In conversation with architect David Felice

What first drew you to architecture, and what continues to inspire you today?

I grew up in Valletta, in an environment of extraordinary richness and brought up within a family and a community that was at once both passionate and in awe of its surroundings. These were not abstractions but living backdrops to daily life, and I think they instilled in me a conviction that the spaces we inhabit profoundly shape who we are.

Moreover, I was fortunate to spend time studying architecture at Virginia Tech under the mentorship of Olivio Ferrari. He was Professor of Architecture in the College of Architecture and Urban Studies there and taught the history of the Modern Movement. He had crafted the core foundation of the architecture programme, one of the most highly ranked of its kind, and initiated the Inner College for Environmental Design, an innovative design laboratory that continues to serve as a model for design education. Ferrari was an extraordinary and gifted teacher - generations of students in architecture and design recognised him as the single greatest influence on their education, as I did. I remember missing other lectures so I could repeatedly attend his lectures, and I credit him with introducing me to the drawings of Piranesi and Boullee and the writings of Laugier.

Architecture is not a profession in the narrow sense; it is a discipline that demands you engage simultaneously with beauty and utility, with memory and imagination, with the individual and the collective. It is the expression of the demand for social change and urban transformation.

What were some of the defining moments that shaped your professional philosophy as an architect?

In the late eighties I worked at Renzo Piano’s studio in Paris, on the project for the new City Gate, on guidelines for the regeneration of Valletta and a competition for a new airport in Osaka, Japan. There I learnt the value of collective work, of self-criticism and how at the basis of every project is research that makes the platform from which new ideas will evolve, looking backwards to move forwards.

Piano had consciously structured his practice after the medieval and Renaissance craftsman’s workshop, where master and apprentice work side by side on projects. Young architects participate in the full arc of a project. Piano’s workshop taught me the importance of being present and to engage with younger members of the team, treating the studio as a place of ongoing dialogue.

This led to the beginning of AP, where working with like-minded people in the early years of practice, was still a learning process and helped form our instincts, which was formative in itself. This intellectual discipline was a result of having a truly creative team, made up of people who challenge your assumptions without abandoning shared values.

Valletta is central to this reasoning. It is an important and successful example of the architect’s role in designing the ‘Ideal City’ – a city of lasting beauty and functionality, to be enjoyed by all. Our duty as architects – especially for us as architects working from the city, but also of all architects for whom Valletta is a reference point – is to persevere in this endeavour to rethink our built environment as a model of urban culture for the future and where Valletta is a laboratory of new ideas.

There was also the more gradual, harder-won realisation that sustainability, as the profession too often speaks of it, misses the point. True environmental responsibility is not about adding a layer of green technology to buildings designed on the same exhausted model. It requires a fundamental rethinking…of materials, of time, of circularity and, above all, of an evolving philosophy. That shift in thinking has shaped AP Valletta’s research and practice ever since.

What was your and Konrad Buhagiar’s original vision for AP Valletta, as co-founders of the practice, and how has that vision evolved over the years?

From the outset, we were clear that we did not want to establish a conventional architectural office. We wanted a practice rooted in place — specifically in Valletta and in Malta — but engaged with the widest possible intellectual and professional world. The name itself, first Architecture Project and then AP Valletta, reflects that dual identity: anchored here, open to everywhere.

Our team’s vision was shaped by a shared belief that architecture requires a fusion of research and application and an interest in inter-disciplinarity, not merely technical competence. We were committed to adaptive reuse and heritage conservation not as specialist niches but as a way of thinking about all design, a method rather than a market segment.

What has evolved is the practice itself. In 2025, AP Valletta welcomed seven new leaders, each with a long history with the firm and each bringing distinct strengths. The practice has grown into something more complex and more layered than we could have imagined, a collective with a genuinely plural intelligence. But the founding conviction remains: that architecture must be rigorous, resolute, and in constant dialogue with the human condition.

In declaring its intent through a manifesto, launched in parallel with the new leadership, AP described this process as a ceaseless exercise, and more akin to an evolving sketch than a completed work. This document gives a snapshot of that sketch at this point in time. It presented AP’s ‘mandate for the future’, outlining a nuanced problem and exploring thought process its research, people, and projects.

Today I find particular inspiration in the idea of the notion that going back, carefully and intelligently, is often the most radical thing an architect can do. A study published in Cognition in 2019 showed that the simple movement of walking backwards, whether done physically or just imagined, improves our ability to retrieve information. Apparently, our brain organises experiences along a “subjective timeline,” where the past is behind us and the future ahead. By moving backwards, we unconsciously activate this connection with our memories. A small step back for a big leap forward.

I call this process ‘Involution’, as opposed to evolution. Whereas our current economic models entail accumulation, with involution an economy lives off its own assets by funnelling resources from production to exchange.

This is an important reframing. It is the grounding of embodied memory research to an economic philosophy of place. It links the mnemonic time-travel effect to theories of heritage-based economic development and urban regeneration. The argument that moving back through existing assets — physically, economically, cognitively — activates a different and more sustainable relationship with the built environment, brings together cognitive science, economic theory, and architectural practice.

