The Planning Authority has been requested to declare its approval on Friday for the demolition of part of the Sea Malta building none and void.

The call was made by the Chamber of Architects, Din l-Art Ħelwa and Flimkien Għal Ambjent Aħjar.

A significant part of the building was approved by the PA for demolition on Friday on the basis of a legal notice allowing the authority to authorise emergency remedial works to mitigate or remove existing danger.

The chamber said in a statement today that nowhere in the structural appraisal report submitted by the applicants’ consultants was it stated that any part of the structure was in a state of immediate danger.

On the contrary, the report advised that “remedial measures to strengthen the existing building are clearly not financially feasible”.

The statement of the applicant, as reported in the media, that the current works were removing unsafe structures that were at risk of collapsing, was not quite correct.

“The structural appraisal report commissioned by the applicant does not say so. In any case, the legal notice envisages that such a dangerous structure procedure can only be issued on the ‘basis of a detailed site inspection by an architect appointed by the authority’”. This was not done so the procedure was vitiated.

The chamber called upon the authority to immediately declare the dangerous structure approval null and void, since the information submitted to it was not sufficient to merit the use of this particular planning procedure.

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“This is not the way to treat our diminishing modernist heritage. The fact that the site has been immediately added to the Menqa concession, as reported in the media, probably better explains why the structure had to be considered as dangerous. Real estate is more profitable than restoring heritage buildings,” the chamber pointed out.

The building started to be demolished on Monday.