The Australian Ugliness (32 page)

The beauty, proportions and rules approved by most textbooks are not fundamental or universal things but subjective values accompanying the comfort of familiarity. Expressions like ‘beauty' are widely acceptable only while they are allowed to remain enshrouded with mist. As soon as they are analysed and described in concrete terms the sense is narrowed so that all meaning is lost to the poets in the audience. Beauty is a private secret; it cannot be a target. Any attempt to pin it down invariably finishes with some stiflingly inflexible dogma like William Hogarth's ‘completely new and harmonious order of architecture': his Rococo rule of maximum variety, which he finally reduced to ‘one precise line, properly to be called the line of beauty'. The better the formula, the more fixed is the expression on the pretty face of architecture.

Yet we know architecture can be more than merely pretty. It can be, for instance, infuriating to some people, as witness letters to the editors on the completion of any uncompromising non-Featurist structure. It can be other than reposeful, charming, soothing; the ‘Great Spirit' referred to by architecture's great apologists suggests something more than a monumental tranquillizer pill. What, then, is the essence of architecture?

Return to Professor Joad's statement, not for a definition of beauty but to reconsider his remark that in a moment of perception an artist may apprehend, albeit obscurely, the patterns and arrangements of the real world and that his work may reproduce somehow this awareness of true values. The increase of awareness of realities: this seems to be the key. Beauty may result inadvertently, but when beauty is the goal style sets the course and fashion steers: it's a dangerous drive. And if beauty is questionable, the other goals mentioned by Vitruvius (‘pleasing appearance') and Wotton (‘delight') are even more suspect. At least ‘beauty' is capable of personal interpretations and can be stretched to cover things more vital than chocolate-box covers, but ‘pleasing appearance' and ‘delight' restrict architecture to some fey world of romance and mythology. In this age and in the West they restrict architecture to some sort of reproduction of the quality held by the acknowledged masterpiece of classic art: the Parthenon. There on the acropolis of Western culture is a building which has been held beautiful, off and on, for two thousand four hundred years. There is the classic exception to the rule which warns against the over-eager courting of beauty. The Parthenon was beautiful so consciously that it even deliberately distorted itself to counteract various optical illusions inherent in the images of parallel lines. For instance, its massive columns lean inwards very slightly to correct an impression of toppling outwards which vertical columns might give to the eye. Again, the horizontal lines are bowed upwards to avoid any impression of sagging. The bow is only about two and a half inches high. It is not seen. The building looks beautifully straight. In other words, the Parthenon was so consciously beautiful that its architects felt the need to improve on God's imperfect work in making the human eye. As a result the Parthenon is a brilliant example—but of what? Not of universal cosmic perfection, as is sometimes suggested. It is a perfect example only of its own remote, majestic, rather pompous kind of beauty.

Modern architecture can be beautiful in this way. It can also be beautiful in the delightful, relaxed, drowsy sense. It can also be frivolous, forbidding, robust, tensed, tough, brutal, gentle, warming, even witty. In short, it can have character. It can reflect real life as well as it can romanticize it and disguise it. It can increase awareness by heightening the experience of each phase of life it shelters, by creating a visual environment appropriate to the occasion. But the Vitruvian concept of pleasingness and the Wottonian one of delight gives licence to every irrational, pretentious, pseudo-artistic act in architecture. Acceptance of the doctrine of delight is the justification of all empty decoration and the vindication of Featurism.

Architecture can flourish only by dismissing the essentially unreal concept of beauty as a sort of detachable glamorising agent and substituting the concept of pertinence, so that every type of building commands its own visual quality. The main task of architecture indeed is to try to rise above pleasingness, to allow the actual circumstances of the most suitable materials available and the human problems of the time and the place to shape every concept, and to allow every concept its own freedom to use a knowledge of proportion and balance and the other technical tricks of the trade, not to serve academic rules, but to suit its own character.

Acceptance of appropriateness to the occasion as the first aim of architecture is no contradiction to the increasing, almost overwhelming tendency of building to adopt impersonal technology. The curtain walls and other standardized space-envelopes can be true to prosaic activities as an individually, painstakingly designed church can be true to the activity of worship. This sort of appropriateness has nothing, of course, to do with fashionable symbols or iconography, and little directly to do with external appearances. The important thing is the appropriateness of the shelter to the job being done, and the psychological effect on the occupant of the space to the shape, scale, proportions, colour, details of the space. The desirable things are that all these relate to and are disciplined by the concept, or motive, in hand, and that this motive is impeccably forthright and unsententious in its acceptance of the realities of the situation, that it does not try to make a silk purse on every occasion, that it is strong enough to accept the naked truth, even when the truth is dull, even when it seems ugly.

Architecture should never have allowed itself to get into the habit of glamorising or glossing over the facts with smooth visual effects. A building can rise to full stature only when it has, firstly, definite and unequivocal form in its masses and its spaces, for without this there is no statement at all; and secondly when the formal statement relates directly to the realities of the problem, for without this every building may as well be done in the image of a fairy castle. To deny the realities consciously for one relaxed moment, in the cause of beauty or expression or religion or commerce, is to start down the slippery road to Featurism and the ultimate ridicule of architecture.

