The Australian Ugliness (18 page)

In the second half of the twentieth century the world has followed Gropius, Mies and Le Corbusier, if not exactly in the way they intended, to allow modern technology to produce unselfconsciously its own building type. This, of course, is the glass box, the international urban vernacular building of this century, counterpart of the carpenters' and masons' languages which are still the vernacular in parts of the country. City office blocks in Australia, as everywhere else, adopted the glass box soon after 1950, following the example of the United Nations Secretariat in New York. The first free-standing, fully fledged glass boxes in Australia were the Imperial Chemical Industries building by Bates, Smart and McCutcheon, and Unilever building by Stephenson and Turner, which transformed Sydney Harbour about 1956, and the most impressive before 1960 was ICI House in Melbourne, also by Bates, Smart and McCutcheon, on Eastern Hill. ICI House also turned out to be the tallest building in Melbourne, having successfully beaten its way through a nineteenth-century height-limit regulation of 132 feet. It is more than twice as high as this, twenty storeys, and elevated on land already some hundred feet above the retail valley. Thus it is decidedly a feature of the city skyline; but it is not a Featurist building. In form it has a clear, simple concept of a tall, thin, blind tower of services hugging the side of a much broader and slightly shorter slab of glazed offices. It is a finely polished example of the international glass filing-cabinet type of office block and as good a representative of this type as one could find. It is in fact as good a representative of the crystallized mid-century style as can be found anywhere in the world. Others soon followed it, polishing the glass and metal a little more carefully every time. Next door to ICI a little three-storey cube, Feltex House, built in 1959 by Guildford Bell, has an even simpler window grid, and has eliminated even the subdued colouring of ICI House. Shell House on Bourke Street and William Street corner, 1960, was designed by the giant American firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (and supervised by Buchan, Laird and Buchan), and is again more direct and sober, with great dark sheets of glass held in dull aluminium frames. Meanwhile in Sydney other glass towers were even higher, if not so polished, and eventually there was not a country town which did not have a glass box or two serving as a bank or an insurance company office, or perhaps a factory, a school, or even a church.

Thus technology upset the even tenor of architectural development by beginning to fulfil a promise it made a century earlier in London's Great Exhibition of 1851. It became capable, with its standard steel sections and its prefabricated curtains of aluminium and glass, of delivering mass-produced, factory-made shelter. This is a modern wonder which promises the only satisfactory means yet invented of covering one day the world's exploding population. It promises a way to end Featurism. It also promises, if industrial development continues in a straight line, the eventual elimination of the artist-architect.

ICI House demonstrated that even in a frantically Featurist society a non-Featurist building can be a popular success. In the first week after its opening, visitors were welcomed, and twenty thousand of them paid nearly two thousand pounds to charity for the privilege of looking over the building. It continues to be popular, but despite its non-Featurist design, not because of it. Other equally simple glass boxes without ICI's claim to sky-scraping were criticized frequently by laymen, from the Governor-General (Sir William Slim in 1958) down. People want Featurism. It fills a need. Its success is a symptom of maladjustment in modern society, which has failed so notably, and not of course only in Australia, to adjust itself to changed conditions on two levels: firstly to the machine, to the replacement of an artist-craftsman by a production line of workers and wiring circuits; secondly, to the disappearance of the patron. After the political and economic struggles were won by the forces of democratic equal-opportunity, there remained the problem of the adjustment of the equalized democrat to the new toys and opportunities, to the realization that the shape of the world around him was no longer safely in the hands of his social superiors. The old patrons of the arts, with the time, means and inclination to cultivate good taste, were seldom now in a position to promote architecture; they wrote books about it which other patrons read. The new promoters of building were corporations, governments, private businesses, and the new class of mammoth speculative builders, the ‘Developers', all of which will never make an architectural move until, directly or indirectly, they have asked the equalized democrat for his artistic opinion. A share in the responsibilities of the patron was divided out to everyone with his share in the responsibilities of government and trade. But of course it was not accepted. The citizen still exercises practically no control or interest in the shape of his daily surroundings until the sudden need for a new home goads him into a brief predatory quest for the most acceptable good taste. A sort of cottage-and-castle division lingers in equalized society, the ordinary man and woman clinging to the cosiest traditions in their own home while content to leave the nature of all the rest of their environment to others.

The only ultimate cure for visual squalor is the redirection of public interest and responsibility to the entire field of the artificial background of life, and a first step to this end is a better understanding of architecture's aims and means. However, most attempts to promote this step which have been taken in books and articles of architectural propaganda take the form of a short course in the history and compositional devices of building; and so much of this is confusing and irrelevant. The aim cannot be to make a world of amateur architects. Furthermore, although artistic values may not change, new rules are needed now. For one thing, the effects of industry remove the architecture of this half of the twentieth century from anything but academic connection with the great buildings of the past. The scale of expansion in all younger countries, the enormous spread of cities, the speed of travel everywhere, have increased the scale of visual comprehension in public places. What was once a fetching intricacy of ornament is likely now to be merely finicking, and what was once a bald box is likely now to be a satisfactorily bold element in the vast mosaic. But an elementary article of Featurist lore is that no technological or other new conditions should be allowed special concessions. Anything new must attract the bustling modern worker in exactly the same way as craftsmen-carved masonry used to attract the leisured classes.

