want to.

AD: How do you advise students on how to say no to bad projects?

MB: I think the only way to convince students is by drilling into them that there are principles that are non-negotiable. Now, like everything in life, you have people who buckle under pressure, people who are ready to serve their soul. But that has nothing to do with the way we teach. So, to answer your earlier question – conspiracy, there isn't, but pressures, there are.

The right to the city

“Public spaces – our streets and squares, parks and pavements – are the stages for public life; the public realm is at the heart of our life as social animals”. Richard Rogers wrote this in 2017 in an article titled When public space is eroded, our democracy suffers. That was one year before Valletta took its fated name as Capital of Culture. The title held a premise and promise for urban uplift. Instead, it became a watercourse to hyper-gloss and ugly trade.

Street adverts, decking, homogenous plant pots, obelisk-esque heaters, flapping tents, signposts, delivery bikes and other consumer trappings now obscure what used to be pavements and pedestrianised streets. There is no looking down or forward, no possibility of walking in a straight line, much less at ease. In under six years, Valletta has sowed an invigorated culture of capitalism, with public space as its sacrifice.

It’s not a unique problem. The lament over public realm given to private hands in Europe stretches back to late-1960s France, where uprisings condemned the growing social condition of capitalism and consumerism. The protests’ specific cry: ‘Sous les pavés, la plage!’ (beneath the pavement, the beach!) – serving a belief that the city should belong to the people and not the establishment. Le Droit à la Ville (The Right to the City) was written in 1968 by French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, opining the role of urban space as a citizen domain, not as a canvas for market forces.

The years around Valletta’s ascension to Capital of Culture similarly characterised an escalatory moment in the encroachment of public space. In Belgrade in 2015, protestors decried the €3.5bn redevelopment of the Sava River waterfront. In Beirut in 2018, residents vocalised fears over the city’s last public beach, Ramlet al-Baida, being swallowed by commercial endeavour. Both examples of swapping citizen wellbeing for billable leisure. 

Back in Valletta, in the new year of 2024, streets are lined with accessories for consumption. They welcome visitors who will come, go, and leave cash as they do. The city increasingly defies that initial definition around the staging of a public life. It has, for some years now, been systematically erasing the power of that ‘stage’ to comfort and give balance to the lone citizen.

By nature, a public square – with its symmetry and commitment to space and light – can bring a person in tune with their senses, along with their haptic prerogative to experience joy within a human-made built environment. The way a crowd disperses within a well-planned piazza – tempered and balanced, leaving neither too much distance nor proximity between its users – reminds one of their participatory vocation, of being part of something bigger than individuality.

But space can also have the opposite effect. If serving priorities of fashion or outright profit, space becomes neglectful in nurturing public life. It transforms into a site of anxiety, cultivating spatial alienation incrementally – corroding the city’s duty to uphold, and nurse, public life.

By this definition, Valletta’s public spaces are disappearing. An aerial survey (architect Chris Briffa’s idea and contribution) of major public zones within the city demonstrates the degree to which the city’s commercial footprint has interrupted public space.

Merchant Street is unwalkable. St John’s Square is not a square. The ratio of habitable, open, occupiable space to tented, barriered, signposted swathes of hospitality is [insert ratio]. This is not an estimation. This is what public space amounts to in our capital.  

There is another side to this argument – that people are in favour of Valletta’s current condition.

Ten years ago, the city was a fallow land, its revival desired and warranted. Maybe this is the course it had to take to achieve that revival – maybe this is what progress looks like and what everyone wants. If we were to survey the health of our capital’s public life by its consumption, taking the view that people are “voting with their feet”, then the results of what we define as ‘public’ might look different.

This Christmas in Valletta, however, streets looked palpably limp. Earlier in December, I had vowed to friends that I would be boycotting the capital during the holiday season, scarred by the audio-visual excess of the city’s recent festive years. But Valletta is inevitable. And so it should be.

Walking through what felt like a skinnier crowd than ever on Republic Street days before Christmas, I imagined a hybrid Valletta of sleepy past and gluttonous present. I remember living in the city briefly in 2010, waking up to blended sights of domesticity and civic grandeur. Back then, a sprinkling of polish held the potential for elegance, for becoming a modern-day totem of Valletta’s rightful splendour – a reminder of its role as a virtuous mercantile hub and a haven for the peripatetic. 

That potential has succumbed to something else – a place where everything you see and touch asks for money. There is a dissonance now between the stage of public life and its actors. But now it’s a new year; a time to call in new direction, to realign the squares and streets with the people that seek to roam them. So give us back space – give us back the city.