Of all the projects you have worked on, which one holds the greatest personal significance for you, and why?

I would point to AP’s body of work in and around Valletta itself. Not a single building, but a sustained engagement with a city. Valletta is one of the finest examples of the Renaissance, a city designed with lasting beauty and functionality. To have worked there, to have contributed to the conservation and evolution of that fabric, is a privilege and an educational process.

In 2021, AP was shortlisted for Europe’s Ilucidare Special Prize for its heritage-led innovation and contribution to Valletta’s regeneration. awarded within the European Heritage and Europa Nostra Awards. These aim to demonstrate that cultural heritage is a powerful resource for strengthening international exchange and driving innovation-led sustainable development. The Ilucidare Jury noted AP Valletta’s dynamic perspective on heritage, saying: “Its work is rooted in the theoretical principle that heritage is not static but rather in constant evolution. The firm has made Valletta into its living lab for testing new heritage ideas.”

Working from Valletta for nearly all of my professional life has given me a relationship with the city that is both personal and intellectual. I think of it as the laboratory of our practice — a place where the past and the future are in constant, productive tension.

Are there any projects that challenged your thinking as an architect and ultimately changed the way you approach design?

I think particularly of projects involving adaptive reuse of complex historic structures, where you quickly discover that the building has its own logic — its own memory, if you like — and that the task is to enter into a dialogue with that existing intelligence. Those experiences reinforced my conviction that the architect must be a listener as much as a maker.

Certainly, the project for the rehabilitation of the Garrison Chapel in the Upper Barrakka, brought many of these challenges together. Completed in 2001, it consisted of a single large void, roofed over with a timber trussed structure, needing extensive restoration work to enable its adaptation and re-use as the new headquarters of the Malta Stock Exchange, all this while sitting on the edge of a tunnel ridden bastion. It also involved the introduction of an innovative climate control system, using Passive Downdraught Evaporative Cooling, achieving a drop in internal temperature without utilising conventional air conditioning systems.

This method of making architecture is affected by working with collaborators from different fields, experts that form a community of thinkers, to deal with the often quoted statement - as Robert Venturi had famously written in in 1966 – on Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, wherein architecture is a celebration of the richness of its history, its ambiguity, tension, layering, and impurity — and made the case that good architecture embraces both contradiction and complexity. Twenty-five years after the completion of the Stock Exchange at the Garrison Chapel, this process continues in AP’s work for the new museum for the monumental tapestries describing the triumph of the Eucharist, being added to St John’s Co-Cathedral.

When you look at your body of work, what do you hope will be your architectural legacy?

I hope that the work will demonstrate that it is possible, in a small island nation with all its pressures and limitations, to practise architecture with rigour and ambition. That quality is not the preserve of large markets or wealthy clients. That beauty and functionality are not in opposition. That the past and the present can coexist without either betraying the other.

I also hope that the practice itself will be part of what endures. We have spent 35 years building something that is larger than any individual contribution: a culture of research, of mentorship, of collaborative hard work.

This is also why AP is setting up the AP Future Heritage Foundation (APFHF). The practice has been grounded by multi-disciplinary exploration, being known beyond its built portfolio for research, publishing, discursive events, exhibitions and more. APFHF is being created to give this tradition of inquiry a dedicated space for production. One which specifically encourages thinking around future heritage, and which deliberately opens itself up to real collaboration.

APFHF’s mission is to redefine heritage as a forward-looking resource, shifting beyond nostalgic narratives to address pressing challenges, including climate change, rapid urbanisation, and cultural identity. The Foundation will position heritage as a blueprint and driver of socially, environmentally, and economically sustainable futures.

In 2024 you received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Premju Emanuele Luigi Galizia. What did this recognition mean to you personally and professionally?

The Premju Emanuele Luigi Galizia carries a particular weight precisely because of who it commemorates — an architect who stood for professional integrity at great personal cost. To receive a lifetime achievement award in his name is to be reminded that the standards of the profession are not merely technical or aesthetic, but also ethical.

Personally, it was a moment of reflection as much as celebration. A lifetime achievement award invites you, again, to look back, which is always instructive. But it also carries an obligation, to continue, to remain relevant. The work is not finished, and it never really is, so long as there is an ambitious team made up of valid members who wish to contribute. This includes AP’s people, its clients, and the wider community it serves.

Having served as President of the Kamra tal-Periti and on numerous national and international boards, what leadership lessons have stayed with you throughout your career?

The most important lesson is also the simplest: listen more than you speak. Leadership in a profession like ours requires you to hold many different perspectives simultaneously — the technical, the political, the social, the aesthetic — and the only way to do that well is to genuinely hear what others are telling you, even when, especially when, you disagree.

The second lesson is about the long view. Institutional change,  in planning, in conservation, in the way a profession organises itself, is slow, a reflection of the slowness of the building process itself. But the belief and the arguments you make truthfully, persistently and in good faith eventually become the common sense of the next generation. That is worth remembering when progress feels invisible.

And thirdly is the importance of remaining a practitioner. Leadership roles can absorb you entirely if you let them. But the credibility that makes your leadership useful derives from the work itself. It is important to keep this dichotomy of professional life in productive tension.

