WE ALL have dreams of grandeur: a more beautiful house, a faster car, a more exotic holiday. Our minister of education and culture also has a dream: a new museum built by Olympic architect Santiago Calatrava, or perhaps Bilbao Guggenheim Museum architect Frank Gehry, or Pompidou Centre designer Richard Rogers. The minister, Pefkios Georgiades, is an architect himself, he appreciates the value of great architecture. If Athens, Bilbao and Paris can house great landmarks, why not Nicosia?
If my neighbour has a Porsche, why shouldn’t I? Well, perhaps because I can’t afford it. Or perhaps I can afford it but there are more pressing, more important things to spend my spare money on, such as a new bathroom or my children’s education. The same goes for the state.
True, the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages were not penny pinchers. Much of the world’s grandest heritage would have made accountants foam at the mouth. Modern day taxpayers would have voted the pharaohs out of office for overspending on the pyramids, and the world would be a poorer place for it (though ancient Egyptian peasants may have appreciated the opportunity to have a say).
Certainly, a Calatrava museum in Nicosia would be something fabulous (and it is true that Gehry’s work in Bilbao has single-handedly revived a declining city). But the minister needs to exercise more sensitivity. “What is one or two million more, when it comes to the construction of a work of art?” he asked this week. Well, on the record of such grand projects, it will probably be more than a million or two, with chronic overspend tending to be the rule on public buildings, especially where ground-breaking architects are involved.
But there is more than that. The casual flinging around of phrases like ‘what’s a million or two’ hardly corresponds to the government’s current message of austerity. So what kind of impression do the minister’s words send out? His Cabinet colleague the finance minister is trying to impose a public sector wage freeze, talking about discipline, pleading with the unions to do their bit to rein in pay demands at a time when the budget deficit is spiralling out of control.
Georgiades would also do well to look elsewhere in his own department. The education system is a mess: private out-of-hours tuition has become the rule for children desperate to get a half-decent education. Yes, Mr Georgiades, we’d love a landmark we can show off to the world, but we’d prefer a decent education for our children, investment in proper teacher training, in sports facilities for our schools, in libraries and new textbooks that can awaken the interest of our children rather than sending them to sleep. Once we’ve ensured a first class education for our children, then we can call in the architects.
