The government don’t understand design. They have to actually see the finished product because they can’t visualise it..
I quote from an interview with Chris Cardona in The Sunday Times of Malta today, on the subject of those market stalls.
Asked why it had to reach this stage before the government realised they were unsightly, Dr Cardona said the initial focus had been more on practicality. “Aesthetically, it’s hard to form an opinion until you see the final product. We are still in time to change them.”
Aesthetically? Exactly what does the matter of aesthetics have to do with the inability of a bunch of cabinet ministers to visualise, on the basis of proper drawings with the accompanying materials description, what the finished stall would look like?
That’s not a failure of aesthetics. That’s a failure of visual comprehension. Not that you need any particular skills of visual comprehension and imagination to understand design mock-ups nowadays, given that CAD produces something that is practically indistinguishable from a photograph.
A hair-tearing moment, indeed.
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What Chris Cardona is saying is, of course, a pathetic excuse.
Since he and his colleagues, including the PM, have no principles and no courage they will jump on any bandwagon that happens to be passing along. Having seen the outrage the stalls have caused, they eagerly inform us that, of course, they also “disapprove”.
Because they have neither the courage to defend their decision nor the courage to admit a mistake. It’s always somebody else’s fault and it doesn’t strike them as ironical that they are disapproving their own decision.
Ejjew naghtuhom ftit cans jidraw juzaw ir-roadmap imsieken ghax ghadhom fil-bidu.
Even when things are in front of them looking them in the face, they are still unable to detect where the problem lies.
Not only do they fail to comprehend visuals but they seem to be totally incapable of reading a roadmap or following a timeline.
And because they also seem to have difficulty in telling the time we better remind them that they have almost reached the halfway marker of their term in office and there’s nothing tangible to show for it apart from half-baked clichés and empty talk.
So when one stall was ready, did they have a problem to imagine what the whole lot of them would look like as well?
They seemed to be able to imagine the Piano project and criticize it vehemently from the very beginning. How were they able to visualize that if they were not able to visualize a few stalls?
We always knew that Labour had no vision and no imagination but they have yet managed to reach new lows.
Thank God for Austin Gatt!
If it was up to this lot the new city gate would be made of ferro battuto opening onto a multi storey car park.
And did they need 75 of them to be built to realise how horrid they are?
If there is one thing you can count on under this government is bad taste.
Chris Cardona could not visualize it. What a joke. CAD is more than a photograph. With its 3 dimensional images, one is very well aware of the finished product.
The whole matter is not the aesthetic value of the stalls but the site chosen for them. scrap this project from scratch and find another place for these stalls.
His words confirm exactly why Labour is a fake.
Design took on its modern connotations the moment industry became the driving force of social change.
It is not a coincidence that design thrived in countries with a very particular mix of mental contents AND at a point in time.
The continental reconstruction following WWII saw to its precipitation in the chemical sense. There was a real and proper need for good design.
Hitler had shut down the Bauhaus with the full intention that Germans think, breathe and aspire Nazism.
Today we think of countries along their particular methods, German organised method, Italian discipline in abstract language, French quirkiness applied to simplicity.
Much as Ruskin had lamented Britain’s reluctance to embrace its industry and do away with class distinction to provide the nature and styles of its products. Thatcher refusal had the same origins.
Malta finds itself with a lost generation the moment Mintoff imposed the utilitarian, ‘practical’ approach to thinking.
Closing down all the faculties deemed irrelevant and superficial just the justifying motive to humiliate those who thought otherwise, in his perverse mind, tfal tas-sinjuri.
Thus Josianne Cassar feels entitled to question the very relevance of why we should ask how things are made. As if it’s the resolve of those with ‘a sense of style’.
Horrible if one were to consider the implications.
Nor can aesthetics be separated from doing, the result becomes an endless variety of derivative thought.
But that’s questioning secularism.
Yes, design is political. And in this case, it’s not about the stalls, it’s something called Genius Loci.
Did you share all this during the Konvenzjoni, or did they shout you down because it’s too intellectual?
Even long before the age of CAD it was standard practice to build a mock-up to discuss and improve upon, or a scale model of one if a full-size mock-up is not practical.
It was just as effective but took more time and effort to make.
The government don’t?? We have a howler here.
I don’t and the governments don’t.
But the government doesn’t.
[Daphne – Not at all. If ‘the government’ is followed by ‘they’, then you use the third person plural throughout. If ‘the government’ is followed by ‘it’, then you use the third person singular throughout. You can either have ‘the government’ in abstract (it) or ‘the government’ as a group of ministers/people (they). The one thing the government most definitely is not is ‘he’.]