Manhattan of the 16th Century

Renzo Piano says Valletta is Manhattan of the 16th century, from Bloomberg:

Italian architect Renzo Piano, who will rebuild the gateway to the Maltese capital Valletta, described the city as the Manhattan of the 16th century. “This may be some kind of sacrilege because Valletta was there before Manhattan,” Piano said during a news conference in Valletta yesterday. “When you walk in Valletta and look south, north, west and east, on each crossing you see always sea and water. This is an incredible sensation.”

Piano, who designed the New York Times building and co-designed Paris’s Pompidou Center, is to construct a new entrance to Valletta, the city built by the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem in the 1500s. He will also reconstruct the city’s opera house, bombed in 1942, Lawrence Gonzi, Malta’s prime minister, announced in December.

The architect was invited to give guidelines for Valletta’s regeneration master plan in 1988. Controversy over his avant-garde submission led to the project being dropped. Piano wants to rebuild the bridge across the moat that surrounds the city, the gateway itself and the square it opens onto. As part of the plan, the opera house will be refitted to serve as the new parliament building. Later, the city’s palaces and forts will be refurbished.

“I liked the idea of doing a public project which was based on civic pride, rather than a commercial one where you so often have to make compromises,” Piano said. Piano was in Malta yesterday with his senior partner Bernard Plattner to revisit the site of the new projects and begin the planning of the new designs. “We walked around, breathed and listened,” Piano said. “You can listen to places as well as people, places have a lot of stories to tell.”...