Professor David Bostanashvili delivered lectures at UM

Georgia’s leading cultural theorist on architecture delivered lectures on poetics of architecture at the University of Malta over the period 20 March – 26 March 2026. Professor David Bostanashvili, an academic at the Faculty of Architecture, Urban Planning and Design of the Georgian Technical University (GTU), Tbilisi, held these lectures following an invitation by the Department of History of Architecture within the Faculty for the Built Environment.

The visit was funded through the Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility for Teaching Staff Mobility agreement entered between UM and GTU.

The lectures delivered addressed the phenomenological experience of space and memory with reference to the work of Gaston Bachelard who focused on how spaces nurture dreaming, memory and introspection. The lectures also addressed architecture as a language whereby buildings are read as ‘texts’ through the utilisation of syntax and poetic devices such as simile and metaphor. Reference was made to the triad of Image-Name-House, a concept developed by Shota Bostanashvili, Prof. Bostanashvili’s late father, which maps the relationship between ideas, words and built structures.