#books #architecture | Art Nouveau to Modernism : architecture in Malta, 1910-1950

Art Nouveau to Modernism : architecture in Malta, 1910-1950 / Conrad Thake.
[Hamrun ]: Kite, 2021.
255 p. : il.
/ EN / Libros / Art nouveau (Arquitectura) / Arquitectura – Siglo XX - Malta

📘 Ed. impresa: ISBN 9789918230358
Cita APA-7: Thake, Conrad (2021). Art nouveau to Modernism : architecture in Malta, 1910-1950. Kite.
ehuBiblioteka BCG A-72.036(458.2) ART
https://ehu.on.worldcat.org/oclc/1335110875

Architecture in Malta during the first half of the twentieth century has to date been a neglected area of academic research. Although there have been succinct contributions profiling some of the more prominent architects, Maltese architecture of this period has never been analyzed within the prevailing political and socio-economic context. This publication seeks to address this lacuna in local architectural history. The period under study is a tumultuous one, encompassing the First World War (1914–18), the Sette Giugno (1919), the Self-Government Constitution (1921), the suspension of that same Constitution (1930), the Language Question (mid-1930s), the Second World War (1939–45), and the Post-War Reconstruction (1943–50). It was a period of major challenges with Malta under British colonial rule, characterized by an unstable economy, distinct social classes, and political aspirations for greater autonomy and self-governance.

‘Conrad Thake has imposed on himself a forty-year time frame for his impressive research into architectural activity in Malta and its more notable exponents. The period 1910–50, is not an inordinately long stretch of time, but is still a most momentous one. Forty years that embrace, among others, no less than two world wars, the Communist revolution, the discovery of antibiotics, the rise and fall of Fascism and Nazism, the assertion of the airplane, the acceptance of abstract art, the diffusion of sound cinema and television.’ - Giovanni Bonello

‘Architect Thake, with his habitual academic analyses, hones in on a period so far sparsely covered or researched: that of the architecture of the initial decades of the last century. During the first five decades of that century local architects were prone to borrowing motives from past historical styles, while also adapting imported influences from then current foreign architectural trends. As such, the local panorama of buildings of this era presents a varied and hybrid amalgam manifesting examples of Art Nouveau, menageries of resuscitated historical styles, and the initial birth-pangs of local Modernism.’ - Richard England