With each passing year, the work of our young and aspiring architects and engineers becomes more challenging within their new streams, to drive aspirations, as they examine Malta's continuously changing and rapidly shifting landscape. Having spent the last ten years working with students, I have given some thought to the legacy we should leave; one that encourages and empowers them to create quality. Malta's canvas 30 years ago is wholly different to the one that has already been constructed for them; one they need to re-imagine or re-engineer.
The global market demands a response to climate change and sustainability challenges but locally Malta is impacted by flash flooding, extreme heat, and more recently, seismic activity. Do clients and developers request to satisfy such design needs as top priority within their calculated cost of construction, or are we presenting an educational curriculum to our student cohort that is unrelated to the concerns the island has right now? Our departments at the Faculty for the Built Environment holistically cover the full spectrum relating directly to architecture, engineering, urban design and infrastructure, sustainability, building services and project management. Likewise, the regeneration of our built heritage, through conservation programmes and materials restoration. Hence, we are a driving community directed towards shaping the built environment for future generations. As Frank Gehry has famously expressed, ‘Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness’, philosophically speaking, our aim is that.
As 2020 was the key catalyst driving corporate leaders to put environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards and certifications on the table, we now have a different set of obligations steering the ship. So, if we must close the gap between what is taught in tertiary education and what employers strive to sell, we must show that the reality of meeting the island’s new challenges is one that can be met with action rather than words. While ‘Environmental’ and Governance’ pillars have slowly but surely been present in many organisations with accelerating growth, the ‘Social’ pillar expresses the need to be tied to all things people-related.
So, as this matter hits close to home, we must come to the realisation that the procurement decisions governing construction are not the cheapest ones, and they will never be. For those who think they can get away with the cheapest option, spell their way towards disaster. At our institution, we encourage students to mix design aspiration with binding responsibility, to produce architecture that allows the client to look beyond the bottom choices. If individuals who embrace education use this tool to showcase sound structural principles, execution to high standards, and primarily following ethical site construction procedures, we can help explain what the construction reality should bring to the table.
In Malta, building is a way of life; every street corner displays a form of construction, whether it's a new building, a road, drainage system, or a large-scale undertaking. If it has a significant impact on GDP, the nation has an obligation to examine it and use the data to forecast a future that uses sustainable materials and requires the use of sustainability measures or, as I like to call them sustainable processes. A sustainable process ensures that none of the individuals involved in a construction process are ever left to make mistakes on their own, by starting off on solid environmental and good governance foundations.
I want to be proud of our dinner table discussions about construction, in the future, because we can see transformation not degeneration. I believe that past errors can be improved upon to better serve our needs. I desire to see students build a culture of change, one that is confident and capable of elevating innovative architecture, one that embraces educational data, one that is humble enough to celebrate knowledge, and one that recognises that those who are imparting knowledge need a space to do so and not to be trampled by those who would rather bypass the system.
