In a series of poems called ‘I Dream This House’, Maltese architect Richard England, born in 1937, remembers the feelings and atmospheres of his childhood home, where he lived for the first two decades of his life. ‘The house that once I lived in, forever lives in me,’ he writes in his autobiographical ‘mnemonic diary’ titled Chambers of Memory, published in 2018.
As well as this house, he writes poetry about the places that meaningfully shaped him. The troglodyte wartime shelter – a ‘rock-hewn abode’ in the northwest of Malta – where he lived with his family for over two years during intense Luftwaffe bombing in World War II. It was this ‘protective enclave and its amorphous space’ that first seeded the idea of his becoming an architect.
It shifted in meaning later in 1969 when, after a picnic together at the shelter, his architect father – who, rather than luring him to follow in his footsteps, taught him values of kindness and love – collapsed and died there. The poem ‘Natal Dreams’ describes how memories of the past can take on new forms in hindsight, becoming liminal spaces ‘between remembrance and oblivion’.
Taking shape through words and drawings, the Megalithic sites of Malta – Ġgantija, the ‘house of giants’, and the Hypogeum, a network of womblike caves – came, mostly unconsciously, to shape his architecture. It’s England’s theory that Malta must have been the spiritual sanctuary of the Mediterranean, with all of these epic prehistoric structures defined by their relationships to the sun, sky and the earth.
When England finished his architectural studies – in Malta and Milan, followed by an apprenticeship under Gio Ponti – Modernism was in full swing. The movement was defined by a commitment to ‘make it new’, in Ezra Pound’s phrase, conceived by some as akin to a plant springing directly from fresh roots. England, by contrast, always preferred the idea of architecture as ‘a new branch to an old tree’, he tells me in Malta, ahead of his first retrospective abroad at Kolektiv Cité Radieuse, a gallery in Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation. ‘One of the things that a lot of Modernist buildings lack is soul.’
Both England’s architecture and poetry are defined by a search for soul. His first built work in Malta, the Manikata church, combined Modernism with vernacular forms and traditions in order to preserve and embody this all-important essential spirit. On a hill in a small hamlet, its overlapping curved volumes, surrounded by a sculptural belfry and seats, resemble a modern echo of a Megalithic ruin – a bold statement on an island of Baroque churches.
It was built with a limited budget and constructed by a fluctuating, voluntary local labour force – mostly made up of the farming community, who brought their intimate relationship with the land, climate and sustainability. The experience had an impact on the rest of his career and his alignment with Regionalism – he was visited in Malta by Bernard Rudofsky, curator of Moma’s 1964 Architecture without Architects exhibition, in the 1960s. ‘I firmly believe that a building that is built with love emanates a certain energy,’ he says.
Questions of ‘soul’ and ‘energy’ are present in his phenomenological approach. In Chambers of Memory, England recalls Jorge Luis Borges’s words: ‘It is more important to feel a place than to see it’. He advises students to read The Eyes of the Skin (1996) by Finnish architect and theorist Juhani Pallasmaa and Gaston Bachelard’s 1958 The Poetics of Space, which both explore the personal and emotional in architecture. ‘The architect creates the ambience in which we live,’ he says, ‘because space is mood manipulation.’
To forge a transformative experience through space, England often uses thresholds and transitions in his architecture. This can be felt most at the Dar il-Ħanin Samaritan (the House of the Good Samaritan), a retirement home for the members of the lay Society of the Christian Doctrine in Malta that, with the establishment of its Meditation Garden, was completed in 2024. Here, architecture and landscape unfold in a village-like composition of chapels, domes, towers, fountains and pools illuminated by light and colour.
This otherworldly place is rich in influences and references from England’s broad cultural interests, from fellow Regionalists Luis Barragán (colour, light and geometry) and Hassan Fathy (the organic and the collective), to writers such as Italo Calvino and artist Giorgio de Chirico who continue to transport us through their layered and mirrored scenes.
It is perhaps no wonder that England designs metaphysical places like this. The reality is that the landscape of Malta has been the victim of a violent construction boom, which began in the 1960s and continues today. It has left the island totally different from what he once knew – again caught between ‘remembrance and oblivion’ – and many of his buildings have been demolished or changed beyond recognition.
In this context, words, poetry, drawings and art have become more meaningful: ‘I’ve long ago realised that architecture, although we always think of it as something that is solid and long-lasting, is in fact the least lasting of all the arts. It’s the most transient. Nobody would add a touch of paint to a painting, a verse to a poem or a chapter to a book. Yet the moment the architect hands a building to the client, it’s lost.’
In the Chambers of Memory, it is the ephemeral instances captured by a poem that become the safest spaces for us to dwell in, the most personal of places that we can inhabit, precisely because they are not solid, continually shifting in step with the complexity of reality. As the architect puts it: ‘Poetry is about building, building with words and sculpting with sound. It is about the taste of words and the intermittent voids and silences of the pauses, a crossover between sound and silence. One reads not only what is written, but also that which is not written, the words between the lines and the invisible words too, the heart and the unheard, the said and the unsaid.’
‘Looking for Richard England – The Spirit of the Place’ runs at the Kolektiv Cité Radieuse in the Unité d’Habitation, Marseille, from 5 Sept–30 Oct 2025
