[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’.]

It was just as effective but took more time and effort to make.

Did you share all this during the Konvenzjoni, or did they shout you down because it’s too intellectual?

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.

If there is one thing you can count on under this government is bad taste.

If it was up to this lot the new city gate would be made of ferro battuto opening onto a multi storey car park.

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.

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.