Cities are about people, not monuments

What I am about to say may well make me a member of the smallest minority in the known universe. Then again, it may not. But personally, I think Renzo Piano’s house of parliament is an ugly building. 

And I don’t just mean ‘ugly’ in the purely aesthetic sense of the word. I can fully understand people (though I am not one of them myself) who might be seduced by the general visual impact of Piano’s vision… if not for the building in isolation, at least for the entrance to Valletta as a whole. Certainly it marks an improvement over the previous City Gate: which had (let’s face it) taken the concept of ‘ugliness’ to an altogether unprecedented level.

But the edifice that now rises in unsteady accretions behind that entrance cannot (to my mind, at any rate) be described as ‘beautiful’. From a distance, it looks like a pile of crates waiting to be picked up by a forklift truck. Were it not for the colour of those crates, you’d almost think it was the loading area of the Malta Freeport: an impression that is greatly reinforced by the scaffolding and skeletal, crane-like colonnades of the ruined opera house behind it… like the fingers of a bony hand thrusting upwards from the rat-infested sewers beneath. 

Whichever way you look at Piano’s parliament – and I stress I refer only to the building itself, and not its immediate surroundings – it imparts an impression of grim, industrial soullessness. A little like Kafka’s Castle, it frowns upon you as you walk past. You are both dwarfed and made to feel out of place… almost as if you were somehow trespassing upon private property, instead of entering the capital city of your own country.

It is as though Piano’s entire brief was to design the entrance to a ghost town. There is no life looking back at you when you gaze upon those grizzled, forbidding walls. Perhaps the effect is simply down to a glaring absence of windows… if a person’s eyes are proverbially ‘windows’ onto the soul, what impression can an eyeless building possibly impart, other than one of inanimate vacuity? 

Either way, Piano’s parliament does not return your stare when you look up at it from below. And why should it, anyway? After all, it is a monumental palace designed by the greatest architect in the world. The human viewer, on the other hand, is an insignificant little insect.

So why should a grand, grim and domineering palatial structure give a monkey’s backside about such worthless things as the people who walk past it every day? It has loftier and more important things on its mind. In fact, the entire impression it imparts is that it would be a whole lot happier if people didn’t exist at all, to intrude upon its magnificent seclusion. You can almost hear the masonry ‘tut-tutting’ disapprovingly at the passing multitudes below… as though ‘people’, by their mere presence in their own capital city, were somehow demeaning the sanctity of a hallowed space that was intended only as a playground for the fabulously important.

I’m beginning to think that this effect was intentional, too… a way of architecturally reinforcing the point that human beings are ultimately a nuisance and an inconvenience, to great artists who automatically know better than everybody else. For let’s be honest: people are annoying things at the best of times. They tend to have these things called ‘opinions’, which at times may – perish the thought – even conflict with the artist’s own superior views regarding aesthetics and the dynamics of landscape. 

And this sentiment is by no means limited to the architect responsible for the new entrance to Valletta: who, being paid over €8 million for this one job, is perhaps entitled to consider himself above and beyond all earthly reproach. Oh, no: you get the same thing from all sorts of other people, too. I’ve heard it said time and again that we should all keep our opinions about such things as ‘architecture’ to ourselves, because – not having studied the subject for six years at university – our own views regarding what a building looks like, and the effect it may have on its surroundings, are worth jack-shit anyway. 

By the same token, I suppose people should not express any opinion about the taste of food, either. After all, most diners at a restaurant will not have studied haut-cuisine under any master chef. They will not have cultivated their palate at El Bulli, or risen through the ranks of culinary perfection under the likes of Gordon Ramsey.

But no matter how ignorant they may be about fine dining, all people have taste-buds which, upon contact with food, will inform their senses whether they ‘like’ what they are eating or not. Even those among us who can’t boil an egg will be able to instantly tell whether they find any particular dish ‘good’ or ‘bad’. And whatever the master chefs of this world might have to say in the matter, it is those collective opinions that ultimately form the cultural phenomenon we call ‘taste’… without which all chefs, great or small, would be out of a job. 

