Architecture & Design

32 | Architecture & Design How do you approach restoring a Grade 1 historic building when its original function as critical infrastructure must not only remain, but also be improved for future use? The starting point is to understand that conservation and operation are not competing objectives. In this case, the continued operation of the pumping station is itself an important part of the building's industrial heritage. The Grade 1 designation places a responsibility on us to understand the building, its materials, its construction and its architectural character before intervening. The restoration and conservation work therefore has to be sensitive to what is already there, while allowing the Water Services Corporation to improve the systems necessary for the building to continue functioning effectively, adjusting to the increasing and changing demands on the utilitarian service it handles. For the Water Services Corporation, the restoration is therefore closely linked to its responsibility to maintain and upgrade critical wastewater infrastructure. The interventions must protect the Grade 1 building while allowing WSC to modernise the systems required for the pumping station to continue operating efficiently for future generations. This creates a very particular design challenge. Some interventions need to be invisible or carefully integrated, while others have to respond to contemporary technical requirements. The aim is not to freeze the building at a particular moment in time, but to ensure that it can continue to have a meaningful life. In that sense, the project is also about sustainability, where we believe that retaining and restoring an existing building, while allowing it to continue serving its original purpose, is inherently more sustainable than treating heritage as something that has to be preserved separately from contemporary life. The project brings together different ambitions; keeping the pumping station operational while opening the rest of the site to the local council and the community. How did this influence the architectural design? The entire project can really be understood through two pillars: Operations and Community. The operational role of the pumping station is fundamental. It forms part of Malta's wider sewage infrastructure and has to remain secure and functional. At the same time, we recognised that a large part of the site was underutilised and effectively inaccessible to the surrounding community. That presented an opportunity to introduce a completely different layer of activity without compromising the operational requirements. These two pillars reflect the Water Services Corporation's wider vision for the project. WSC needs to safeguard the pumping station's essential operational role while opening parts of the site which are no longer required for operations to new civic and community uses. The design therefore works with different degrees of access and uses across the site. The pumping station retains its infrastructural role, while the historic building and some of the existing ancillary structures accommodate new civic and community uses. The garden becomes the element that connects these different components. This also meant that we were not designing a new object in isolation. We were looking at the whole site as a piece of urban fabric and asking how an existing infrastructural compound could become more porous and useful to the neighbourhood and urban context it inhabits. The intention is to retain the identity and importance of the pumping station while giving the site a new relationship with the people who live around it. Bringing the Gżira Local Council into part of the historic building introduces a civic and community dimension to what was previously a closed utility site. How do you see this changing the way people relate to the building? The presence of the Gżira Local Council is important because it gives the building a new civic role while respecting its original one. For many years, a pumping station would naturally have been perceived as a technical facility rather than as a place belonging to the community. By introducing the Local Council and flexible spaces for community activities, the building can become something that people enter, use and identify with. We have also tried to make these spaces adaptable rather than prescribing one particular use. They can accommodate a variety of educational and social events, active-ageing activities, council initiatives and other community-driven programmes. This is where the idea of adaptive reuse becomes particularly relevant: we are giving existing spaces new layers of use rather than replacing them. There is something quite powerful about that change in perception. A building that was once associated primarily with infrastructure and closed off to the public can become part of everyday civic life, while still retaining the memory and evidence of what it was built to do. The project will transform an underused and largely inaccessible site into a public garden. The garden is conceived as a kind of 'secret garden', with a landscape approach influenced by the idea of the Third Landscape.

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