8
THE ETHICS OF ANTI-FEATURISM

By definition Featurism stands for the subordination of the whole and the accentuation of selected separate features, and it is bad enough from Plato's point of view when the conflicting, restless features are necessary functional elements. But in the most common form, the featured features are not required functionally by man or beast. They mean very little and they do absolutely nothing. They are the gratuitous adornments known throughout most of art history as ornament, or, when their lack of meaning is especially obvious, decoration. They take several forms. They may be half-pretending to be real functioning parts of the object to which they adhere, like the stone columns standing in front of the self-sufficient concrete structure of most pre-war bank facades. They may be lies of such Goebbelian proportions that they convince the viewer that they must be true, like the Sydney Harbour Bridge pylons or the tower of Melbourne's Manchester Unity Building. They may be sordidly economic-functional, like the wriggling patterns on plastic table-tops intended to hide the scratches or the vivid marble effects on floor tiles intended to hide the dirt. They may be an involuntary traditional or fashionable habit, like lipstick. Or they may be a very special additional artistic thing given to another thing by someone who loves both of them.

When every scroll or figurine had to be carved by hand, no one questioned their right to exist. But from early in the nineteenth century when the casting, printing, turning, moulding, veneering, spinning and stamping machines first began producing cheap, intricate ornament, the ethics of its use have probably raised more argument than any other topic in design. Righteous antagonism to the mass-produced decoration was in large measure responsible for the revolution that eventually crystallized in the modern idiom of design. As an axiom, the modern movement demanded from the beginning impeccably honourable intentions towards materials. The Europeans were more scrupulous than the Americans, but in general all agreed that there should be no concealment of anything essential to the structure, no dissembling or falsifying, no redundant enlargements to make things ‘in good proportion', and no forcing of any material into shapes not entirely sympathetic with its nature. In short, the architect or product-designer should be morally bound by structural and mechanical laws and prepared to forsake all other means of achieving form.

The rules seem simple enough. One must follow the engineer's formulae and the slide rule, and these do not equivocate. Even Oscar Wilde probably would have admitted that nothing much could be said in favour of an architect who, by whim or incompetence, makes the foundations three times as big as required for permanence. By logical extension of this thought, most people will accept in theory the code that the sizes dictated by experience and scientific analysis are the only sizes which can in conscience be used for the visible parts. A column made fatter than its safe, economical size because it thus looks ‘in better proportion' and more enchanting to its architect is just as reprehensible, if not as dangerous, as one made beautifully slimmer than safety permits.

The attention paid here to the structural properties of the selected material leads easily to the rule that no material should be twisted into shapes unsympathetic with its nature. The mason's shape of a pointed arch carpentered into the wooden weather-board walls of a mock-Gothic wayside church is now an object of derision to anyone prepared to give it a second thought. Such a fate eventually overtakes any shape contrived purely for stylistic reasons. Some shapes in reinforced concrete and steel which are taken for granted today will be derided ultimately when fashion moves on to some new phase and leaves our predilection for ‘floating planes' unsupported. Then posts may be used again where suitable in place of elaborate cantilevers and cables, and buildings may no longer feel obliged to try to look lighter than air. If one twists its hidden bones, concrete will carry heavy loads while allowing itself to be posed in almost any strange position. The ethical code decrees that one should not take unfair advantage of such a compliant nature.

In the past, although ‘firmness' was one of the three requisites, a wide woolly fringe area for the operation of artistic licence was allowed on the high side of minimum strength requirements. One criticized an unnecessary classical column which obviously had been added simply for effect, but one did not question a column for being grossly thicker than required provided it looked ‘in good proportion' and gave the impression of being wanted. One applauded a redundant Gothic flying buttress provided it looked as if it might be supporting the wall. The new ethics trimmed down the fringe of artistic licence and demanded the operation at all levels, and not merely the semblance, of structural rule. In the backwash of the first wave of success for the modern movement, however, a reaction set in against the code. Exposed concrete and expressed steelwork began to pall on many architects, who looked about for new means of restoring life and amusement. They had no serious thought of returning to the application of moulds and scrolls, but the simplicity won by the pioneer rationalists changed its nature gradually and subtly after the Second World War to be a new rule of taste rather than logic. ‘Ethical' shackles on architecture are an arbitrary and ridiculous fallacy, the new aesthetes said. If the result is beautiful, ethics and rules are of little consolation. Mies van de Rohe helped to demolish the dogmas which once he helped develop. He applied false light steel members to the faces of the structural columns in his Lake Shore Drive apartments in Chicago in order to bridge the gaps in the rhythm of vertical window members. The effect of simplicity was now more prized by him than innate simplicity, and beauty was once more its own reward.

The ordinary Australian everyday designer never had much patience with the ethical idea, if he ever heard of it, and these free methods were not new to him. The meanest designer often seeks to give the impression that his building, or at any rate its facade, holds together as a single artistic unit, hoping to indicate to anyone interested that he was able to conjure up the inspiration necessary to interrelate the conflicting demands of the problems. It is not difficult for anyone who has learned a few tricks of a style to give an illusion of unified design to a muddle of thoughts and a tangle of spaces. Every popular style of architecture has its own set of features and disguises, like false moustaches and wigs, which can help a designer escape the emptiness of his thoughts or habits, or the ugly consequences of a misconception. One such device is the symmetry of the Georgian facade and its numerous progeny, often tied like a papier-mache mask in front of an unsightly disarrangement of rooms. Once the entrance hall is fitted behind the central front door—the nose fixing the mask in place—an appearance of competent conception is given to the casual observer. The popular sub-styles of the twentieth century have devices of their own to recommend them to busy commercial designers. Simple Functionalism is sometimes convenient for those who do not attempt to conjure up a motive for a building. The first diagram of functional circulation provides a plan for a series of rectilinear cases, and when rooms refuse to be fitted into a rectilinear case it is only necessary for the architect to complete the box by adding pergolas, posts and beams, like chalk lines in the air, sketching in what is lacking in solid building to make a balanced whole.