The Australian Ugliness (34 page)

Nothing is easier for a clever stylist than the designing of an attractive building exterior, redolent of any desired atmosphere, if he separates it entirely from the realities of function and structure. This is done every day for the backdrops of the stage, films and advertisements. With his greater facilities for illusion, a modern architect could go further and, outstripping the Baroque, build beautiful gauze and plastic screens in front of his buildings, permanently coloured in any fetching design he desired. But even the most uncaring or cynical Featurist will guess that this proposal is made in heavy sarcasm, because he knows that underneath every responsible human's apparent insensibility to his shelter there is a desire for some sense of reality in the background of life. The most frivolous Featurist designer, moulding like putty the tastes of a public hypnotized by fashion, acknowledges an instinctive revulsion against blatant counterfeit. Even in the abstract sphere of car design, the fins and dips and chromium strips pretend to be practical. The swept-wing tail fin of useless metal is given a taillight to hold so that it may try to look useful. Arbitrary breaks in the body line are often given little black slots suggestive of a ventilator or perhaps some electronic aid to comfort.

Not all surface adornment is arbitrary, or bolstering some weakness in the basic form. Sometimes the building is strong in itself, but the ornament is added somewhere along the path of design as an unsolicited gift of love from the architect. Much of Walter Burley Griffin's ornament in Australia had this look of a sentimental gift, and it may be accepted in this spirit without our having solemnly to hunt for the significance which the donor saw in the gift. Colour may be an architect's ornamental, irrational gift to a motive. Since something must be applied the architect should be able to select materials which support his motive. So far the ethics are fairly precise: if an element must be included, select the best for the case. But what of murals, mosaics, sculptural pieces, or symbolic or iconic objects like the cross on the church?

At this point the ethical rules change, as it were, into small type on the back of the sheet. The introduction of other arts and crafts by sub-commissioned painters and carvers may be a helpful type of feature to an irresolute architect, allowing him to dispense with some descriptive lettering and freeing him from the moral and economic responsibility of adding a feature of his own invention to a weak spot in his composition. Painting and sculpture can add their own descriptive and symbolic overtones to the architectural range of expression, projecting currents which could never be started by architecture's own abstract means, but these emotional overtones have nothing to do with architecture. And, in any case, the ‘free' arts seldom are invited to add their own messages; usually they are no more than decoration by proxy, the painter or sculptor being used by the architect to escape with clear conscience, within the accepted terms of modern architecture, from the drabness of his creation.

There are, in short, three kinds of architectural ornamental feature. One is a gift from the architect's heart, and one is descriptive extrinsic art or symbol. But the third and most common type is the architect's admission of his own indecision. For a little of each sort no better example could be found anywhere than Wilson Hall, the ceremonial hall of the University of Melbourne and the crowning jewel of Australian Featurism. The circumstances of this building and the character of its undoubted beauty are worthy of examination as a record of the highest level of Australian public taste in the mid nineteen-fifties, and the highest levels to which Featurism and sensitive creative ornamentation can aspire.

The building is named after Sir Samuel Wilson, who gave £30,000 for the erection in 1879 of the first hall to the design of Joseph Reed, who chose for this special occasion ‘Tudor Perpendicular'. In 1952 it was gutted by fire, and the ashes of its oak-faced oregon beams were hardly cold before a discussion was raging on the style of the building required immediately to replace the burnt one. The division was more complicated than in the usual traditional-versus-modern argument, for the bulk of the Hawkesbury sandstone walls remained upright, and a third school of thought advocated that these be left as a comparatively genuine Gothic ruin, grassed within, and that a new, uncompromising modern building be erected elsewhere. No matter what was to be done, the choice of architect was a foregone conclusion: Bates, Smart and McCutcheon, the firm Joseph Reed founded, was still one of the biggest and the most distinguished in Australia. No doubt the university authorities had in mind also that this office would still possess the original drawings, and reconstruction would be for it a simple task. Mr Osborn McCutcheon, the principal of the firm, succeeded, however, in convincing his clients that neither a reconstruction nor a ruin would be economic or efficient or architecturally satisfactory. Eventually the stone remains were removed, and a great square hall of cream bricks and heat-absorbing glass took their place. This was counted as an unquestionable victory for modernism.