The same is true for people’s tastes regarding buildings and their effect on their immediate environment… indeed, it is arguably more pertinent when applied to architecture than food. Food is by definition perishable: you eat it, and… zap! It’s gone (until it later re-emerges in a different form… that invariably smells just as bad, regardless of whether it was haut-cuisine, or something you ate out of a tin). 

Buildings, on the other hand, stay there for a good long time. You could almost say ‘forever’, were it not for the fact that they are sometimes destroyed in wars or cataclysms, and – like the Valletta opera house – never rebuilt. How much more, then, should we be collectively entitled to an opinion of our own, regarding something that more or less permanently alters the entire impact of the entrance to our own capital city?

Meanwhile, there is increasing evidence that the assortment of crates that has piled up at the start of Republic Street is, in fact, more important than the people who are supposed to be represented by the parliament it is intended to house. Even as I write this, there is a small commotion regarding a government decision to site the ‘Monti’ – an open air market, of the kind that graces all capital cities worldwide – right underneath Piano’s masterpiece.

Heaven forfend! I mean, can you imagine the outrage, if an open-air market were to open up… say… outside the Covent Garden Opera House in London? Or within sight of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin? Yet these are precisely the places where you will find open-air markets in the capital cities of the world. It is only here in Malta, it seems, that we have forgotten the basic principle that invigorates cities everywhere, and which underpins the entire concept of ‘civilisation’ – a word that originally derived from the Latin ‘civitas’, and implies a product of city life.

Simply put, a city is as alive as the people who live and work in it. Remove the market stalls – or hide them as best you can, so that they cannot detract from the visual impact of soulless architecture – and what you will end up with is but the shrivelled husk of a city: the architectural equivalent of a shop-window peopled only with grotesque mannequins. 

And this, far more than the unsightly rabbit-hutch effect of Piano’s boxed parliament itself, is what has in a sense uglified Valletta. Voices calling for the removal of the Valletta market from the doorway to its own city are doing more than just placing empty buildings before the people they were built for: such arguments also turn people against themselves. 

It is not just the untidy market stalls with their (admittedly tacky) wares that will get in the way of Piano’s grand but sterile vision; it is also the people who man those stalls, with their shouts and their noise and their day-to-day bustle; the smell of ‘imqaret’ as it wafts about the streets; the clinking of coins and the inane chatter of human conversation. All this, we are told, simply has no place at the heart of such a formidable architectural statement of monumental aloofness as Piano’s parliament. 

Yet it is precisely “all this” that – like it or not – makes us the people we are. We owe far more of our identity to the Valletta market than to the mathematical symmetry of Piano’s creation, or his choice of stone quarried from God-knows-where. Yet we are bluntly told that we should forget who we are and where we’re coming from, to embrace a vision that quite frankly never included us at all.

Nor is it just the Monti that may have to make way for this monument to depopulated nothingness. Back in the days when the project had yet to be given the green light, there was much excited talk about whether the housing estate across the road should also be given its marching orders, along with the shops that once huddled under the ‘arkati’ of the old City Gate. I remember one argument (no names mentioned) in which I was invited to picture the following scene: Piano’s masterpiece on one side… and across the road, balconies laden with the laundry of some 50 families, fluttering untidily in the breeze. 

Can you imagine? Oh, the effrontery, that a city’s inhabitants should carry on with the daily business of being alive, when the great and the glorious would much rather that city were dead as a doornail. 

I was shocked then, and still am today, to discover that some people would advocate the wholesale eviction of scores of families, just to make way for an architectural extravaganza that celebrates nothing but itself. The implications are little short of staggering: why limit ourselves only to city gate? The whole of Valletta is an architectural wonder in its own right. Should we evict the inhabitants of all its kerreja and tenements, because their shabby laundry jars with the sublime juxtaposition of Laparelli’s fortifications? Or palaces that were designed for Knights and noblemen, at a time when your ordinary Maltese citizen was not actually allowed within the city walls? 

And if so, what would that be… if not a case of turning back the clock to when buildings really were more important than people?

This, to my mind, is the impression I come away with walking into Valletta through its front entranceway in the 21st century. Renzo Piano may be a great architect, but his great artistic achievement in this case was to visually enshrine, in a way that we can’t avoid seeing, precisely all those things that divide us as a nation, and which encourage us to look upon ourselves as contemptible.

For want of a better word, I would call that ‘ugly’.