The Prime Minister’s Special Envoy to the World Tourism Organisation promotes the Renzo Piano project for Valletta as a major tourism attraction
Published:
June 14, 2014 at 6:25pm
34 Comments Comment
Reply to Jozef Click here to cancel reply
What exactly is the Prime Minister waiting for?
Why do people act as though the Nationalist Party/Renzo Piano destroyed the old entrance featured on the left to make way for the new city gate project?
It had been destroyed during an air raid in WW2 if I’m not mistaken, and the one built to replace it (the previous one) was absolutely hideous and had no historical value whatsoever.
You can’t put it beneath the Labour party to twist history for their own propagandistic ends, can you?
As much as I wanted something a little more baroque, a modern minimalist design blows our old one out of the water any day.
Not modern. Timeless: http://i.imgur.com/vhfqqjP.jpg
Sorry but you have your facts wrong. That gate was pulled down in the 60s to have a gate with large opening for carnival floats to go through. And the bridge was widened for the same purpose.
Joseph Muscat is afraid that if he steps on the Mintoffian dinosaurs’ toes, they will eat him for breakfast with their McDonalds muffins and Caffe Cordina pastizzi.
‘Jaqq xi kruha’ zaqqek, Joe, u mhux il-progett ta’ Piano.
What he didn’t say is that at least now he can pass through the “gate”.
Meanwhile, in other news:
The ministry said it would file a counter-protest.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140614/local/ministry-sticks-to-its-guns-on-ombudsman-controversy.523352
The only thing we’re expecting you to file is your resignation, Dr Mallia.
With a star cabinet like this, Mr Prime Minister, there’s no end to your government’s potential.
Risposta bil-Malti għal-envoj:
Wara snin tant ħielsa, ghandna nqisu l-arkittura dik dal ħakkiema bħalha glorjużha. Dik taqra bħala, “Qed tarani sewwa? Jien imexxi u mhux int.” Imma l- Malti għadndu jħobb il-kuruna donnu.
Aparti li poplu Malti jaf bosta fuq l-ambjent bidni (dan xi jkun?) insomma.
L-għajn tiekol insomma, ghax Grima, xempju tal-porporżjon umana. Qisu David ta’ Michelangelo, għamilu, “huss x’ġisem!” meta jgħaddi.
I’m not sure whether his behaviour is more shameful now or when he used to hurl insults and (almost) get physical in parliament in The Golden Years of Labour.
What a stupid comment to make for someone who is supposed to be representing Maltese tourism.
Other countries use major developments and important modern buildings to attract international attention.
Our representative at the WTO denigrates the one modern development which, if used well in promotion, will provide for added value to our tourism.
How incredibly myopic. Joe Grima is making himself and Malta the laughing stock at the World Tourism Organisation.
It seems that every generation has buggered about with this national monument. That includes the British. The only ones’ to get it right were the Knights.
I must inform you that in the time of the Knights it was merely a hole in the wall complete with a thick door and a drawbridge.
Don’t forget that the bastions were a defense system and surely no ornate gate would have withstood a land attack.
The British replaced that with a single gate first and a double gate later.
This was eventually replaced by the entrance which has recently been demolished.
I know all that but it has reverted to being a hole in a wall again, just a bigger hole.
Isn’t a gate an opening in a fortified wall, and a weak point at that? Gateways were never meant to be glorious. The idea of pomp and glorified gateways came much later, until they were reduced to mere symbolism. Note Hompesch Gate for instance.
Please stop insisting that Valletta has to have a gate. The original gate has lost its purpose and ceased to exist centuries ago. There is no reason for inventing something afresh, particularly if we don’t really need. The gate was there to defend. There is noting here to defend anymore.
The idea of rebuilding the gate as the Knights designed it, is tantamount to a Disneyland charade. Not the even the gate seen in most old photos is the original one. It’s the third, built by the British.
So which will you have, the first which was destroyed by the British, the second built and remodeled by the British or the third one? And while we’re at it, why not keep the fourth?
But then again, nobody mentions the fact that the bridge (I understand) has been reduced (ie narrowed) to it’s original width.
Valletta needs a gate like I need a karettun and my Ritienne needs an ghonnella.
Rob Roy, you will notice how the Maltese do not understand function.
All they do is take context out of context. And that’s not a mind twister.
Indeed, what people like Artemis look for is memory, this one perversely not theirs. Whereas if they build the replica it becomes their composition in gentry.
Sweet: Build the gate in the form of the knights that we become that elite of European families. Breeding by numbers.
The fact not one of them manages to read a plan, or understand the algebraic operation to produce a relation of mass, volume and space in keeping with, anzi in total relation to the existing Cavaliers, palaces and churches just shows the agenda:
Total intellectual dishonesty.
Take it up a notch and you’ll come across the same vicious reasoning applied to everything, blame speculators for the situation in Sliema when they’d have been the first to gain, blame traffic when it’s their call to ease congestion and so on.
It is most sublime to take in how Gonzi was supposedly the confessional obscurantist and then hear them react in the most ‘Dominican’, I say Savonarolic, of manners.
Their weakness remains an aversion to function, preferring ‘form’ (straight out of a Victorian furniture catalogue) to establish some thought.
What we’re experiencing is a vacuum of ideas making a single whole, I blame an ex-leader of the opposition, now in power, for that.
Everyone stilted and in standby mode. That he perhaps come up with something.
