The gate

Last Sunday, at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, I wandered through the bookshop and struggled against the urge to contribute even further to the excess weight of my checked-in baggage. There among the endlessly tempting tomes on Danish designers, Danish architects, Danish artists and Danish iconic furniture was one lone non-Dane. Taschen’s tribute to the worldwide work of Renzo Piano stood in a pile on a little table. It would have added a couple of kilos to my bags, so I gave myself a mental slap on the wrist and told myself there’s always Amazon. But the point had struck home: here was the only non-Dane who had been thought worthy of inclusion on bookshelves almost entirely dedicated to the groundbreaking might of late 20th and 21st-century Danish design.

That Taschen, possibly the world’s leading art and design publisher, should have showcased Piano’s works in a definitive catalogue of this nature speaks volumes in itself. It is the sort of tribute generally reserved for those who have died, and whose work is observed in retrospect. But Piano’s achievements are recognised as monumental already in his lifetime. It is hard to persuade people in Malta of his status if they have no contact with the world of art, architecture and design, if they read nothing and remain atavistic in their approach. One tries to draw comparisons but they mean nothing essentially. The great artists and architects of the past to whom we might wish to compare Piano, so as to convey the full magnitude of his status and achievements, fell far short – not in terms of giftedness and soaring brilliance, but because there was no such thing as ‘internationally lauded’ in those days when much of the world was unknown to the rest, and vice versa. In his lifetime, Michelangelo was acclaimed in few places beyond the Italian peninsula. In his lifetime, Renzo Piano is acclaimed on every continent.

The gulf between Piano’s status as a living architectural legend and the consummate lack of understanding of this among so many people in Malta could not be greater. He is dismissed as a ‘foreign architect’, belittled as a maker of monstrosities, pooh-poohed as a waste of money, and the derisory suggestion has been made several times that ‘local’ (as distinct from Maltese, perhaps?) architects should be ‘given a chance’ to show their mettle. One or two people have put forward the notion that the opportunity of designing Valletta’s new gate should be opened up to students of architecture as a sort of credit-scoring project. It is unbelievable, but it must be pointed out that no architect or architecture student has suggested any such thing. If there is any architect or architecture student in Malta who is not in awe of Piano’s achievements, and thrilled beyond measure at the fact that he has agreed to design our symbolic gate once more – after having been treated so shabbily almost two decades ago – then that person has not come forward. The architects who have made their views known have expressed excitement at the prospect.

Seeing the comments on on-line forums, I am saddened. Despite having lived in Malta all my life, I never cease to be astonished by the graphic failure of imagination that grips so many people. What went wrong, in the educational system, in their upbringing, in the closing of their minds instead of their opening that they cannot think outside the narrow confines of their hamster’s cage? Even leaving aside one’s personal views on the aesthetics of Piano’s work, it is impossible to ignore the general international consensus that he is one of the architectural greats not of our age, but of all time. A person must have a very small mind indeed and no imagination at all to be unable to grasp the full significance of what it will mean to Malta to have the symbolic gate to Valletta designed by Renzo Piano. That is an internationally newsworthy story in itself. The gate will sell Valletta to legions of potential visitors. It will give us something to admire, something to be proud of. In marketing speak, it will brand Valletta.

I can see why Piano would want to do it. Valletta is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. As a fortified city built by the Order of St John, it has a peculiar status. If this were not the case, he would have turned down the Maltese government, especially after what happened last time. He would have accepted only because of Valletta’s unique status. It is the right sort of project for Piano, and Piano is the right architect for Valletta’s gate. As for those ‘foreign architect’ arguments, some people need to be reminded that Valletta was planned, commissioned, built and funded entirely by foreigners, the ‘gentlemen’ to whom Sir Walter Scott referred.

As my former professor Mario Buhagiar remarked in a letter published in a newspaper some days ago, brilliant architecture is necessarily of its time. There is no scope for a pastiche of the past in rebuilding the gate to the city as it once was. Many people are agitating to have it rebuilt, but interestingly, they do not specify which gate it is they want to see: the 19th century British gate, with the armorial symbols of British power emblazoned above the archways, or the original gate built in the late 16th century, to what was essentially a foreign city in Malta, rather than a Maltese city like Notabile/Mdina? I am given to understand at times that some of those who are loudest in their agitation do not know that the present gate is the third and not the second. I imagine, too, that they are familiar only with the front elevation of the 19th-century gate, and not the rear. If they knew what that looked like, they would realise that there can be no reconstruction because it wouldn’t make any sense at all in the current context. There was no square behind the gate; the houses ran right up to it. Would they have those rebuilt, too?

There is a strong streak of far-right political thinking in Malta, though many of those whose opinions fall clearly within this category are unaware of it and would take offence at being associated with the dangerous battiness of the overtly far right political elements that have cropped up over the last few years. I can’t help but observe the close correlation in people’s views of religious fundamentalism, xenophobia, racism, and ‘fior del mondo’ syndrome (“the more I travel, the more I come to understand that Malta is the best place in the world, and that there is nobody as kind, generous, beautiful or Catholic as the Maltese”). Rebuilding the gate as it was is seen as a matter of national pride. Those who put forward this view appear unaware, unless they are being disingenuous, that they are arguing within a fascist construct: building in the present to project the national glory of the past, rather than looking to the present and future.

There is the perfect parallel in the old city of Rhodes, where the Order of St John was based before transferring to Malta. Benito Mussolini, the quintessential fascist, spent a lot of time, money and effort on having the Order of St John’s citadel headquarters at Rhodes rebuilt to what he must have imagined was a perfect replica of the original. It is now a meaningless pastiche, all sense of history and of the passage of time having been erased by an architectural Disney-set. I found there was more history in the cobbled alleys outside.

I feel a sort of muted mixture of shock and shame when I see how little the significance of Piano’s work is understood here. People are talking as though they are insulted at not having been consulted on his engagement and, as far as they’re concerned, he’s not up to much. For respite, I turned to a friend whose views on such matters are widely respected, and this is what Giovanni Bonello had to say:

“I am a fanatical, say irrational, believer in democracy in most areas of human choice, but I am unsure if at art I would not draw the line. Should democratic majorities determine the choice of design of a new parliament-house or city gate after an international architectural competition? I used to believe so years ago; but not anymore. Doubts first appeared when I attended a large collective exhibition and was given a voting-slip with the entrance ticket. Visitors were being asked to vote for the painting to be awarded first prize. Of the superb works on display, none made it. What the democratic vote singled out by a plebiscite majority was a picture I would not want stacked facing the wall in a leaking attic. In a total perversion of my democratic credentials, I would trust a Medici or a Buckingham to reach the right artistic conclusion but not the democratically-expressed view of the majority. Democratic power and art do not go hand in hand, as shown by the massive popular rejection around 20 years ago of Renzo Piano’s city-gate project in Malta. Piano is, in my view, easily the Michelangelo of the 20th century, and any work with his signature would place Malta on a different scale of artistic magnitude, like only Caravaggio had done before to St John’s in 1608. And yet the affable grocer, the bank clerk and the police sergeant had no doubt they knew what architecture is all about at least as much as Renzo Piano – actually more than him, and they second-guessed him. Malta lost its great chance to be relevant in the contemporary architectural world – no, Malta will be remembered in history as the only country to reject a Piano project, a distinction I could well do without. Now that we have this second chance before us, I can hope only that the same gargantuan error is not made. The democratic combination of a small mind and a loud voice cheated Malta of a landmark beacon in architectural history. In this very limited sense, democracy does well to steer clear of art.”

This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.