United on Piano project by Andrè Zammit - 03.10.2009

Lawrence Gonzi, a leader I greatly admire for his many sterling qualities, is reported to have said in Parliament that "the Piano project should unite the Maltese people, not divide them". It is difficult to get unanimity on any project but, in this case, it looks as if we have a very wide consensus against the project. We have unity against the project.

Let me make one thing clear from the start. I am a great admirer of Renzo Piano, the architect. On a personal basis I think we may have overlapped at the Politecnico of Milan in 1958 where he read architecture and I did post-grad in highway engineering. They had a football team named Poolaster and we may have met in the bar or in the rest room! He went on to do great things in the world and I came back to my small island home.

When I first went to the Centre Pompidou in Paris my wife could not tear me away until it got quite dark. I would give anything to have a work of the great master in Malta. In my student days there was a move to have a building by Frank Lloyd Wright - another great favourite of mine - on the Canal Grande in Venice. I was a great supporter of the idea. I am also an admirer of Picasso. At the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid I stood for an hour in front of the Guernica. But I wouldn't want it in St John's.

Valletta is another matter. It is one of the few walled towns left in a more or less pristine state. It is also one of the grandest on a world scale. It is a World Heritage City. Standing on a peninsula and with its land front developed as a planned advance fortification, Valletta never felt that its walls were strangling its further natural growth as most European towns started feeling in the second half of the 19th century.

When, in 1857, the Emperor Franz Josef with his "It is my will...." decree gave his consent to the demolition of the walls of Vienna, paving the way for the famous Ringstrasse, it was the signal for a good number of European cities to lose their walls. Milan was one of the first, the walls being replaced by a ring road still referred to as the maglia dei bastioni. However, it retained most of its gates or porte. But perhaps the best example is Bologna which, though it lost all its walls for the ring road, it carefully preserved 10 out of its original 12 gates. The walls may go but the gates must stand. In Valletta, we are being told to do the reverse: leave the walls but take away the gate.

There seems to be universal agreement on a proper opera house and multi-purpose arts centre with a conventional roof over it, fake or no fake. The Scala in Milan was fedelmente ricostruita dopo I danni bellici and La Fenice in Venice was similarly restored after a recent fire. I have seen scores of opera houses in Europe, especially in Germany, rebuilt - at least externally - to the original designs. I was not an absolute admirer of the Barry design and I believe that cities are living organisms so that buildings have to evolve to a certain extent. If the original site is too small for modern needs, by all means enlarge the site towards the "gate" and have the auditorium along the diagonal with the possibility of a revolving stage.

I also find it offensive to the dignity of Parliament to give it a location next to the bus terminus and the excuse of "balancing the block of apartments on the other side" is nothing more than an excuse and a very thin one at that.

Of course, a cultural building would not balance. I agree that the President's Palace should be freed of all other uses but for the best part of a year I have been saying that Piazza San Giorgio is the proper location for Parliament and that the enlarged Main Guard building - all the frontage on the square, plus an extra floor and down to Strait Street - would be ideal. It would give dignity and Baroque form to the square and screen the eyesores on the depressed roof line. Scores of people have phoned me or stopped me in the street to express agreement with the idea.

In the circumstances, I do not see how the whole affair should have been thrown in the lap of Mepa. There is no agreed proposal - quite the reverse - and the boffins of Mepa have no brief to decide on what is good for the people of Malta other than what emanates from the Structure Plan of 1992 or its updates. In the name of good sense let us first have a proper overall evaluation.