The Australian Ugliness (33 page)

More obvious practices of false pretence crowd the lower strata of commercial design. The cubists' plain box with gashes for windows was never a rage in the land of Featurism, but between the wars various compromises with modern architecture were produced by false means. Often in urban buildings a bold effect was given to facades by the simple subterfuge of colouring selected panels between windows a dark hue roughly matching the effect of the glass. The predominating lines of the building could thus be made to run in any direction that the designer wished, according to which sections of the wall he made dark and which he made light. Thus in the mid nineteen-thirties the vertical received a forced stress, as in the Hotel Australia in Martin Place, Sydney. A few years later it was the horizontal, as in the Hotel Australia in Collins Street, Melbourne. Now the fashionable line is the diagonal. Roofs zigzag in parody of engineers' stress diagrams. Walls are carried up yards above the roof to screen machinery and make a cleaner, more uncluttered facade. Grilles of metal, masonry, or plastic mask a multitude of doubts with the convenient excuse of sun-shading. In smaller buildings there are parlour tricks with fieldstone veneer and copper, illusions with mirrors and glass, and harmless but meaningless mockery in many other guises. If one allows any pretence, thereby denying the idea that a satisfactory visual image should be extractable solely from structural and functional logic, then the crassest of vulgar tricks should be acceptable.

Even more abhorrent to the pioneers than the thought of dissembling construction was the very suggestion of any sort of ornament. While no one is likely to defend in principle the cruder fraudulent means of achieving architectural effect, the frank application of adornments is another matter. A tradition of undecorated design for function, older than history, is evident in most primitive housing, military posts, farm structures, silos, bridges, aqueducts, sea walls— wherever building was building and was not confused by self-conscious symbols, conventions, pretensions, or the primitive urge to embellish nature. The Victorian era, which felt this urge more strongly than most and had the means of satisfying it, was hardly under way before reactionaries in its midst began dying for a return to simplicity. Many foresaw the disasters of the decorated jungle ahead and warnings came from near and far.

‘Beauty, convenience, strength and economy all more or less depend on architecture's cardinal virtue—simplicity,' said
The Australasian
, Melbourne, in 1850, calling for an architecture of organic design in which beauty and utility were one. Horatio Greenough, the American sculptor, was not the first theoretical Functionalist and Anti-Featurist, but of the early ones certainly he was the most eloquent. The aim of the artist, he explained in
Form and Functions
in 1853, is to seek the essential and, ‘when the essential hath been found, then, if ever, will be the time to commence embellishment.' The architectural essential was ‘external expression of the inward functions… the unflinching adaptation of a building to its position and use.' And he ventured to predict that the essential design, when found, would be complete and that completeness would instantly throw off all irrelevancies, commanding: ‘ ‘‘Thou shalt have no God beside me.” ' Greenough saw any ornamentation as evidence of ignorance and incompetence, ‘the instinctive effort of infant civilization to disguise its incompleteness', and he was not dismayed when told that his theories would lead to total nakedness. ‘In nakedness,' he said, ‘I behold the majesty of the essential instead of the trappings of pretension.' The first downward step in architecture's ancient history was the introduction of the first ‘inorganic, non-functional element', thought Greenough the sculptor, whose art was so close to architecture in language and so far from it in content.

All warnings against the mechanized multiplication of ornament were lost in the clatter of decorative castings during the second half of the eclectic century. Even architects who professed to agree with ethical theory crowded their buildings with non-functional features. No architect of the time believed that the theorists meant their remarks to be taken quite literally. None could think that a sane man would ask architects to abandon
all
ornament. This understanding was left to the European rebels of the turn of the century, who insisted that a building which could not stand as conceived before the world without cloak or petty titivating was an ignoble object. Ornament on a building was at worst comparable to the slashes of paint on a savage warrior. At best it was a confusion of media, comparable to a written explanation attached to a canvas by a painter who had been eluded by the full pictorial expression he sought. To scrape decoration from the sides of architecture was a simple act of housekeeping after the Victorians' squalid behaviour. Ornament's most bitter adversary was now the Viennese architect Adolf Loos (1870–1933), a sculptor's son who could distinguish between his father's medium and his own. He was the first to practise the plainness of which Greenough and others had dreamed. He saw the elimination of ornament as a cultural crusade: ‘Evolution of human culture implies the disappearance of ornament from the object of use.'

When Loos's buildings and those of the other early Functionalists proved unpopular, ‘stark, forbidding, unlovable', the psycho-analysts produced a ready explanation: the sexual symbolism of many familiar architectural forms—column, tower, dome, doorway and so on— long-recognized but decently camouflaged by decoration, was now laid bare to the conscious mind. The elements were shocking now that they were stripped of their string courses and acanthus leaves. When the psycho-analysts noted the appearance after the First World War of streamlining and Paris Moderne fashions, they were inclined to misconstrue these cheap commercial styles as heralding the inevitable return of architectural clothing. In fact these styles were not caught in the middle of re-dressing, as it were, but in the middle of undressing. These were merely delaying tactics, part of a transition period between Victorian furbelows and the popular style of today which, though not entirely unadorned, likes to leave its symbols sportively free.

The question of dress or applied ornament was never, however, the cause of many arguments on the higher levels of design discussion. No serious architectural theorist has countenanced the idea of pinning decorative objects on a wall to clothe or enrich a building already artistically complete in itself. The enrichment which is admired is rationalized by its admirers to be an essential element of the building irremovable without artistic calamity, something in an entirely different category from any applied titivation.