The new hall was opened on 22 March 1956. The praise for it was hardly qualified, except by a lone cry in the Sydney
Bulletin
from the Jorgensen art colony which lives in a Gothicky stone chateau at Eltham, Victoria, made from pieces of wreckers' salvage including bits of the old Wilson Hall. Several prominent men from the university, and outside, who had been strong advocates of reviving the Gothic Revival went so far as to admit their mistake and to acclaim the new building not only for being practical but for being beautiful, impressive, and dignified as well, for which qualities modern architecture was not well-known at the time. The new hall was a personal triumph for Osborn McCutcheon, for without his persuasive advocacy it would not have existed except as rehashed Gothic, and without his masterly diplomacy it might have been far less of a popular success. When introducing his design to the university authorities, McCutcheon announced ‘it will be a box', and went on to explain what means he had in mind for relieving the severity of the box. This is the spirit, then, in which the architects offered it—and let us remember that at the same time they were engaged in building the unrelieved non-Featurist ICI buildings in Sydney and Melbourne.

The box is long: a hundred and seventy feet, and sixty-three feet high. The only dimension at all restrained is the width, which is forty-eight feet, and this is compensated by a transparent side wall: five thousand square feet of glass on the east, through which the enclosed hall looks sideways to a planted terrace. The entrance is at the north and through a glazed foyer fitted underneath the hall's balcony. The foyer ceiling is a fine curve of spaced wooden battens sweeping down low overhead, and the visitor experiences a notable spatial sensation as he passes through this bottleneck into the great airy volume of the hall, the beautifully fitted jewel-box, clear space but for a line of globular feature light pendants strung off-centre to the left; the right wall and ceiling are sheeted as one, as if made from one huge board smoothed by some giant fist to an easy curve at the cornice, the whole using a third of an acre of Swedish birch panelling. Ahead is the square dais and above it, dominating everything, is the principal feature: a giant mural by Australia's most distinguished decorative artist, Douglas Annand. The central figure of the mural represents humanity with arms raised to the sun, his legs still bogged down in an unpleasant tangle of ignorance. Annand designed the piece; Tom Bass, sculptor, carved it in position in the wall's thick blocks of plaster, and Annand painted it. The result is quite the largest but not one of the most impressive of Douglas Annand's works. His sensitivity and his subtle taste bring dignity to the rather pedestrian theme and his superb craftsmanship somehow manages to maintain an attractive delicacy over hundreds of square feet of wall area. Not even the bog of ignorance looks really strongly repulsive. As Annand himself joked, it looks perhaps like the remains of an elegant lobster salad rather than raw ugliness. Like all Annand's murals, its interest changes and develops as you approach it, and finally it will reward the most minute inspection as strange little unexpected intricacies show up even in the depths of the bog. The attention to detail here reflects the nature of the building, the numerous, carefully selected means of relieving the severity of the box: beautiful black Italian marble on the columns freestanding inside the glass wall (its grain, a white tracery of lines, might have been designed by Douglas Annand), a glass mosaic screen that was designed by Annand, fragments of stone salvaged from the first Wilson Hall and built into the creamy-pink brickwork, plain battens, ribbed battens, perforated metal, a rococo sweep of organ pipes, more sculpture, and bronze reliefs by Tom Bass round the outside.

