Knocking on Valetta's door

My first visit to Valletta can be encapsulated in my fascination with its architecture. Whereby baroque and mannerism seamlessly blend together due to their honey coloured stone. The stone naturally lacks definition and opposing buildings can appear to be extremely similar even if architecturally they aren’t. The globigerina limestone can be thanked for that. Historically, Malta has undergone many changes, but what has remained consistent is the stone used. The stone itself is omnipresent in Malta and its abundance is precisely why its used throughout the entire country. Yet to the wary eye the buildings reveal seemingly obvious differences between them based on their style.

It appears that both expensive law firms and cheap tourist shops can exist right next to each other in the same dirty and slightly deteriorated building. There is a seamless nature to the entire city in its aesthetics which appears to be a generally agreed upon idea of authenticity, which drives the design and structure of the architecture in the city. UNESCO describes this element of authenticity in Valletta as one which respects the form and design, the materials, the function, and the setting. The problem I found is that the buildings lacked any form of individual identity.

I left Valletta slightly unimpressed with its aesthetic but realised that if it were to start slowly revealing itself, there must be more to explore. A thought I put into the back of my mind, to ponder for the next few days. Which is when it suddenly hit me: doors. This might appear to be a strange object to have a ‘eureka’ moment over, but I was convinced that this is what I had been unable to grasp. My second trip to Valletta was almost entirely concerned with testing this idea, where I would roam the streets, without any actual direction or idea of where I was, with the objective of looking at doors.

But I didn’t just look at the door as a whole, I tried to unpack the specifics of the door and what each potential area might imply. Areas such as: the temporary state of the door; is it open or closed? How open is it? What can you see from an outside perspective? The material of the door; is it a metal door? A wooden door? What does that suggest about what is behind the door? The size of the door; how tall is it? How wide is it? What surrounds the door; arches, plants, balconies, the bell, the door handle, a gate before the door, or even another door behind that door. The colour of the door; What colour is it? And finally, an important overall area is the age and its state of deterioration. As this influences your perspective of each of the previous areas.

The more I realised how individual and different each door in the city was, the more I begun to think about what this aesthetic diversity reflects. The door is a reflection of the people behind it, a sign of the social differences present within Valletta. As Valletta pushes for an authentic look; it undermines the need for expression found within living in the city in the present. The door acts as the agent that allows people to express the present era of Valletta, continuing its history while also actively participating and reflecting on it.

Yet these are merely observations and there is the potential to do more in depth research on such a topic, to maybe prove such a hypothesis, or even simply to gain more understanding of the role of the door in Malta. I am however not the only one fascinated by this idea. In researching this topic, I found an online blog called Malta Doors; where Lisa Gwen posts pictures of interesting and quirky doors she discovers across the Maltese islands. The idea originating in the realisation that we often ignore the simple things around us in our rush of going from one place to the other. The project aims to focus people’s attention on the objects around us as a way of better understanding the life around us. To extend this, the idea of overlooking can also come from elements other than rushing. From a personal experience, the door as an object is not one of much interest in. In the Netherlands the variation of doors is so minimal and insignificant in the context of the entire house, making it easy to view it simply as what it is. By bringing such a mindset into Malta, I initially ignored what appears to be one of the most interesting cultural aspects of the country.