"What is new and significant must of necessity be grafted to old roots." These are the words of the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok, and it is this philo- sophy which I have tried to follow in my architecture, in trying to produce an architecture of place, an architecture which is in fact an expression of regional- ism, but regionalism with relevance to a particular sense of place. The Maltese Islands where I was born and bred, float like a scorched leaf in the centre of a blazing Mediterranean sea, an archipelago made of stone and still more stone.

This is an island where the fields are rock and the hedges are stone. This is a place which has always practised, because of the one sole building material avail- able, a maximum utilisation of minimal resources, something which the world of the 60's have forgotten. In Malta, this globigerino limestone, these blocks, seen in a quarry, somehow echo the future buildings of tomorrow. We can see the geometry of the same townscape forms,once this is put together in completed buildings. In Malta, the sum of the parts is actually equal to the whole.