A couple of months ago, I attended the Architects’ Journal Retrofit Conference – a day-long event focused on reuse practices in architecture, specifically geared towards their role in decarbonising UK construction. From my pages of otherwise esoteric notes, one line reverberates: “net zero is a societal issue, not a tech issue”.
This is not an article about Malta’s conversion to net-zero construction. I cannot see that this exists – if anyone knows different, please write in. This is about the connectedness of building methods with wider belief systems. It’s about how difficult it will be for local development to ever become less environmentally and spatially offensive unless fabric or performance-led efforts are matched with awareness and will.
To echo: Malta’s construction grievances are a societal issue, not just a technical one.
Right now, the two things exist separately – what we believe in, and what we build. But one methodological candidate has the potential to act as bridge: our steady allegiance to conservation.
I next spoke to Nicholas Bewick, an architect and art director for Milan-based studio AMDL Circle – a practice that describes its work as “humanistic architecture and design”. We virtually meet fresh off his trip to Malta as one of the judges for the Din L-Art Ħelwa Prize for Architectural Heritage, where he visited some of its contenders. The award focuses on restoration projects, rehabilitation, and reuse of old buildings.
Of his visit, Bewick describes the presence of “a real sense of wanting to explore the whole history of everything that has happened over the years, centuries, in these spaces and buildings. There was also this ambition or clarity of vision [from the entrants] to say – okay, we need this, this is important. And they found the tech, the builders, and the people to do it.”
His description aligns with Malta’s deep-seated preoccupation with conservation. Indeed, heritage forms one-half of every postcard and personal elevator pitch that has classically defined what Malta offers. The other half being heat.
My questions to Bewick fixate less on rigour – which he readily affirmed – and more on innovation. In a context where development is so rapid and new-build- focused, and where we desperately need an emphasis on reuse, how can heritage practices become more about novelty and less about rigid preservation?
Our role as architects and designers is to help people understand where we’re heading- Nicholas Bewick
“I think you have to be sensitive and respectful. But you also have to not be afraid of trying to do something that is bold and imaginative. Our role as architects and designers is to help people understand where we’re heading. In the past, people made bold statements – to impress, but also to demonstrate the potential of innovation, the ingenuity of people, the understanding of climate or history, or the understanding of people’s nature. It’s not just thinking about one single idea of building construction, but also bringing together all the arts to contribute to something.
“It’s also about the communication of projects as not just a heritage or museum piece, but what the potential is of these regeneration projects to bring something to the community and society around them.”
Incidentally, Bewick’s practice recently completed the conversion of the former Banco di Napoli into the Gallerie D’Italia in Naples, designed originally in 1940 by Marcello Piacentini. The adaptation is pitch perfect – the original Rationalist architecture made canvas to resplendent new materiality of brass-coated metal and walnut wood, graciously refusing to bow in aesthetic servitude to the austerity of its host.
The project exhibits the very sentiment of the technical meeting the aspirational in heritage – showcasing how commerce can become a site of culture; announcing architecture’s role as a beacon of shifting interests.
Back in Malta, it will take three things for heritage architecture to overtake the veneration of the new. First, become more desirable than whatever can be virgin-built. Second, be less expensive. And third, become as usable as possible.
Together with the aptitude we already have around preserving buildings we choose to, we must now become more inventive with their future functions. Aside from the visual scourge of new-build intensity, we are also facing a crisis of affordability. If we are numb to our responsibility to the natural world, at minimum we must counter the collateral damage of building at such speed and scale. We should care about both.
The need for flexibility should originate in education. To piggy-back onto Bewick’s thoughts around combining architecture with all arts, let’s add economics, demography, and overall social science into how the discipline is taught and eventually practised.
Architects and urbanists should be trained to understand land-use demand, coached to insist on programmatic need ahead of delivery. This should be enshrined into planning law, preventing permanent infra-structure where industries are only temporarily dominant (see: Smart City).
Bewick led our conversation describing the devotion, passion and meticulousness of the heritage awards entrants – which, I’d agree, exist abundantly. But for reuse to take hold of mainstream development locally, there must be willingness for heritage practices to go off-script.
It’s time to accelerate both a societal and technical effort around the resurrection of spaces, reimagining their functions more wildly, and ensuring their convertibility for yet another life. Our future is waiting to come alive in what already exists. We have the practical know-how to make it happen, we now just need to want to.
This is the third article in the new Times of Malta column on the built environment. Write to culture@timesofmalta.com with the subject line: ‘Space Matters’ with comments and suggestions.