In late 2013, the studio won a competition for the design of a monument to commemorate Valletta as European Capital of Culture 2018. The chosen site for the installation was the main Bus Terminus, close to the main entrance to the capital.
At the time, Renzo Piano’s City Gate project was nearing completion, and the sight of the two robotic arms demolishing the last of the old city gate left quite an impression. Valletta’s previous entrance somehow relayed the city’s architectural story, a palimpsest in which layers of architecture paid homage to the stylistic preoccupations and ambitions of conflicting times.
The city’s gates, past and present, mutate into a singular 2D icon, disassembled into different planes and anamorphic projections. The result presents what seems, at first glance, ruins deconstructed. Approaching them on foot, they slowly converge and the icon appears.
Building such thin slabs would only be possible in Serra-like steel, too costly for the project. By some sort of blessing, a few days before the good news, studio founder Chris Briffa happened to be walking around the MuCEM in Marseille where he discovered Ductal, the strongest concrete formula on the market whose structural properties were akin to steel.
With the assistance of an architect from the south of France, we visited the manufacturers and proceeded to commission the production and engineering of the slabs, which would measure four centimetres thick at their tips. A few weeks before the inauguration, the French slabs arrived in Valletta and after long hours of precise setting out to ensure the alignment of viewpoints, Prospettiva was set, and inaugurated by then prime minister Joseph Muscat, in October 2014.
