Considering a city's nostalgia

Beneath blazing skies on the last Sunday of June 2009, hordes of people rushed their way up two flights of stairs at the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta, Malta. The visitors stood before the sole purpose of their visit to the museum: an exhibition of posters hanging from a high ceiling in a faintly lit room. Blown-out drawings and concept sketches depicted bastions, ruins, buildings and trees that seemed familiar and yet still tricky to perceive. After gazing at the sketches, the visitors turned to a site model that loomed in the centre of the room. Valletta, the capital city of Malta, was carved out of balsa wood by the hands of a master — soft on the eye, sharp on the detail. The model exhibited the capital with new buildings and alterations at the main entrance of the city. This series of interventions was revealed the night before by Renzo Piano, the world renowned architect and author of a proposal that would put the Baroque City back on the map of contemporary architecture.

Valletta, the "City of Marvels", is like a time-machine, a museum of rich architectural history dating back to 1566, when the first foundation stone of the oldest building in the city was laid. The Knights of the Order built the city port with masterful engineering to fortify the capital; ice-white limestone blocks generate a series of bastions and walls for the city's defence. Time has transformed the white tilted walls into yellow eroded monuments, some of which soar dominantly, as high as 100m. The knights' departure left the island susceptible to conquerors, who also left their own architectural interventions in the city. During World War II, open skies devastated the streets with bomb shells and fragmented buildings, leaving the citizens in dismay after a frantic bombardment which damaged the Royal Opera House.

Independence Day in 1964 brought the first and only Modernist intervention in the capital, a new City-Gate, the only entrance into the city. This marked a new beginning for the country. Don't seek out other Modernist buildings in the city, however, as you will be on a fool's errand. Independence Day also signified the start of a dormant 40 years architecturally. The Maltese Islands house an architectural museum of a style frozen in time built only from local stone, barely piling up to a height of 5 storeys. High buildings clad in glass were never regarded as a possibility; the first building to reach 22 storeys was the Hilton Tower. In 1998. The pre-war vibrance never resumed and the city has devolved into a nostalgic lull that lives on today.

The latest attempt to modernise the architecture of the capital turned out to be controversial. Renzo Piano's proposal involves removing the existing City-Gate, designing a new building to house the Chamber of Parliament and converting the ruins of The Royal Opera House to an open air theatre and cultural centre.

A contemporary intervention in the vicinity of the capital's oldest church is regarded as blasphemous and profane. Much like his previous 1986 plan to bring Valletta up to date was scratched, Renzo Piano's latest proposal for the capital aroused an unrelenting criticism. In the proposal, City-Gate is not a gate anymore. No new gate will substitute the previous one; it is now a void in the fortifying walls of the entrance, approached by a simple bridge that has been narrowed down to 8m. "City-Slit" was ridiculed by many, outlining the traffic crisis as a consequence to the demolition of the street above the previous gate.

The sore point in the entire project is unquestionably the open-air theatre, composed of the preserved ruins from English architect Edward Middleton Barry's neo-classical design for the Royal Opera House. A vestige of columns will be punctuated with steel masts, supporting a system of translucent screens. On the night of a performance, the screens will glide vertically to isolate the theatre from the busy streets nearby. Controversy surrounds the treatment of the ruins of the Opera House, presenting a dilemma: save the remnants or fabricate a replica? However, the parliament building offers a subtly spectacular new entrance. The façade of the three-storey building will be clad with a screen of 7,000 blocks, quarried in Gozo and laser cut in Italy. Nevertheless, the public remains unimpressed. "Forever shame on the perpetrators of The Rape of Valletta." said Charles De Micoli, a resident of Malta.

Interestingly, Piano and the Maltese actually share a congruent love for the capital, though this shared passion brings about incongruent opinions concerning how to manifest nostalgia in architecture. Contrary to what local residents think, Piano's first loyalty is to the history of the city. The Opera site was initially targeted as the location for the new Parliament, but it was Renzo Piano himself who put forward the idea of shifting Parliament to the neighbouring open space and utilizing the existing Opera site as a multipurpose theatre. "I like the idea of joining past and future, history and modernity, in the place that is Valletta and on the ruins of something that was so beloved... The real sacrilegious thing would have been to destroy those ruins, to put there some other function. But to keep those ruins, giving them dignity, giving them function and adding machines, modern machines for performing art... I think that's great, that's part of the magic," Piano said.

A calculated caution can be sensed in Piano's work. No erratic spatial interventions or overtly confrontational stylistic statements were proposed. In the proposal, Piano balances a sensitive elegance with subtle urbane pragmaticism, creating a memoriam whilst transforming the site to a utilitarian space that captures the zeitgeist. Especially in Malta, nostalgia remains one of the greatest challenges for an architect to overcome. A popular curiosity might be how the Maltese public — portraying itself as conservative in taste — decisively rejects the neutrality in Piano's proposal and embraces ornament and replicas as a concept without any difficulty. Additionally, what the general public wished for, was essentially the construction of a fake; a cold neo-classical wrapper with doleful interiors, wishing to be lulled into the past. The Maltese public must step into the 21st century and embrace the future with all the opportunities that lie within. A city as marvelous as Valletta deserves it. Lyanne Mifsud