“Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skim your country of its beauty,” Theodore Roosevelt once said. Regrettably, it seems that our country has done exactly that. The fires of monetary gain and profit have incinerated the island. As the land burns, tentacles of greed are extinguishing the last remnant beauties of ‘din l-art ħelwa’.
Avaricious construction moguls aided by their political acolytes and an all too easily acquiescent Planning Authority continue to poison our environment with their ravenous appetite for monetary gain and saturation of their financial coffers. The construction industry is in shambles and it is not surprising that people at large have fallen out of love with developers and their architects and the supposedly local building control authorities.
The malady, however, extends beyond aesthetics. Corruption merges with the construction delirium, setting the island reeling in a febrile loss of values, ethics and moral principles. What was promised was not delivered. The choreography was mendacious; theatrical masks concealed the adulterated truth, as tarantulas continue to spin their deceitful webs.
We have lost our way. We wander aimlessly in a moral vacuity, dancing to the jarring music of corruption and the discordant tones of avarice and greed. As the deceitful prosper, the island burns. Ethics and values have been carbonised; the promised dreams have turned to nightmares.
From the remnant embers and ashes we need to rise to pave a way to a radiant future. We need a threshold to transcend these turgid times and open the way to a return to sanity. How to jettison the present toxic folly is not an easy task.
Ethics and values have been carbonised; the promised dreams have turned to nightmares
To eliminate fraudulence and corruption requires vigilance, surveillance and the strictest of adhesion to the rule of law.
In relation to the steroid construction mania, as the island grieves, wounded and weeping, we ponder on what the remedies might be for a Promethean renascence to extinguish the Armageddon of the current fires incinerating our land.
The last decades have witnessed an alarming increase in calamitous land consumption, together with the newborn penchant for high-risers and mini tower edifices even in our close-knit village cores. We need to ensure that greed and avarice do not continue to destroy our land.
Perhaps by delving back into the clepsydra of time we can relearn some paradigm lessons to convert the unsightly construction industry into a programme which produces buildings that marry poetry to the pragmatic.
From the pre-pyramid Neolithic builders, a people for whom the land had more meaning, we can learn to once again value nature, to thread gently on these isles and master once more environmental governance and stewardship.
From the period of the Knights of the Order of St John, we can relearn the need of enlightened clients more interested in creating edifices of splendour to be left as lasting legacies than in buildings as monetary and profit-making vehicles.
Non-architect vernacular typologies also furnish us with valuable lessons in terms of the adhesion of buildings to site and context, all of which provide a tutelage which, if updated can produce satisfactory solutions for contemporary edifices.
We urgently need a nascent dawn to light up the darkness of our times; a beacon of hope to revitalise the poisoned entrails of this land, if only to ensure that future generations can, at least, inherit some of the remaining particles of the precious heirloom that our more sapient and caring forefathers passed on to us.
Richard England, Architect, writer and academic