The Australian Ugliness (35 page)

Forms and spaces can be a delight in themselves without any observer feeling any need for features. Architecture makes a statement in its motive, but it cannot pursue a stray suggestion or a wandering word. It will not elucidate. Hence the importance of clarity and strength in the form, which is in a finely conceived building a kind of portrait in building materials emphasising the realities of the human activities being sheltered. If it is clear and incisive it will heighten the experience of these activities by all who come within its range.

Very often a building of this century, of this country, can be most appropriate simply by being objectively scientific, by encouraging the hesitant advance of building technology, and by refraining from emotional comments or bright small talk. But there are times when a building, because of its position and function, is called upon to say something positive, and then it must be emotionally constructive without being irrelevant.

A building of this century makes a constructive, appropriate statement in the same fundamental architectural language as that used by the Greeks and the Goths. To be real it should be based on a motive which recognizes all the practical and psychological problems connected with the building and synthesizes the solutions to all of them in a single driving architectural theme. After all this the building may not have the same visual attraction for the viewer as it has for the architect. It may not seem elevating or inspiring or reposeful. It may not even appear beautiful. A capacity to appreciate the unbeautiful is a quality which no Featurist would envy and few would be interested in cultivating; yet this is the key to depth in appreciation of architecture and all the useful arts. To be free from the sirens of beauty, pleasingness, delight, is to be free to create and to appreciate the real thing, the whole thing.

To the Featurist, architectural appreciation exists only on a plane of trivia. A popular symbol or a personal association invests a certain memorable combination of colours or textures or proportions with some significance, and the visual reaction to them wherever they are repeated is transferred into an emotion of delight or distaste.

Man builds up through the ages and races habitual patterns of visual reception which amount to an evolving aesthetic instinct. At one time and place a satisfaction with symmetry is bred into the eye, and at another a certain arbitrary distribution of the proportions of an object, received as a block impression by the unanalytical eye, may set off the involuntary emotional reaction. Interpreters of architecture have often sought and are still seeking formulas to explain the nature of architectural delight and to tie up all the loose ends of appreciation. This task is all the more fascinating and perplexing in the complex architectural scene of the twentieth century. Perhaps one day, reliable, mathematically precise codes and criteria of modern Western beauty may be calculated. If and when that happens it will be a great day in the factories which are mass-producing the space-envelopes, but the discovery will be irrelevant to the creative architect. To try to find laws of beauty in the works of the great creators is a flat adventure, leading, if relatively successful, only to a sort of gilded prison for the spirit. But the search for the realities of design for everyday use is one of the most consequential activities in the cultural life of a nation.

Even with the highest zeal and best intentions, the visual arts cannot rid the world of evil and ugliness, and they should not be interested in applying pleasing cosmetics to the face of the sick patient. They are doing well if they can portray, honestly, richly and vividly, the world as it is, as distinct from the way it is represented by the paid or honorary purveyors of Featurism.

The universal visual art: the art of shaping the human environment, is an intellectual, ethical, and emotional exercise as well as a means of expression. It involves the strange sort of possessive love with which people have always regarded their shelters. The Australian ugliness begins with fear of reality, denial of the need for the everyday environment to reflect the heart of the human problem, satisfaction with veneer and cosmetic effects. It ends in betrayal of the element of love and a chill near the root of national self-respect.

AFTERWORD

John Denton, Philip Goad & Geoffrey London

Fifty years on, Robin Boyd's
The Australian Ugliness
still reads as a beautifully written rage against visual squalor in this country. And the very last phrase of his diatribe rings as true as ever. There are ugly aspects of our built environment and ugly aspects of our visual culture that, in Boyd's words, leave ‘a chill near the root of national self-respect'. Has anything really changed? There are still philistines in the street but also philistines across the corridors of power, whether in government, industry or commerce, whose design sensibility remains rooted in the eighteenth century, ingloriously timid about innovation or in ignorant thrall to shallow glamour. How rare is it to win generous government and industry support for design and the arts that is institutionalised and ongoing, and embraces more than just the blockbuster or the rolling out of national clichés? Boyd wanted to wake us from the slumber of complacency. It was a pioneering call and remains so.

