The Founding Myths of Architecture 
by Konrad Buhagiar, Guillaume Dreyfuss and Jens Bruenslow, published by Artifice and available on Amazon.

The opening scene of Pasolini’s Medea (1969) is one of the most haunting moments in film history. The centaur Chiron appeals to the boy Jason, his ward, to sense the sacred in the physical world (my translation):

“All is sacred, all is sacred, all is sacred. There’s nothing natural about nature, my dear boy: keep that well in mind. When nature begins to appear natural, it will all be over ... Does it seem to you that even the smallest corner of this beautiful sky is natural, and not inhabited by a god?”   Except Jason is not listening - he’s more interested in catching a very natural-looking crab. An early sign of a hard-nosed pragmatism that will serve him well to assemble the Argonauts and seize the Golden Fleece.

Pasolini’s film, and the timeless question it explores about how to reconcile two seemingly opposed forms of lived experience – that of myth, and that of reason – was the inspiration behind this collection. It started life as a conference held in Valletta in 2005.

An apt location, too, because AP Valletta must be the one firm that has done the most to rescript the city in recent years. The portfolio of projects includes City Gate and the Parliament building (in conjunction with Renzo Piano Building Workshop), the Barrakka Lift, the Manoel Theatre, the Malta Stock Exchange, the St John’s Co-Cathedral Museum, ongoing conservation work on the St Paul’s Pro-Cathedral, as well as various private commissions. 

Konrad Buhagiar and Guillaume Dreyfuss are the executive director and director of research respectively at AP. Jens Bruenslow, the third editor, is a former associate of the firm. This, then, is a scholarly book, but it is also in a sense a vision statement of a group of architects and planners whose work and thought extends well beyond the drawing board. Nor is it the first in this vein: in 2012, AP published A Printed Thing, a playful collection of essays and artwork.

St Calcedonius Chapel, Archbishop’s Curia, Floriana. Photo: Mark Anthony Falzon

The book takes issue with the straitjacket that templates architecture into a pragmatic science of manufacture – in many cases, one underwritten by the rules of profitability. Instead, architects would do well to keep in mind their foundational mission as bearers of symbols. To put it differently, good architecture makes places that humans and gods can co-inhabit, and where the symbols of that relationship can dwell. While very little in the book is about Malta in particular, the rethink it urges is a desperately needed antidote to the horrors mushrooming around us. I don’t suppose that any symbols, other than those of accumulation, dwell in the wastelands of blank party walls and maisonette-garage combos.

The protagonist of the book’s ten essays is a homo faber who makes, and who does so scientifically and often profitably, but who retains the sacred and the mythological as his main accomplices all along. Take Georges Grognet de Vassé, best known as the architect behind the Mosta Rotunda. His career included an elaborate fabrication that set Malta up as the location of Atlantis. At first glance not his finest moment, but the con doubled as an attempt to elevate lived place to that of mythology – a sleight that defined much of his lifework. The Rotunda itself,  a technical feat, is built on a rich seam of symbolism: suffice it to say that when anthropologist Paul Sant Cassia described it elsewhere as a building “that would look good as a ruin”, he was being neither rude nor nasty.

Le Corbusier’s field sketches and notes include reflections on Ġgantija.

La Chaux-de-Fonds is an unlikely birthplace for an architect-dreamer: it is, after all, the heartland of Swiss watchmaking. Which is probably why Le Corbusier, born there in 1887 as Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, looked elsewhere for inspiration. His first trip to Italy in 1907 saw him, in his own words, “trekking the wilderness of time, in search of the origins of architecture” – a quest that took him to Istanbul via Athens and the Acropolis in 1911. In 1933, he launched himself again “into the ancient waters of the Mediterranean, like Ulysses on his odyssey”. The trip included visits to Neolithic sites in Cyprus and the Cyclades, as well as Ġgantija in Gozo. It was on those sacred stones that he honed his feelings for the founding myths and forms of architecture - a sensibility that would give us his masterpiece at Ronchamp in 1955.

The trouble with many architects is that they’re too busy catching crabs. Some even manage to get their hands on an even bigger prize. If anything, this book serves as a timely reminder of the true cost of the Golden Fleece.

The Founding Myths of Architecture is available for purchase online at www.artificebooksonline.com.

Pillbox, Majjistral Park, Malta (interior). Photo: Mark Anthony Falzon