Architecture & Design

16 | Architecture & Design Of all the projects you have worked on, which one holds the greatest personal significance for you, and why? I would point to AP's body of work in and around Valletta itself. Not a single building, but a sustained engagement with a city. Valletta is one of the finest examples of the Renaissance, a city designed with lasting beauty and functionality. To have worked there, to have contributed to the conservation and evolution of that fabric, is a privilege and an educational process. In 2021, AP was shortlisted for Europe's Ilucidare Special Prize for its heritage-led innovation and contribution to Valletta's regeneration. awarded within the European Heritage and Europa Nostra Awards. These aim to demonstrate that cultural heritage is a powerful resource for strengthening international exchange and driving innovation-led sustainable development. The Ilucidare Jury noted AP Valletta's dynamic perspective on heritage, saying: "Its work is rooted in the theoretical principle that heritage is not static but rather in constant evolution. The firm has made Valletta into its living lab for testing new heritage ideas." Working from Valletta for nearly all of my professional life has given me a relationship with the city that is both personal and intellectual. I think of it as the laboratory of our practice — a place where the past and the future are in constant, productive tension. Are there any projects that challenged your thinking as an architect and ultimately changed the way you approach design? I think particularly of projects involving adaptive reuse of complex historic structures, where you quickly discover that the building has its own logic — its own memory, if you like — and that the task is to enter into a dialogue with that existing intelligence. Those experiences reinforced my conviction that the architect must be a listener as much as a maker. Certainly, the project for the rehabilitation of the Garrison Chapel in the Upper Barrakka, brought many of these challenges together. Completed in 2001, it consisted of a single large void, roofed over with a timber trussed structure, needing extensive restoration work to enable its adaptation and re-use as the new headquarters of the Malta Stock Exchange, all this while sitting on the edge of a tunnel ridden bastion. It also involved the introduction of an innovative climate control system, using Passive Downdraught Evaporative Cooling, achieving a drop in internal temperature without utilising conventional air conditioning systems. This method of making architecture is affected by working with collaborators from different fields, experts that form a community of thinkers, to deal with the often quoted statement - as Robert Venturi had famously written in in 1966 – on Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, wherein architecture is a celebration of the richness of its history, its ambiguity, tension, layering, and impurity — and S t J o h n 's C o - C a t h e d r a l M u s e u m E x t e n s i o n , Ta p e s t r y C h a m b e r V i s u a l

• Cover