Architecture. Visions on Paper. Malta

reviewed by Richard England

Author: Conrad Thake

Published by Kite Group, 2022

252 pages, illustrated (photography by Alex Attard)

ISBN 978-9918-23-091-4

€85

Available from www.kitegroup.com.mt and all local leading bookstores also featured in drawings by Genga (1558), Lanci (1562) and Laparelli’s post-siege 1566 proposals, all manifesting the Order’s urgency for the building of a new fortified city.

Bridging across time to the British colonial era, we are regaled with a couple of unknown 1928/1929 superb hand-drawn proposals for Houses of Parliament schemes on the site of the Main Guard building on Valletta’s St George’s Square, together with the impressive renders of Thomas Henry Wyatt’s 1861 Poor House proposals and Emanuele Luigi Galizia’s intricate drawing of a later Mosque addition to his Ottoman Marsa cemetery.

Apart from the Harrison and Hubbard drawings for Valletta and Senglea, the post-war era section features an unknown architect’s futuristic Valletta vision brazenly demolishing practically the whole city with the exception of St John’s Co-Cathedral, the Grand Master’s Palace and the Auberge de Castille. It would no doubt be interesting to discover the author of this project, an architect who obviously was influenced and cognizant of Le Corbusier’s 1925 Voisin devastating Paris plan.

This portion also features a number of the numerous vain and endless proposals to find a solution to replace the Old Opera House in Valletta, with drawings from the 1954 International Competition down to my own more recent unrealised proposals. These are preceded by a 1964 Victor Pasmore sketch for a project on the same site modelled on his Peterlee Apollo pavilion in County Durham, England. In this section we are also able to admire Konrad Buhagiar’s superb 1982 postmodern theatrical Valletta urban renaissance drawings. These, together with Karl Borg’s intricate Calvino’s Invisible Cities inspired images, feature among the finest renders in the whole book, and along with Gio Ponti’s 1962 Comino houses project watercolour and Julio Lafuente’s 1967 photomontage of his audacious cliff-hanging Gozo Hotel, they must rank among my own personal favourites.

Visions on Paper demonstrates various architects’ processes in mapping the matrix of their projects. It presents the visual manifestations of a dialogue between mind, eye, image, and paper; initial thought processes and embryonic way-findings, pathways leading to an eventual definitive project. All the concept drawings in this publication are physical representations of the hand expressing the mind, a dance involving an alchemical amalgam of head and hand. Just as the seed is in itself the plant it is to become, the architect’s concept drawings hold the anticipatory forms of the future completed buildings. Computer imagery has regrettably recently diminished freehand sketching and has replaced the spontaneity and freshness of the hand-drawn sketch. One sincerely hopes that the mouse won’t eat the pencil.

On a final note, it is worth pointing out that while manifest architecture is subject to change and remains the most transitory of all visual arts, architectural drawings and renders are permanent, immutable, and forever fixed on the paper on which they are drawn. This book, which features an array of excellent examples, is beautifully laid out and published by the Kite Group and is further enriched by a cognitive cultural-anthropological Foreword by Paul Sant Cassia. Conrad Thake deserves our thanks and praise for adding yet another erudite episode to his already vast published academic architectonic legacy.

What do we mean by the term Decorative Arts?

This is far from an easy question to answer, but when using this term, we usually denote a sort of an umbrella-meaning under which we group those arts where form somehow meets function, be it liturgical, lay, or merely ornamental. Techniques involved might vary considerably, from silverware to embroidery, ceramics, basketry-weaving, glasswork, and furniture, amongst many others.

This book, edited by Mark Sagona, has two very specific aims in mind: firstly, to dispel the elitist idea that the decorative arts could, in any way, be considered as somehow less important than the so-called Fine Arts, and secondly, to rectify the widely held misconception that high-end examples of the decorative arts in Malta had died with the expulsion of the Order in 1798. As is more than amply stated in this book, the nineteenth century was equally interesting, producing works of art in the field of the decorative arts which are—and should be—considered as sumptuous as anything that was produced in previous centuries.

This short review is meant to highlight the main arguments raised by each of the contributing authors, but before I delve into this exercise, I want to give due credit to the production of this book. Like most of you reading this review, I am in love with books. Not just their content, but books as material objects, books as works of art. And this book, which might be small but big in its reach, ticks all the right boxes. Its size, paper weight, page design, choice of letter-font, pictures, and cover design, are all beautifully spot on. And so, my first positive note goes to the publishing house and to the printers of this book. Now, back to the contributors and the different facets of nineteenth-century decorative design tackled:

Alaine Apap Bologna argues that Neo-Classical designs survived well into the nineteenth century, especially more so in the