Bal Harbour

C O U R T E S Y O F M I C A S /J OA N A VA S C O N C E LO S , M I C A S / M I LTO N AV E R Y FROM TOP Joana Vasconcelos, Árvore da Vida [Tree of Life], 2023; Milton Avery, Boathouse by the Sea, 1959, and his Still-life with Skull, 1946 Elton John's mind than a church. (Maximalism is relished by the Maltese, notes designer Sultana, who refers to the local aesthetic as "Baroque and roll.") The museum here also focuses on adaptive reuse: in this case, creating a floating gallery that's bolted onto a row of adjoining historic houses that will better display the church's sumptuous Flemish tapestries. It's aiming to be completed by the end of 2026, after more than a decade of planning and construction. David Felice, the Valletta-based architect behind that project, sits in his airy office a few blocks away, the bookshelves heaving with pothos plants. "I'm a city boy. Valletta is my town, my place," he says in a gravelly voice sprinkled with mischief. Felice says that it's no coincidence that the focus of both new museums is adaptive reuse, upcycling an historic structure for a new purpose via a cutting-edge addition. "Malta has a combination of wanting to be contemporary and modern, but at the same time, it has this sort of burdensome heritage," he says of its centuries-long central role in the Mediterranean. "But as a combination, that's so attractive." His work on the cathedral's museum, for example, will be "almost like a parallel building, which flies above the ground and that you can walk underneath," a sleek, modern building that's made, like MICAS, from that signature honeyed Maltese limestone. Deploying that material, mostly quarried from the southwest of the island, is a visual trick, Felice adds. "The color is amazing. It adapts with climate and changes over time. You can tell how old a building is, and its orientation, from the color of the stone." No wonder that when he was working with Italian Pritzker Prize–winning architect Renzo Piano on a splashy new home for the Maltese Parliament, completed in 2015, the aesthetically eclectic Piano was happy to use that same stone for its façade. He also opted for another adaptive reuse: rather than bulldoze the site earmarked for the building, the former Royal Opera House, which was bombed into a smoke-ravaged shell in World War II, he designed around it. The ruins were then reconfigured as an outdoor performance space. "We have the opportunity to create the heritage of tomorrow if we start off with the lessons we learn from the heritage of yesterday," says Felice. Malta's museum landscape isn't quite complete. There's a smaller, but equally meaningful, project slowly underway. Drive around the edge of the waterfront where MICAS will sit, past the boats and superyachts bobbing on the marina, and you could easily overlook one of the island's historic sites. This is a low-slung neighborhood of old cottages, many of which were home to British military officers from the nearby UK base. Among the officers rostered for a stint on Malta? Philip Mountbatten, who brought with him his wife, who would go on to be crowned Queen Elizabeth II. They lived for two years at Villa Guardamangia, a humble, almost ramshackle house in this area, before duty called them back in 1951. That home has been derelict for some time, damaged by water and rubbish. Now, though, it's under the auspices of Heritage Malta, which is beginning the painstaking restoration process, with hopes to open as a museum in around five years. It may not be as monumental as MICAS, but it's just as likely to help put Malta on Europe's cultural map. BALHAR B O U RSH O P S .CO M

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