The plainness of the new curtain-wall boxes was never accepted as a relief from the visual confusion of the city. ‘Imagine a whole street of them!' complained the Featurist. Industrial processes, having no wish to offend, responded to the complaint and dressed themselves ingratiatingly. The glass and metal panels of the curtain walls were inclined, very soon after beginning, to look back to decoration of the repetitive type to which a stamping press or a moulding machine so readily lends itself. Technical problems aside, the age of efficient industrialization of the building industry is held at bay by the aesthetic barrier. Awaiting the long postponed conquest by technology, the world today is witnessing a transitional stage. During this time the industrial product is trying to carry on in the tradition of individual building, making each structure appear as personal to the occupants and as individual for the circumstances as possible. The central part of Queen Street, Melbourne, displays more separate new glazed walls than almost any other street in the world—and more variety: two dozen different ways of combining glass, metal strips and coloured panels, all doing precisely the same job. This variety can be provided only at the expense of the economics inherent in the industrial mass-production process.

Mass-produced shelter—whether it is a single box, or a balloon, or is made of adjustable components—has by nature a universal neutrality, a negation of individual character. At the most it may be a chameleon in the colours which it adopts. Its form is fixed by the requirements of the central factory and the general demands of the average human animal, not by the demands of any specific site or occupant. If the prospect of a world of frankly industrialized shelter is depressing to some minds, the prospect of these shelters being less frank and attempting a pretence of sympathy is worse. The idea of anything but neutral character being mass-produced and endlessly repeated has a farcical note; one is reminded of a
New Yorker
cartoon of a tract development of houses, each with a reproduction of Frank Lloyd Wright's ‘Falling Water' with its own diminutive waterfall.

On the other hand, if the industrialized building is left to its own nature, to be negative, anonymous and impersonal, it will never offend an educated eye; it will never disturb. While remaining neutral, it may be beautifully neutral. If it is wisely and sensitively directed, if the advice of the great teacher of universal principles in the machine age, Walter Gropius, is heeded, if the terrible temptations of the stamping press and the injection moulding machine and the industrial printery are conquered, then the impersonal aesthetic of the machine may provide a background to life which will restore the dignity that was lost about the time Australia was founded.

If the housing industry were to embrace modern factory methods with even half the enthusiasm of the car industry, in no time it would be producing standardized components or space-enclosures of some kind which could be assembled in various ways to suit the needs of each buyer. Gradually the family itself would become the designer of its own pattern of standardized units, as suggested by Walter Gropius as early as 1909, changing them about if necessary as the pattern of the family life developed. To be sure the spaces themselves and the outside of the house might be as impersonal as a new washing machine.

Whether we like the idea or not it would be blindly unrealistic not to recognize in the ICI and Unilever offices on Sydney Harbour a hint of the machine-made character which will ultimately overtake all construction. Their glass and metal walls were forerunners of a future now forecast with bated breath by research men, of a coming age when the space-enclosure fabric of any building—office, church, home, or school—is some sort of plastic sandwich coursing internally with all kinds of creature comforts, and these sandwich skins, propped perhaps on central service masts, are made so they can be linked together in a matter of hours to make a structure to suit any requirements, and unlinked as casually to change the shape when the needs change. It is a future which will have many jobs for technologists, but no studio to offer the special sort of artist who has been known hitherto as the architect. He might instead be occupied as one member of some large town-planning organization and his old art of space manipulation would be confined to the siting of various standard components. It would be a future in which the world at long last would be free of Featurism.

It would not be, however, a future free of features. The research man's forecast of an industrialized landscape wiped of all individual expression is profoundly disturbing to some people; it is also as unlikely as the familiar film set of a city on Venus. Someone will always insist on featuring something: if not a free citizen wanting to feature some symbol of his own success or aspirations, then governments featuring the symbols of their power. Shelter, food and features seem to be fundamental human needs; this is understood. The construction of features only becomes an ism when the object featured has no intrinsic importance or claim to be featured; for instance, the popular ‘feature wall' of interior decoration: featured for the sake of creating a feature to occupy momentarily the dull, hedonistic eye.

If the negative, impersonal industrialized landscape is considered only as a background on which genuine features may be arranged to taste, it becomes a more acceptable idea even in our present state of visual delinquency. It is the black velvet on which the gems are sprinkled. It enhances the feature gems. They would stand in relief, magnificently featured, like Christopher Wren's churches among the phlegmatic brick houses of Georgian London, or Francis Greenway's in Colonial Sydney. But however attractive may be the vision of this future of two clearly defined architectures, it could not evolve easily or naturally from the present twilight world of commercial design, with its established and accepted false effects and empty imitations. The realization of non-Featurism would demand fulfilment of two conditions with which the present age is not in a mood to comply. One is the purging of advertising-architecture and ornament and all pretensions to expressive art from the industrialized buildings of the background. The other is the stepping up of the architectural quality of the foreground: the feature buildings worthy of special design and construction. Bathed in such limelight architecture would be obliged to wade out from the present pleasant luke-warm shallows into greater depths of artistic perception.