The Col. Ringer Thomson designed city-gate was more satisfying to look at than the gap that there is now.
I remember when it was torn down in that summer of 1964, and that entrance was only 111 years old at that time.
The politics behind these project were complex (why 3 projects with a budget of Euros 80 million?). But people like pompous Joe Grima, apart from having the intellectual faculties of an earthworm, are simply vile and manipulative.
Earthworms perform a vital function to humanity. Grima never did.
Can’t anybody sack this loathsome man?
Muscat.
HPB: I would present your question differently?:
“Who could anyone possibly employ this ignorant man?”
And Sur Grima, what on earth have your ever contributed towards tourism? Why don’t you admit that you simply happened to be a minister at the time when British tour-operators started offering cheap package holidays to the Med.
Interesting how for the ‘before’ photo he put up the older gate rather than the monstrosity which Piano’s gate replaced.
All I know is that the entrance now is elegant and welcoming like two arms opening the City to us as we walk through. Delightfully blending old with modern architecture.
The only pity is that awful housing estate which Mintoff planted on the bastions and filled with his supporters was not demolished. Though if keep it we must, the simple change of those ghastly aluminium balconies to the traditional ones has made a big difference.
Of course once again we have paid for the improvement of property belonging to those who have made scrounging off the State an art form. God only knows what those properties are worth today.
Let’s for argument’s sake assume that the gate is ugly. As The Prime Minister’s Special Envoy to the World Tourism Organisation his job is to attract quality tourism to our islands and praise the world renown architect’s work to the heavens.
The old gate shown on the left was built by the much hated colonial British; it survived the war. It was demolished to make way for the Bergonzi Gate which was never completed.
I entered Valletta some weeks ago, and I felt that entering the city was an experience in itself. The whole setup gives one a feeling of order and harmony.
Well done to the previous administration for embarking on the project and to this administration for continuing the project, bar the garden in the bottom of the ditch underneath the narrowed bridge.
Hopefully by next October the project will be ready.
It is Gahan, it is.
Try it on a Sunday evening, a red sky glowering against the building.
Perhaps the Theatre needs some further enclosing, even if in translucence, the Maltese still need to learn to finish lines mentally to define form for themselves.
Induce rythm visually to finish it mentally. A pedagogic experience which may sate this collective psychosis with completed make believe.
I like what Norbert Attard’s doing. Taking up where Piano gracefully bowed out.
The same however, is required for the stage. That it become a 3 dimensional public performance from the ‘back’.
The only wrong thing in that photo is that block of social housing built by Mintoff. Otherwise the entrance to the city is just as grand as it always was, the difference now being that it is now more contemporary.
Miktuba ghac-cwiec – izda, kuntrarju ghal hafna ta’ qabilha, mhix miktuba mic-cwiec……
He’s just being populist, first with the immigrants issue, and now with the Valletta project. Populism is the comfort zone of losers and insecure persons. It’s the worst type of politics. Pity it seems to be quite the trend…
The Labour Party’s reaction to any project started and carried out by a Nationalist Administration takes one of two forms:
a. to inaugurate it with extravagant pomp and claim it as their own work, as they did with the Regional Road bridge and tunnel;
b. to condemn it as waste of money, ugly and unnecessary even if afterwards they use it and pretend they were the originators of the idea. This is their more usual reaction as witnessed by the new airport, Mater Dei Hospital, Delimara power station, Arriva, etc.
It seems they are applying this method for the new Parliament and the new City Gate. This was to be expected as they talked of having an open market near the project and even more by suggesting a Mintoff Museum in the building itself.
That will change in a few years time when they will boast that the idea was theirs in the first place.
And what are the projects carried out by the Labour Party: Metalfond, Marsa Shipbuilding, the Red China Dock, the extension to the old Luqa Airport. What long-lasting aesthetic and economic contribution did they make to the country?
What does his role consist of and why did Muscat that this horrific man is some expert in tourism and marketing technology?
If anyone has ever followed Grima’s FB posts, he/she would have noticed how off the mark he is. Prior to his envoy appointment, he bragged for years how he had this ‘revolutionary idea’ for a website which – from how he described it – sounded similar to Google Maps.
If Grima’s mission is to promote Malta, this post of his constitutes serious professional misconduct. His dismissal should be immediate.
People were content with the Teatru Mwaqqa as if that was not an eye sore since the end of the war. That’s around 60 years.
The previous administration took the plunge and commissioned an interesting project. I am not in any way a connoisseur so I cannot pass judgement whether Piano’s project is a master piece. I simply find Ithe experience of walking into Valletta exhilarating.
There are no laws or conventions which state that a 500 year old city must have it’s demolished buildings in the original style as long as the new buildings have a strong aesthetic dimension.
Take The Berlin Memorial Church http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Berlin_in_World_War_II#mediaviewer/File:Berlin_Eiermann_Memorial_Church.JPG.
It is an amazing fusion of antique and modern. One cannot appreciate it fully without seeing it in the flesh. Piano’s project is significantly more pleasing.
What is wrong with Labour? For one, it retained Grima.
Piano’s project for Valletta is the only decent work of public architecture that these islands have seen in living memory. The building will, in time, become an icon of Valletta as much as the steeple of St. Paul’s Anglican cathedral and the Carmelite church dome have become.
The only difference is that Piano’s project is far, far more respectful of context than these other two icons. I would advise Mr. Grima to not comment on things architectural for he is obviously out of his depth there.