At the same time, there's absolutely no doubt that the Australian built environment has evolved since Boyd's vivid and satirical portrait of 1960. We've successfully remade our cities to possess a cosmopolitanism of which Boyd could not have conceived. A huge influx of population from Asia starting in the 1970s brought with it massive apartment investment and an intense consumer culture that has acclimatised us to a dense urban condition which will not change. Italian, Greek and Lebanese migrants took up the suburban house from the 1950s and with alacrity in the 1960s and made it their own. Boyd was on the cusp of this, unaware that cappuccino, falafel and souvlaki would become part of daily fare, unaware that the highs and lows and gritty reality of suburban culture would be examined and lionised, however darkly, by artists and architects like Howard Arkley, Mia Schoen and Peter Corrigan, writers like Christopher Koch (
The Boys in the Island
, revised 1974), Melina Marchetta (
Looking for Alibrandi
, 1992) and Christos Tsiolkas (
The Slap
, 2008), and filmmakers like Geoffrey Wright (
Lover Boy
, 1989, and
Romper Stomper
, 1992) and Jane Campion (
Sweetie
, 1989), as central to the productive, sometimes tense multiculturalism that would characterise Australia at least by the 1970s and definitively by the end of the century.

Yet Boyd was absolutely spot-on about design and the suburbs. The look of the suburbs hasn't changed. They have just moved further and further out and the scale of the roads, highways and intersections has ballooned. Nothing has really changed. Developers have offered nothing more. Block sizes have reduced, roof eaves have shrunk and houses—along with their mortgages—have grown larger and larger, justly earning the label of ‘McMansions' and now officially recognised as the largest freestanding dwellings in the world. And, paradoxically, this has happened as household sizes have shrunk. The same building materials are being used as were used in Boyd's day but they are lighter, flimsier, with more steel roof sheeting rather than terracotta tiles. There are now windowless central rooms that are ‘media rooms', faceless double rather than single garages, walled front yards that create private fortresses and ‘al fresco' entertainment zones, functionalised outdoor living spaces designed like cemeteries that have spelt the death knell of the art of suburban gardening. ‘Arboraphobia', Boyd's term for the hatred and fear of trees, is rampant. It has continued unabated for fifty years, as has the fear and loathing of Australian native trees and shrubs in the suburban landscape. What is remarkable and disappointing is that the example set by the 1960s project houses of Pettit and Sevitt (New South Wales), Corser Homes (Western Australia), Merchant Builders (Victoria) and a host of others, all productive collaborations between architects and builders, was not taken up by speculative builders and developers. These project houses held subtle lessons about the benefits of appropriate solar orientation, efficient planning and effective integration of house and garden. The assimilation of their ideas into the common housing market remains an unfinished project in itself. But the housing industry and associated agencies remain doggedly conservative, supported by almost medieval techniques of building, resistant to alternative housing types and sustaining the values that lock everyday Australians into unrealistic expectations of space and energy use and reliance on cars.

The parody of Surfers Paradise as ‘a fibro-cement paradise under a rainbow of plastic paint' is one of the sections of
The Australian Ugliness
where Boyd revels in highlighting a physical site as ‘a musical comedy of modern Australia come to life'. Surfers, he claims, is the capital of ‘Austerica', the epitome of Australia's habit of cheaply imitating the worst aspects of American commercial culture. Yet Surfers, like the suburbs, has also endured and developed, been celebrated and hence accepted within the annals of culture in films like
Muriel's Wedding
(1994) and Matthew Condon's novel
A Night at the Pink Poodle
(1995). Surfers, like its model, Miami, is also a type of place now recognisable across the world as a precursor to the visual gymnastics of a Dubai or Las Vegas. It's a place not especially Australian, part of a global rather than a local phenomenon.

