Bad taste, no ideas – Chris Cardona’s ‘old Maltese bus’ market stalls

You just have to read this story in The Malta Independent today. The Chamber of Architects held a competition for a design for the new market stalls, a winner was chosen and handed the prize money by Chris Cardona’s Ministry.

Then market traders were called to a meeting and the ministry, told that the winning design had been discarded (which means that the competition, like the government’s tendering processes, was just for show because they had chosen the winner up ahead already) and presented them with a picture of a mechanised trailer in the shape of a ‘cut-n-shut’ old Maltese bus.

They probably think it is an amazing idea. Leaving aside the impracticality of it, this is typical lousy taste and no ideas or imagination. People now barely remember old Maltese buses and they have no relevance. The market is not for tourists but is a functional, working market, so having stalls that look like fridge magnets in souvenir shops is ridiculous.

These tacky and unimaginative references to the past are so over, so hackneyed. Imagine 70 or 80 of these stupid-looking things massed in Ordnance Street every day. What exactly is the point of them? Why can’t they use standard wooden stalls of the sort used in even the most famous markets, like Spitalfields in London, all over the world? Must they have a ‘design’?

Besides which, these children’s-fun-ride Maltese bus things are going to get old and tired really quickly.