MICAS staff and architects collect the President's Award at the Premju Galizia 2026
MICAS clinches President’s Award in 2026 edition of Premju Galizia
MICAS wins Premju Emanuele Luigi Galizia’s President’s Award, the highest honour in the field, and Adaptive Use award
MICAS, the Malta International Contemporary Art Space, has once again been recognised for the quality and ambition of its contemporary intervention for the way it has shaped the built environment at Floriana.
MICAS won the Premju Emanuele Luigi Galizia’s President’s Award, the highest honour in the field, which recognises excellence in design innovation, environmental responsibility, social inclusivity, and cultural significance.
It also won the Adaptive Use award, which honours projects that transform historic buildings with care and clarity, where conservation and sustainability is not a backdrop but an active design process.
“Such projects demonstrate the reuse of the original structure with limited waste generation, sensitivity to the architectural language of the original structure, and meaningful integration of new uses, systems, and materials,” the Premju Galizia jury said.
MICAS was also nominated finalist for the Public Projects Award, which celebrates civic clarity, design integrity, and contribution to collective experience.
The Premju Galizia is Malta’s national awards programme recognising excellence, leadership, and impact across the built environment.
MICAS executive chairperson Phyllis Muscat toasted the contemporary art museum’s latest success, which follows a string of awards collected last year.
“For most of its history, this stretch of the Floriana Lines, known to many as the Ospizio, had been closed off – a military space built to keep people out. MICAS has made it a place that invites people in,” she said.
“The fortifications are not just a backdrop but they are the home in which our steel and glass roof envelops this new national museum of contemporary art. The ancient walls are the walls of our galleries. The terraces of the Ritirata ditch are our exhibition floors. Even a breach from the Second World War remains, stabilised, as part of the building’s story,” Muscat said.
Muscat dedicated the award to the people whose research and patience generated the final result for MICAS: the Restoration and Preservation Department, who led the project and its conservation; Ipostudio Architetti and AEI Progetti in Florence; EMDP; b.NEL; LightCompany; and Formafantasma.
“And it belongs to the public, who now share this place with us,” she added.
