Blogs

by Petra Caruana Dingli A new planning policy, which will allow hotels to build as many floors as they like, is currently being drawn up by the hoteliers themselves. This is blatantly wrong. Consult hotel owners and other industry stakeholders extensively by all means, but nobody should take decisions on planning matters of any kind in which...

by Conrad Thake Politicians of all hues and colours make it a point to be not only high visible but at times oppressively omnipresent in our lives. Fair game one might say, as after all we are all political animals of some sort. I was intrigued by the recent public announcement by ‘Heritage Malta’ announcing a...

     by Petra Caruana Dingli The Times of Malta reports that graffiti has been scrawled on the walls of an 18th-century coastal battery at Qbajjar in Gozo. In its print version today, the Times describes it as ‘Santa Maria Battery’, although I know it as ‘Qolla l-Bajda Battery’. It was built...

by Alan Deidun A  number of sobering statistics concerning the built-up footprint of these islands (25%, compared to a European average which is less than 5%) and the staggering number of vacant buildings (72,000, or roughly one-quarter of the total local stock) have been bandied around so much that they been watered down into mantras and...

  by Petra Caruana Dingli The Times of Malta has pointed out that the promise of cheaper electricity might lead to people losing interest in solar energy. Financial considerations win over environmental concerns in most families. Photovoltaic panels require a substantial capital outlay and if electricity is going to be cheaper then the idea of investing in...

by Conrad Thake The German-born British architectural historian, Nikolaus Pevsner once famously stated that “A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.”  His distinction between what constitutes a mere building (presumably not involving the services of an architect) from architecture was that “anything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for...