/library/oar/handle/123456789/8105 2025-11-13T13:35:46Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/136618 Title: Bridgeford MacDougall Pirie (1876–1941) - a Scottish architect in Malta, 1905–41 Authors: Thake, Conrad Abstract: The name ‘Bridgeford M. Pirie’ does not feature in historical accounts of British colonial architecture in Malta. It was only through a providential ‘discovery’ of his tombstone at the multi-faith Ta’ Braxia cemetery, followed by a decade of research that the full extent of this Scottish architect’s career in Malta was revealed. His magnum opus – the King George V Merchant Seamen’s Memorial Hospital has long since bitten the dust, a casualty of war, but other buildings including his first residence at Gwardamangia Hill, the Connaught House in Floriana, and St Oswald’s church at Mtarfa still stand and are testimony to his steadfast determination to embark upon a successful career in a place far away from home. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/132809 Title: A Mediterranean history of modern art : tension between history and metahistory Authors: Schembri Bonaci, Giuseppe Abstract: Prof. Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci’s latest publication, A Mediterranean History of Modern Art: Tension Between History and Metahistory (Volume 1), builds upon the author’s critical scholarship on modern art by focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth-century artistic developments of the Mediterranean region. His is the first study on Mediterranean modern art which analyses the region as a whole and that considers the multiple contradictions and complexities of the geographical space in question. Schembri Bonaci’s theoretical approach to the study of the arts is here further developed to analyse themes that are inextricable from the history of the Mediterranean, namely the tension between cosmopolitan and the periphery, the coloniser and the colonised, and how these defined the artistic character of the region. In A Mediterranean History of Modern Art, the author advocates for a horizontal approach to the study of Mediterranean art by dialectically juxtaposing and challenging vertical models that have sustained a hierarchy of artistic positions. Exploiting this innovative approach, Schembri Bonaci challenges the outdated methodological approaches that are still predominant in scholarship in 'peripheral' territories, including Malta. This innovative shift from the vertical to the horizontal, yet which combines both positions, reconsiders history through the ideas of the Marxist, the Frankfurt and other Post-Marxist Schools of thought, through the writings of Modern and Post-Modernist thinkers, and other contemporary schools of thought and, significantly, through the writings of non-European scholars, intellectuals and artists from the Mediterranean region, with the aim of challenging notions upheld by the colonial perspective, still dominant under various forms and robes in today's academia. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/129099 Title: Architecture : visions on paper : Malta Authors: Thake, Conrad 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) 2022-01-01T00:00:00Z /library/oar/handle/123456789/127560 Title: The Ottoman Muslim cemetery in Malta Authors: Thake, Conrad Abstract: I have to confess that ever since I was a young child, the local Ottoman Muslim cemetery has been a source of boundless fascination and imagination, an architectural imagery that would embed itself in my mind and consciousness. While driving past it, as a passenger in the back-seat of my father’s humble Fiat Cinquecento, it had then appeared to me as some fantastical and exotic palace with fairy-tale towers, inhabited by wealthy princes and members of royalty, totally unlike anything else that I had ever seen around me. But as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had written in The Little Prince, ‘sometimes there’s no harm in postponing your work until later’. And some forty-five years later, now as an architect and architectural historian, it was high time to revisit the subject of my childhood fascination. [excerpt from the Preface] 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z