It might be argued that Boyd's fear of a dominant American visual culture was a deliberate caricature and that the late-twentieth-century universalisation of culture has since leavened such influence. The American built environment today provides very few visual models for the Australian setting. But American legacies persist and include the ultimately conservative concept of gated communities, the mawkishly retrograde pleasantries of ‘new urbanism' and the shopping mall behemoths that through their very scale seem to deny any sense of design ambition. Boyd would be alarmed and disturbed by this shift in scale and more so by the now unrestrained consumption of American culture, apparent even in the accents of young Australians shifting in response to much-watched American sitcoms.

Is Australian ugliness any worse than ugliness elsewhere? Probably not, but Boyd saw it as
our
ugliness and something for which we should take responsibility. And, since Boyd's time, there are new forms of Australian ugliness. There are the scores of poorly designed and poorly built apartment blocks in the inner suburbs and inner city, especially Sydney and Melbourne's Southbank, often the work of the same developers who had earlier plastered their cities with six-pack walk-up flats. These will be the weeping sores of Australian cities of the future. We build now with a new sense of bigness at the edges of our cities, with shopping malls, factory outlets and huge barn-like structures to buy a few screws and a doormat. Eye-catching fast-food outlets are accepted as the norm and even Boyd himself was guilty of designing one of those: his controversial Fishbowl Takeaway Food Restaurant (1969) was a polygonal glazed kiosk topped by a giant blue fibreglass ball. It's now not ‘a humble of Holdens' but a larger, faster and menacing force of 4WDs, all soon to be called SUVs, emulating the American acronym and the streamlining of their global marketing. We scar the coast with suburban developments on the edge of ecologically vulnerable sand dunes, north and south of Perth and endlessly from Brisbane, and with unstinting arboraphobic zeal. The desecration of the natural environment is now well understood to be harmful and yet still we don't back off. More—though crude—tools have been put in place to enable local government to manage and even resist change, but often these agencies simply don't have the skills or the will, and hence continue to be unable to resist, let alone limit, the perpetuation of ugliness.

Boyd's messages in
The Australian Ugliness
thus continue to resonate. One way of dealing with the dilemma of the ‘ugly' would be to resort to the relativism of ‘anything goes' and the maxim that ‘everything has value'. But that would be to avoid highlighting moments of artistic, architectural or design beauty; in effect, such a position asks us to suspend judgement. Impossible. Part Three of Boyd's book is, in many respects, a rather old-fashioned way of attempting to impart to the reader some fundamental rules about the production of a ‘pleasing' building design through proportion, clarity of idea and the honest use of structure and materials. This was a valiant attempt but doomed to failure because of changing notions of the canonic in architecture and what constituted art in the 1960s. While Boyd's definition of good design was resolutely modernist and soon to be challenged by the widespread international disillusion with late modernism, behind his rhetoric lies a perceptive observation of a continuing problem within Australian culture, especially in the design of the built environment: a perpetual scorn for theory and ideas.

While the ‘nervous architectural chattering' (of which Boyd himself was an eager participant) still goes on in today's cities, Boyd would be immensely gratified that contemporary Australian architecture is now highly regarded and visible in world terms. He would be gratified also by the level of design culture in most Australian cities and gratified that climate change and sustainability will, by necessity, force new focus on those aspects he identified in 1960, especially the nature and form of the typical suburban home. And, most especially, the value of trees, with their ability to soften city and suburban streets, as bearers of shade and as climatic mediators. When Boyd was writing, Australians were planting extensive areas of buffalo grass lawns and dumping uncounted litres of water on them daily. Now, no more. Our exotic gardens, especially our botanical gardens, are at serious risk. Water is scarce and our houses, suburbs and cities all have to readjust. The effect on the look of our cities will be dramatic. But the big question is: will Australians change? Will the culture change or will the ugly side of Australia win out? As a rare and early public intellectual for the Australian built environment, Boyd pricked our conscience and his concerns remain vital and relevant.