Architecture as art and poetry: an interview with Richard England

In present-day Malta, architecture and environment are often at loggerheads. RICHARD ENGLAND discusses their relationship with Joseph Agius and talks about his current exhibition Richard England: Architect as Artist.

JA: In British novelist Susanna Clarke’s 2020 novel, Piranesi, one of the characters in the novel describes himself in these words: “People call me a philosopher or a scientist or an anthropologist. I am none of those things. I am an anamnesiologist. I study what has been forgotten. I divine what has disappeared utterly. I work with absences, with silences, with curious gaps between things. I am really more of a magician than anything else”. Do these words define you in some way? Is Richard England an ‘anamnesiologist’?

RE: I am not quite sure that I would define myself as an ‘anamnesiologist’. I would think that I am perhaps more of a ‘Janus’ figure interested in the past as a threshold and doorway to the future. While we still certainly have much to learn, I am convinced that perhaps we have more to remember. The ancients knew something which we regretfully seem to have forgotten; perhaps they were more shrouded with wisdom than knowledge.

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