Ann Dingli, one of Din L-Art Ħelwa’s Architectural Heritage Awards jurors, writes about the need for recognising excellence in heritage conservation, highlighting DLĦ’s insistence on matching rigour with innovation in conservation and adaptive practices.

Last year, the Din L-Art Ħelwa Architectural Heritage Awards received significantly fewer entries than usual. Architecture is a slow discipline – buildings take years to be made – but the number of rehabilitated or adapted projects is still disproportionate to the intense scope and speed of new construction across Malta and Gozo. We need more.

Regardless, the calibre of entries was high. The winners of each different award category have since gone on to have their own successes elsewhere – whether through subsequent, international award wins; dissemination of research findings; and of course, through the positive impact they have on their environments and the people who use them.

The idea of rewarding architecture through awards programmes – if done with rigour and attention – is less about ceremony and more about capturing a moment in time. It’s about marking dominant learnings and innovations which that time represents, and then creating awareness around them through dissemination.

The DLĦ Architectural Heritage Awards are the longest-running awards programme in Malta. They are the only programme where a jury visits every building submitted for scrutiny, allowing them to understand and adjudicate them in the round and within context. By nature – because the judges spend two days looking at and talking about buildings together – the awards encourage real discourse and criticality. They operate on a shoestring budget, but ensure that their culminating ceremony includes an explanation of why each winner was chosen. They are more than organised flattery. 

The DLĦ awards themselves have seen the need to up the ante and are evolving. There’s no bigger or shinier prize in store, but the programme’s jurors have recognised an imperative to emphasise innovation in heritage practice. They’ve also understood that new voices and more diversity matter.

This year, the judging panel includes two jurors under the age of 40, a third of it is female, and for the second year running includes one non-architect. We also have an external judge joining – Alexander Turner – who will help the otherwise all-Maltese cast remain conscious of insider blind spots.

Turner hails from Liverpool and launched his own practice, Studio MUTT, in 2017. Together with his team, he has worked for some of the world’s most recognisable cultural brands – the V&A, British Library, Design Museum, Tate and more – and is therefore accustomed to following rules connected to cultural legacy. His practice has worked on complex conversion projects, mainly for industrial heritage buildings – earlier this year, the adaptation of a former Great Eastern Railway printworks building in London, converting an old ticket printing hall into a large co-working space, and most recently the redesign of the Royal Albert Docks interiors in Liverpool, also into workspace. Alex and his team’s work is bold, unafraid of difference and wild form, and able to confidently declare its contemporaneity without compromising deep respect for context.

This is some of what we hope to see going forward. But there are other values the awards prioritise that bear repeating. Joanna Spiteri Staines, a veteran juror and long-time DLĦ board member, outlines three focus points: the first is the need to understand context – having an ability to visualise a project’s impact from macro to micro and study the history of a place before intervening on its embedded layers. Context includes environmental appropriateness, designing with Mediterranean approaches as solutions – thick walls, external shading, orientation, ventilation from the northwest, using water to cool, and so on.

The second is harmony – of materials, of colour, of scale within a streetscape. And the third is remembering interstitial spaces – filling in places in between buildings with trees, guaranteeing shade, saving and/or creating patterns of light.

The story of heritage conservation, re-use, and urban rehabilitation occupies too minor a role in Malta’s wider built environment for decency. We are a heritage island – our history is our USP. Or at least, our most savoury one. The DLĦ awards are now open and ripe for recognising projects that are as thorough and considered as they are activating.

If you are an architect who has worked on adapting an existing building, regenerating an urban area, or conserving heritage fabric, please submit your project. We need to celebrate re-use in new and different ways.

The XIX Din L-Art Ħelwa Architectural Heritage Awards are open for submissions until Friday September 19, 2025. To enter, write to info@dinlarthelwa.org. This year’s awards are sponsored by Belair Property.