Those crafts-lovers who have found enjoyment in ornament, from Ruskin to Wright, have wanted to explain their taste, as if they really recognized deep down that there might be something small-minded about their interest. Ruskin, dedicated to ‘war upon affectation, falsehood and prejudice of every kind', insisted that the only ornament which he admired was not applied, extraneous, or superfluous. ‘You do not build a temple and then dress it,' he wrote in
The Stones of Venice
. ‘You create it in its loveliness, and leave it, as her Maker left Eve. Not unadorned, I believe, but so well adorned as to need no feather crowns. And I use the words ornament and beauty interchangeably, in order that architects may understand this.' Ruskin emphasized that all ornament is relative to the object ornamented. It is not something to be made separately and fastened on. It cannot be good in itself, in the stonemason's yard, or in the ironmonger's shop. Before we can judge it, ‘we must know what it is to adorn, and how. As, for instance, a gold ring is a pretty thing; it is good ornament on a woman's finger; not a good ornament hung through her under lip.' Ruskin of course is very old hat. No one could be more scornful of him than a bright modern Featurist who keeps his features up to date. Yet the Featurist, if called upon to explain a liking for some featured ornamentation, will argue in precisely Ruskin's terms. The feature is by no means redundant and superfluous, he will claim; it self-evidently was conceived as an inherent part of the total design.

This most accommodating argument may be stretched to cover the most repulsive piece of superficial prettification ever devised by man. Ruskin's analogy with the gold ring merely argues that the antisocial practice of holing a woman's lips to carry a ring produces deformity, which is ugly
per se
. This has nothing to do with the crucial questions: Why ornament? Why the nervous, savage urge? How could the sensitive Ruskin say a ring is good on a woman's finger when she is already ‘so well adorned as to need no feather crowns'? He escaped this issue by likening bodily adornment to a building's furnishings, which are ‘
not
the
architecture
' (his italics) and no concern of the architect. At another time, in
Seven Lamps
, he showed in one of his moments of pique that he did in his heart view all ornament in the only light which sanity will allow: as a separate entity from the honest solid stuff of the building. It was to be applied or omitted according to taste and appropriateness. He had this thought while waiting for his train: ‘There was never a more flagrant nor impertinent folly than the smallest portion of ornament in anything concerned with railroads or near them.'

Despite all pleas of mid nineteenth century critics in America and Australia, the ideological fight against ornament took place almost entirely on the face of European walls. It was a foreign war to America and to Australia almost as remote as any Old World fighting of the time. Even in Chicago, where the sky-scraper and the candid expression of the big building frame were pioneered, ornament clung to the terra cotta. There was one exception: the great, gloomy, powerful Monadnock building by Burnham and Root, which sweeps in an unbroken line from pavement to parapet. But Louis Sullivan, the leader of the Chicago School, was also the first and best of the flam-boyant decorators of the new century. ‘It is not evident to me,' he once admitted, ‘that ornament can intrinsically heighten [architecture's] elemental qualities.' But he could not resist adding it to every building he designed. Frank Lloyd Wright, his pupil, never forsook applied ornament for long, arguing as Ruskin did that every decorative strip of wood or fold of metal, which may appear so unnecessary to some observers, is in fact essential to his motive, conceived in the moment of inspiration, and ‘growing like the blossom from the tree'.

The early European expressions of Adolf Loos's creed were in concrete and plaster, steel and glass, and other self-consciously machined materials which in their naked state were attractive for all purposes only while the novelty lasted. The Loos revolution failed. Ornament gradually returned, taking new guises including abstract mural paintings, pierced metals, bas-reliefs and Italian mosaic tiles. The new humanist welcomes this. He has no time for ethical shibboleths and depends upon his taste: If I cannot tell by external examination that a column is redundant, he says, I am not concerned with the engineer's theory that it could be removed without disaster. If it delights me it rises to a plane above the reach of logarithms.

This attitude is a godsend to the tired architect who cannot achieve proportions and emphases which satisfy him by a sensitive arrangement of the essential elements. It permits him to bring in new elements to complete the composition. A line of ornament, whether a cornice borrowed from Greece or a row of louvres from Brazil, may improve the building's apparent proportions. A mural by the entrance will give the desired accent which he could not provide in the motive. Arbitrary features, breaks and bends will relieve the monotony of a dull expanse. But honesty of intent and the abhorrence of misrepresentation are no more than a timeless code of craftsmanship. Whenever a new, stricter, convincing interpretation of that code is understood by a craftsman he cannot allow himself to return to looser methods. The integrity of a building is not divisible. Dissembling of any sort reduces the dignity and meaning of architecture. Without this discipline it is only a semi-paralysed sort of sculpture. Discipline does not condemn architecture to naive functionalism. There is all the scope for poetry which any architect could desire in the interpretation of the reality of the function, and the devising of a form to typify it. But the poetic looseness should cease once the formal motive is adopted.

Observation of the ethics need not imply sanctimony or demand a self-righteous display of every element and the expression of all means to the end. A man may be deemed truthful without his opening his bankbook to everyone he meets. The ethics condemn redundancies and deliberate disguises. But they still permit the sympathetic control of all the essential elements in accordance with the building's motive. The great builders of the world have demonstrated a number of times that it is within the bounds of possibility, economy and even ordinary everyday architectural practice, to create character while observing the natural laws of structure, the practical rules of use, and the code of Adolf Loos. Architecture is simply the manipulation of necessary elements of shelter, and an architect would seem to have missed his vocation if he finds it impossible to achieve the kind of character he seeks within the structural and practical rules.