2009 will be the year when a highly charged decision will have to be taken regarding City Gate and the Opera House site in Valletta. RAPHAEL VASSALLO ponders the many unanswered questions surrounding this forthcoming controversy, starting with...
Why now?
There is an unspoken maxim in the world of politics, that when unusual or controversial proposals are suddenly and unexpectedly announced, they tend to serve as smokescreens to deflect public attention from other realities the government would much rather keep secret.
And certainly, the City Gate/Opera House reconstruction project – foisted on the public last month, after 20 years in the wilderness – has long been dogged by controversy. In the 1960s, Prime Minister Gorg Borg Olivier tried unsuccessfully to have the Theatre Royal rebuilt, at the expense of the British Crown, as part of the Independence negotiations. Ironically, it was the selfsame Borg Olivier who ordered the demolition of the former Porta Reale, to be replaced with the present abomination... allegedly so that Carnival floats would able to enter and leave the city through its front gate.
Earlier still, the General Workers’ Union had objected to yet another bid to rebuild the Opera House, this time by a group of released German prisoners of war in the early 1950s. It seems, therefore, that the issue has been a cause of deep division for almost 60 years.
So why has Dr Lawrence Gonzi chosen precisely now to re-launch this selfsame millennial ambition? Could it be a ploy to defuse popular malcontent, at a time when Gonzi’s own government is still reeling from a backlash of criticism over the revised energy tariffs?
At a glance, there is compelling evidence to suggest as much. For example, the fact that government has spent the better part of the last three months insisting it is too strapped for cash to continue subsidising home consumers’ electricity bills to the tune of €55 million a year... and yet, it somehow has access to considerably more than that amount (€80 million, according to the initial estimate) to spend on a lavish, though not exactly useless project.
Further evidence is the Prime Minister’s entreaty to the general public to unite behind him in his effort to get this long-overdue show on the road: knowing full well that the last time the government of Malta sought to rebuilt City Gate (still less the Opera House), the same public’s howls of protest could be heard all the way from Renzo Piano’s hometown of Genoa.
And as if on cue, this raises the curtain on the second the proposed project’s many enigmas.
Why Piano?
In decades gone by, the choice of Renzo Piano – architect of, among others, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the floating Kansai Airport Terminal of Osaka – was itself the source of practically all the controversy surrounding City Gate.
Certainly, the Nationalist government appears committed to hiring the services of the world-renowned Italian architect, and no one else, literally at all costs. Perhaps this stems from a natural affinity with the country that originally gave birth to the PN’s own brand of ‘democrazia cristiana’; perhaps it is genuine admiration for the man’s many architectural masterpieces around the world. Or who knows? Perhaps there is some other pressing reason none of us know anything about.
Whatever it is, the present administration has been hell-bent on appointing Renzo Piano to rebuild both City Gate and Opera House ever since 1989, when the Italian architect’s original plans were unveiled to a storm of national opprobrium.
Much has evidently changed in the intervening two decades, as – if you overlook one or two online comments to the effect that the job should go to a Maltese architect - the announcement that Piano has once again been appointed for the job caused barely a ripple this time round.
Chamber of Architects president David Felice recently hinted as much, while openly doubting whether people knew what it was they were actually commenting about when it came to the City Gate project.
“There has been very little discussion that I have noticed,” he said in comments to MaltaToday, “What little there was, focused mainly on the choice of Piano, and even then, it was mostly positive. Evidently not many have noticed that this implies that the original design is now definitely a thing of the past.”
A matter for relief, or outrage? It all depends on what one originally made of the plans when they were first made public in 1989. Back then, Piano’s concept of a roofless gate, flanked by enormous colonnades reminiscent at a glance of the menhirs of Hagar Qim, had provoked a veritable furore among Malta’s fledgling urban conservationist movement.
Many of the more vociferous critics argued in favour of a faithful reconstruction of the preceding British-built Porta Reale... without pausing to consider that the “Putirjal” they fondly remembered was not itself the original gate, and that we have little or no idea of what the Knights had first envisaged for the entry to their capital city way back in 1566, when the need for a gate first made itself felt.
It is meanwhile evident from Piano’s own comments that he has yet to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new workable design, reflecting both his own personal development in the 20 intervening years, and also the changing global architectural trends over the same period.
And yet, astonishing as this may sound, the general public is suddenly expected to form an instant opinion – positive or negative – about a conceptual re-invention of both City Gate and also the former Opera House ruins... without having a clue as to what either replacement structure will actually look like once complete.
Why parliament?
Understandably, therefore, the limited controversy surrounding the project today does not concern the proposed architectural style – how could it, when none of us knows precisely what style we are talking about? – nor even, as outlined above, the appointment of Piano himself.
It seems as though the concept of Renzo Piano as sole proprietor of the City Gate/Opera House project – for better or for worse – has now been absorbed into the collective subconscious, and few, if any, of his previous detractors now contest the unilateral decision to entrust the project to a hand-picked architect.
This seems to have disappointed certain political commentators, who would evidently prefer the controversy to surround the choice of Piano – with his portfolio of undeniable successes around the world – rather than the controversial use of the Opera House site as House of Representatives, which is a good deal harder to defend.
But it transpires from the generally negative public comments to date – with, of course, a few noteworthy exceptions – that it is precisely the proposal for a parliament on the site of the former Opera House that has elicited the most virulent reactions this time round.
Dr Gonzi first floated this idea in 2004, shortly after becoming PN leader (and hence Prime Minister) the preceding year. And unlike his other, similarly controversial proposals – the aforementioned utility tariffs, for instance, or the famously aborted Xaghra l-Hamra golf course – Gonzi knew, or at least had good reason to suspect, that he could rely on the Opposition for support.
Individual commentators from the Labour fold (for instance, MEP John Attard Montalto) have already publicly expressed themselves in favour of the project; while it is an open secret that MPs on both sides of the House have long complained about the paucity of the facilities their present set-up has to offer.
More to the point, it is rumoured that the proposal to relocate Parliament to the capital’s grandest and most conspicuous site, marks the Prime Minister’s own personal ambition... presumably dictated by the same political impulses that push Cabinet ministers to unveil endless plaques and monuments in commemoration of themselves.
Given his age, and the fact he has only just won his first-ever election as party leader, it seems a little premature for Lawrence Gonzi to already have an eye on his place in the history books. But certainly, his remarkable insistence in the face of concerted opposition does suggest the rumours to be well-founded.
If successful, he would certainly go down in history as having accomplished that which no previous Maltese Prime Minister has ever achieved – the redevelopment of what is arguably the only wartime scar to still blemish the streetscape of a European city. In so doing, he would also greatly alleviate the daily discomforts of some 65 – 69, in the present legislature – members of parliament. But there is, of course, a price to pay for making history.
By inference, he would have also disappointed the sizeable crowd to interpret this decision as the triumph of Philistinism, at the expense of what little remains of Maltese culture.
But at the same time, perhaps the question we should all be asking ourselves is: given the extent of uncertainty to surround this project... will it ever see the light of day at all?
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