All these things, selected with utmost care and cultivated taste, relieve the severity and transform the box into a glowing space. The new building was a success, but not as modern architecture. In some ways it was more akin to the Gothic Revival building it replaced than to the unadorned modernism which theoretically challenged the Gothic in the stylistic argument that preceded its conception. As in Gothic Revival, and more than in most other carefully stylized work, this building frankly elevates features to the major emotional role. All its ornament—including the giant mural, which was always a commissioned feature and never could have been, under the circumstances, a strongly felt expression—is truly contemporary to the nineteen-fifties, when it was built. It is ornament applied with imagination and skill and in many cases with such sophistication that few people viewing it recognize it as ornament. They are deluded into thinking they are looking at the bland empty box they expected but for some unaccountable reason are enjoying the experience.

Thus modern architecture fought the battle of the Wilson Hall, won it, and was popularly acclaimed the victor; but in the process it had jettisoned most of what was once considered essential to modern architecture.

Acceptance of the structural and functional ethics restricts the range of architectural expression, and this is exactly what is intended. Even without the physical disciplines architecture is stiff and inarticulate compared with the freer ‘fine' arts. But within the discipline it enters a field of contact and participation with humanity which the others can never attain. The very physical limitations of architecture are its strength when they are translated into motive. Comparisons with other arts, usually intended to increase understanding, generally depreciate architecture. The English architectural advocates Clough and Anabel Williams-Ellis, amiably disagreeing with the notion that building beauty is better unadorned, say that it is ‘equivalent to demanding that the lyrics…should be cut out of a play by Shakespeare or the epigrams out of
The Importance of Being Earnest
.' This nice analogy holds only when the architectural ornament is as expressive as the lyrics or as witty and succinct as the epigrams. On this ground no architecture has ever approached the standards of Shakespeare or Wilde. But judged on architecture's ground, on the strength of theme rather than the niceties of execution and the nuances of interpretation, even a plush Victorian theatre may leave the play on its stage standing. The theme in music, painting, literature, may be no more than a peg to hang thoughts on. Loquacious media have the prerogative of unfolding a slim theme by circumfluent action, introducing contrasts and contradictions, and views from many sides. Each new impression may even be more significant than the sum. Henry James tells in his preface to
The Spoils of Poynton
how the theme for the book came to him during a Christmas Eve dinner as the lady beside him dropped an item of gossip into the conversation: ‘a small single seed…a mere floating particle in the stream of talk.' It touched some nerve in his imagination and years later he built a novel on the situation evoked by ‘the stray suggestion, the wandering word'.

The good architect is as restrained as, but no more restricted than, other artists who voluntarily accept the sharpest disciplines of their media. As they refine their means of expression, eliminating all that is inessential to communication, they are obliged to concern themselves more with the idea to be communicated, and to focus it clearly before they attempt to convey it. For the early impressionist painters all was in the execution: the industrious pursuit over a busy canvas of a frail, elusive quality of light. But for Henri Matisse, after years of whittling away at inessentials, ‘all is in the conception. I must have a clear vision of the whole composition from the very beginning.'

The argument that architectural ornament supports the central theme, like minor figures on a canvas, or dialogue in a novel, is only another example of the confusion that usually accompanies analogies between architecture and the other arts. The dialogue is a part of the very form of a novel; without it the theme may not be elucidated. Each brush stroke is a brick of the painting's structure. But architectural ornament is always separable from the form of the building. That is not to say that every material and detailed shape must be austere, barren and steely cold; this was merely the taste of most of the pioneer modernists in their reaction to Victorian elaboration. The twentieth-century architect has wide scope to build up emphasis, punctuation, contrasts as he selects from the groaning larder of modern materials and finishes, but there is a difference between sensitively selected elements which strengthen the motive, and featured colours, textures, or patterns which are deliberately made insistent enough to captivate the eye. These are in the same class as the emptiest ornament and since they cannot be regarded separately, as Ruskin insisted, and have no meaning of their own, they must be parasitic. They must draw their subsistence from the forms they ride, inevitably detracting from the motive. Thus the second objection to features, on top of the ethical issue, is that they weaken the reality and the strength of architecture. At best a feature is inconsequential and at worst it is distracting. It is never an addition but always a subtraction.