As Chairman of the Valletta 2018 Foundation, you played a key role in securing Valletta’s designation as European Capital of Culture. What are you most proud of from that experience?

Leading Valletta’s successful bid required me to think about architecture not merely as built form but as a framework for how a society understands and projects itself. Valletta 2018 was an opportunity to move regeneration from being building led to becoming culture led, in a post-colonial, young European country.

In seeking a balance between economic growth and cultural preservation, we still need growth in those areas ‘beyond preservation’, where we need to apply the lessons learnt from the past to contemporary culture and our responsibility to create the new heritage of tomorrow. Valletta 2018 promoted the idea of a Valletta, and a Malta I called a ‘Greater Valletta’, where the latter grows from the notion of the planned city and which struggles to maintain the same quality of the former.

The bid process itself was transformative. To make the case for Valletta as a European Capital of Culture required us to articulate, with accuracy, honesty and passion, what this city is and what it might become — to tell a story about a place that those of us who live and work here are passionate about.

The process engaged people who had not previously thought of themselves as participants in the cultural life of the city. Architecture, heritage, public space — these are not specialists’ concerns. They belong to everyone, and the Valletta 2018 process, at its best, reflected that.

The designation also demonstrated and convinced Europe that a small capital in a small country could produce something of genuine significance. That continues to matter to me as an argument about scale. That ambition is not proportional to size. Having said that I cannot say I am satisfied with the outcome, especially in terms of community involvement, but that’s another story for another day. Valletta will need a new strategy if it is to be driving for excellence towards its 500th anniversary in 2066.

In your opinion, what are the greatest challenges currently faced by Maltese architecture and planning?

The challenges are both structural and cultural. Structurally, planning in Malta has for too long been subject to short-term political influence rather than expert, independent, long-term vision. I argue for a planning system genuinely led by professionals from a range of fields, operating with an independent and clear mandate and insulated from the electoral cycle. Without that, no individual policy will be sufficient.

Culturally, the construction sector remains predominantly driven by residential and commercial real estate pressures rather than by a considered national vision for the built environment serving productivity. The result is a form of development that accumulates without composing, that adds volume without adding quality.

The gravest risk is the loss of what makes these islands distinctive. Attractiveness is not a marketing asset; it is a quality of life. If Malta remains a pleasant, beautiful, coherent place to live and work, it will serve its residents and its visitors alike. If we sacrifice that quality for short-term gain, we will have lost something that cannot easily be recovered.

If you could influence one major change in Malta’s built environment over the next decade, what would it be and why?

A genuine shift from building-led to culture-led regeneration, and here I mean culture in the fullest sense of the term, not restricted to heritage or the arts. I want to see Malta move from a model in which the built environment is primarily shaped by development pressure to one by a deliberate, shared vision of what kind of place we want to live in. Where our architecture - and infrastructure - are there to support our goals.

This requires, among other things, a proper national strategy for existing building stock, for the repurposing of what we already have before we add further to what we do not need. The benefits of adaptive reuse are not only environmental but social and economic: existing buildings carry memory, identity, and patina that new construction cannot replicate.

Valletta is the model I return to. A city that has been inhabited, adapted, and reimagined across centuries without losing its essential character. The question for Malta over the next decade is whether we can apply that information at larger scale. Not as nostalgia, but as a genuinely contemporary way of building, if we are to continue the country’s legacy of creating new heritage.

When future generations look at Malta’s architectural and urban development in the early 21st century, what do you hope they will say about the contribution of architects, and about AP Valletta’s contribution in particular?

I hope they will say that architects argued consistently and in public for quality, for long-term thinking, and for the human experience of space over the imperatives of the market. That the profession held its line when it was not easy to do so.

And I hope they will say that AP Valletta—through its projects, its research, and its people—demonstrated that it is possible to practise architecture as a civic discipline from a small island at the edge of Europe. That the practice left behind not only buildings but ideas: about how to engage with the past without being constrained by it, about how to build for the future without betraying what already exists, about what it means to take a place seriously. And above all, that AP was a place of opportunity for the many young people who started their professional career there.

The concept of Involution, which we have been developing in our research and manifesto work, is part of that contribution. A small step back can be the foundation for a very large leap forward.

What advice would you give to young architects entering the profession in Malta today?

Take our context seriously. Malta is not a limitation; it is a privilege. To work here is to work within one of the most layered, historically rich, and intellectually demanding built environments in the Mediterranean. That is not a small thing, and it should fuel your ambition rather than diminish it.

Invest in research. The best architecture comes from deep understanding of a place, of a brief, of a material, of a structural principle. The projects that endure are the ones that were thought about hard before they were built.

Remain engaged with the public and the social dimension of the profession. Architecture shapes the lives of people who did not commission it, who did not vote for it, who may not even notice it. It carries a civic responsibility that goes beyond any individual client relationship.

Finally, find collaborators who challenge you. The practice of architecture, at its best, is never a solitary exercise.

David Felice is a founding partner of AP Valletta, since 1991.