Architecture : visions on paper : Malta

Abstract

Conrad Thake has regaled us with many sumptuous books on Malta’s architectural history and he presents us here with a novel and fascinating selection of what he aptly calls ‘Visions on Paper’, i.e., drawings of different architectural projects, some commissioned, others exploratory, that were in the main never realized. This stratigraphic architectural imaginary tells us a great deal on the main concerns of the various periods, from triumphal arches to replanning of Valletta, to that old chestnut, the Opera House. In architecture we find the merging of Levi-Strauss’ bricoleur-artist and engineer. The former supplies the inspiration, the latter the resolution. It is pursued through a specific visualization whose imaginative stirrings commence in the nursery playground, that of substitution, and realized later in a learnt skill: that of miniaturization, the drawing or sketch, scaled upwards and re-dimensioned from two to three, to project magnitude, volumes, and enclosed spaces. [excerpt from the Foreword by Prof. Paul Sant Cassia)