Mercury in retrograde: Social mobility through real estate | Gabriel Zammit

The Mercury complex in St Julian’s is made up of three buildings with the main structure being a 33-storey skyscraper. It is taller than anything else on the island and its impact on our collective unconscious is indisputable.

The Mercury project, commissioned by Joseph Portelli and designed by Zaha Hadid, is riddled with paradox and complexity.

Zaha Hadid Architects is one of the best-known architectural firms in the world. Their aesthetic language has developed from a parametric design process that uses algorithm-led methods to generate the signature organic shapes that the studio has become known for.

Joseph Portelli, on the other hand, is best known for being one of Malta’s biggest development moguls. He is at the helm of a vast business empire that has political influence.

That is one contradiction – the strange marriage between Zaha Hadid and Joseph Portelli.

Another is that the building might be a feat of aesthetic engineering but this is negated by its gross insensitivity to context.

Mercury Towers was developed around Mercury House, a 19th century telecommunication building. Undoubtedly, the house and its environs needed rejuvenating but this alone is evidently not the only justification for the skyscraper complex. The new buildings loom over the old like predators over a piece of dead prey.

The tower itself is stark white and clean. When seen from afar it squats ungracefully on the horizon, and framed against the sea it is beautiful in a dystopian, jarring, kind of way. Put simply, it does not fit into its surroundings or the fabric of Malta more generally. Mercury, therefore, can never accomplish the radical urban change that its proponents claim is one of its core purposes.

Similarly, the new mall at the heart of Mercury with its shiny glass shopfronts is populated with the same brands that can be bought from pretty much anywhere else in Sliema and St Julian’s and so the development fails to aptly respond to any contextual necessity. So why build it?

Besides the obvious reason of more money, Mercury is indicative of a certain kind of self-narration that describes something troubling that has emerged in our collective unconscious.

Joseph Portelli is part of a new social class that has achieved upward mobility via the recent boom in construction and attendant spike in property prices. The prevailing tastes of this newly created species of millionaire are reflected in the aesthetics of the buildings that are going up around the island. A new language of whiteness, maximisation of space, stark party walls, tiny shafts, a lack of natural light and overall negligence of architectural context or social need is unfolding. This type of building is oriented towards the needs of the individual (rather than the collective) and favours a process of tight optimisation and direct monetisation.

The values that are communicated in this aesthetic language are two: Maximisation of capital at all costs and a sublimated notion that stark concrete newness and stark whiteness have something to do with being better and moving up in the world. Collective consideration of context and neighbourhood come second.

Maximisation of capital is easy to understand but the psychological dynamic is a little harder. Both, however, have precedent in the development of modern empires across the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. They are unwittingly inherited from our colonisers, who looked at our Mediterranean, Maltese messiness with disdain, and sought to neutralise it in order to extract as much capital as possible for their own coffers. Our contemporary architecture is telling of the fact that we have adopted the logic of our colonisers without realising it.

As a consequence of perpetuating colonial principles, we are levelling out our internal and external landscapes, reducing our Maltese identity to soulless development projects that embody the strange entanglement between social mobility and neoliberal empire fervour that has become prioritised at all costs.

This is the real context that Mercury is responding to, and the towers crystallise this world view in its purest form. Their aesthetic is not coincidental either, and even though it is filtered through the capable hands of Zaha Hadid Architects, it mirrors the same language of whiteness, orderliness and maximisation of space.

With Mercury Towers, Zaha Hadid’s innovative architecture becomes the tip of a spear that draws something extremely problematic out of collective memory. Any architectural brilliance is engulfed into a socio-cultural, Stockholm-syndrome-esque, caveat of which the studio was almost certainly not aware, or perhaps did not care about.

Coincidentally (or not) Mercury is lit up at night with garish green strip-lighting.

So where does this leave us?

In an article titled Form Follows Finance published in The Architectural Review, Oliver Wainwright writes about skyscrapers in New York: “…these towers are the totemic markers of a period in which real estate is the ultimate asset class, more valuable than all the worlds’ stocks, shares and securitised debt combined. In a damning indictment of society’s priorities, these rampant vehicles for ceaseless wealth accumulation are burgeoning…”

The development mania, best described as a collective dream of social mobility through real estate, has pushed the species of capitalism that is applied here on the island into quasi-religious territory that rides roughshod over democratic principles such as equality of opportunity, fair competition and open markets. It creates its own processes that ritualistically codify a system for superseding guidelines established at policy level because the experience of Mercury (and comparable projects), for people like Portelli, is ultimately spiritual.

Its meaning, and its justification, in the eyes of these people, is so self-evident as to be incontrovertible, it can be taken on faith alone and justifies any action because there is no doubt that what it drives towards is good, in and of itself, or in Portelli’s own words, “iconic.”

The development of Mercury Towers was inevitable. It cannot do anything for its physical context or abide by the rules of common sense, because the need that it responds to is spiritual, not physical. The towers are the material extrusion of a psychological process that has been kicked into warp speed since at least 2013, when the economy started to boom, and possibly even before.

Mercury is thus the ultimate indictment of our society’s collective dreams – social and financial mobility through real estate, at any cost.