Art Nouveau to Modernism
Architecture in Malta, 1910-1950
9789918230358
Hardback mint condition
rrp €120.00

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