High-rise buildings: Attila

Stone, concrete, steel, there you are. Malta is forever under construction, eating up land this way that way. It is significantly rooftops and again more rooftops and rooftop “furniture”, with the very spiritual domes and belfries as well as bastions, the inevitable magħtabs, and cranes that really make up our skyline. Trees and mountains have never made it there. Whatever is said however, despite empty apartments and derelict houses, build we must.

Building upwards seems to be the only solution for tiny Malta as this is the only way no more footprint is gulped up by concrete or asphalt. This has been said repeatedly ad nauseam over the years, and now that we have the new energy to build tall buildings we shoot the idea down! Taller buildings will have to be the future if land is to be preserved. Other countries have realised this and acted on it intelligently decades ago. What is wrong if we emulate good ideas? I feel that building up very, very carefully will be here to stay, sooner or later. Building out must be out.

What baffles me about all this however, is the incredible tears shed by people who kept mum in the past, even though they were witnessing in strange silence the environmental massacres and piecemeal destruction all over Malta and Gozo. That makes me consider their words with caution.

A Savaging Attila

A particular but very colourful picture published in the media to shoot down “highrise” buildings, depicts Attila the Hun at Malta’s environmental door! The writer was evidently never tickled enough by what has been happening in Malta over the years. Conveniently unknown to him, old, savage Attila had already been very active in Malta for many decades! Indeed, Attila had taken up permanent residence here precisely under the noses of compliant (or we shall call them naive?) authorities many years ago! It is strangely only now that this writer realises the presence of Attila the barbarian. This is what convinces me that the hue-and-cry is being clearly orchestrated. It does not look very honest and not at all sincere. Very sadly indeed, it seems so politically motivated.

Other articles in the local press carried some pictures of threatened houses of character at Sliema. The article was another surprise indicating that the writer had apparently just landed in Malta after an absence of several decades, conveniently overlooking what had been going on and on for years and years - with no-one standing up even meekly to Attila the Hun in question who savaged many old sites at Mosta, Birgu, Floriana, Naxxar, Birkirkara, Qormi, Attard, Balzan, Rabat, Selmun, Qala, Marsalforn, Mellieħa, Żurrieq and many other places where Attila could smell money and roll his bulldozers to. A beautiful red edifice in Tower Road was demolished overnight. Another magnificent red villa in St Paul’s Bay was demolished overnight. People just looked at the rubble meekly with resigned helplessness. Attila was an arrogant and unmoving brute. These old houses were then replaced by the highest possible building that structures (not the skyline!) permitted.

During these last 30 years or so, many other very old buildings of historical value were mercilessly razed to the ground