The Australian Ugliness (4 page)

Featurism is not simply a decorative technique; it starts in concepts and extends upwards through the parts to the numerous trimmings. It may be defined as the subordination of the essential whole and the accentuation of selected separate features. Featurism is by no means confined to Australia or to the twentieth century, but it flourishes more than ever at this place and time. Perhaps the explanation is that man, sensing that the vastness of the landscape will mock any object that his handful of fellows can make here, avoids anything that might be considered a challenge to nature. The greater and fiercer the natural background, the prettier and pettier the artificial foreground: this way there are no unflattering comparisons, no loss of face.

Or perhaps it is simply that man makes his immediate surroundings petty in an attempt to counteract the overwhelming scale of the continent, as man always in building has sought maximum counteraction to natural extremes—of cold or heat, of all the other discomforts of open air. It is unusual, however, for counteraction to apply in the artistic approach. Throughout the history of architecture there have been buildings which gently lay down with nature and buildings which proudly stood up in contrast. ‘Two distinct trends,' as Sigfried Giedion wrote in
Space, Time and Architecture
: ‘Since the beginning of civilization there have been cities planned according to regular schemes and cities which have grown up organically like trees. The ancient Greeks put their mathematically proportioned temples on the top of rocky acropolises, outlined against their southern skies.' On the other hand Frank Lloyd Wright sometimes nestled his houses so closely into the folds of the earth ‘that they seem to grow into nature and out of it'. Neither of these two constantly recurrent ways of approaching nature is necessarily superior. ‘The artist has the right of choice.' But Featurism is a third and the most common approach to nature which Giedion didn't mention, because it is seldom adopted by respectable architects. It is neither sympathetic nor challenging, but evasive, a nervous architectural chattering avoiding any mention of the landscape.

Featurism is not directly related to taste, style or fashion. The features selected for prominence may be elegant, in good taste according to the current arbiters, or they may be coarse and vulgar. Featurism may be practised in Classical or Contemporary style, in the most up-to-date or the dowdiest of old-fashioned manners. It may be found in architecture or in the planning of cities or the design of magazines, espresso bars, neon signs, motorcars, gardens, crockery, kitchenware, and everywhere between. It is the evasion of the bold, realistic, self-evident, straight-forward, honest answer to all questions of design and appearance in man's artificial environment.

To hide the truth of man-made objects the Featurist can adopt one or both of two techniques: cloak and camouflage. Each has its special uses. Cloaking changes the appearance of materials, and camouflage changes their apparent shapes. Cloaking of common materials with more exotic finishes has always been a favoured practice in Australia. After technology arrived in 1867, in the form of the first wood veneer saw, the practice of sticking a film of imported wood over the plain native boards gradually grew to be routine in furniture manufacture. Now wood veneering is accepted in the most ethical circles of armchairs, and modern technology is continuously offering new, richer veneer temptations. It can provide superbly coloured and grained images of marble and timber photographically printed on to any cheap base, gold more brilliant than any alchemist dreamed in rolls of plastic. These things are well received in Australia. A faint stigma that once attached to the idea of veneering is gone. Brick-veneer construction—a single thickness of brickwork instead of weather-boards on a timber house—is the standard technique for middle-income housing, at least in Victoria. Veneering has become entirely respectable.

Nevertheless, simple veneering has its limitations; it allows the real shape of the object to show through. To disguise reality more completely it is necessary for the Featurist to resort to camouflage, utilising almost the same technique as the services use in wartime. Introducing several different arbitrary colours and shapes, he breaks up the whole thing into a number of smaller things. A Featurist city has little or no consistency of atmospheric quality and plenty of numbers on the guide map directing the visitor to features of interest: the Classical town halls, the Gothic cathedrals, the English gardens. Non-Featurist towns are rare. The description must be confined to unspoilt peasant villages, of which Australia has none, or to towns built specially, and completed in one drive, for a specific purpose. Of these Australia has very, very few, and in most of them Featurism has overtaken the original concept, and advertising, overt or oblique, rules the environment. Some streets in any city manage to grow naturally, cohesively and non-Featuristically: streets of warehouses and wholesale commercial enterprises, streets of economically matched houses, and streets where no one cares. But the Featurist street is the fighting retail street where each new building is determined to be arresting, or the street in the competitive suburb where every house feels obliged to suggest a high degree of success—or if not success then certainly superior taste. If there are mean motives suggested here Featurism can also develop in a city on the crest of high ideals—when public buildings, churches, museums, and others naturally inclined to be outstanding, can sometimes shatter the inherent unity of their surroundings by their conscientiousness and self-consciousness.

All this is the involuntary Featurism of competitive societies. The more interesting sort, the psychopathological sort, is the voluntary, deliberate Featurism practised without economic or political stimulus. The building which is featured in the commercial street is itself broken into features: a spiral stairway featured behind a huge feature window, the firm's name featured on a feature panel, the initial of the name featured in an exotic letter-face. The house which is featured in the suburban
cul-de-sac
is itself a gift box of features: the living-room thrust forward as a feature of the facade, a wide picture window as a feature of the projecting wall, a pretty statuette as a feature in the picture window, a feature wall of vertical boards inside the featured living-room, a wrought iron bracket holding a pink ceramic wall vase as a feature on the feature wall, a nice red flower as a feature in the vase.

The problem of design which occupies a few serious-minded planners, architects, industrial designers, and graphic artists in other practical fields is to find order in a confusion of functional requirements and conflicting economic demands, to blend separate parts into a whole, single, unified concept. The Featurist, on the contrary, deliberately and proudly destroys any unified entity which comes into his hands by isolating parts, breaking up simple planes, interrupting straight lines, and applying gratuitous extra items wherever he fears the eye may be tempted to rest.

Voluntarily or involuntarily, Featurism dogs Australia even when she sets out with good intentions of avoiding it. Consider firstly the case history of the national capital. If ever there was a city planned to be above Featurism, to be grandly whole and united, it was Canberra, the national capital, founded in 1910 as a compromise to solve interstate jealousies. A beautiful valley rolling between the hills of southern New South Wales was selected, and in 1911 an international competition was called for a town-plan. The contest was organized on such parsimonious lines that the British and Australian institutes of architects black-listed it. Nevertheless a hundred and thirty-seven entries were submitted and two distinguished foreigners won prizes: Eliel Saarinen, second, and the less famous but already well-known Walter Burley Griffin, first, with a prize of £1,750. The results met with a familiar mixture of sceptical and panegyrical comment, rising indeed as high as: ‘The City Beautiful…The Pride of Time.'

Griffin had been with Frank Lloyd Wright some four years when he entered the competition with his future wife, another Taliesin member, Marion Mahony. Their drawings showed a town of interlocking circles and hexagons set on a triangle of three main grand avenues—the whole spread wide on the ground and filled in the centre like a lemon tart with a system of three ornamental ‘water basins' fed from the wandering little Molonglo River. The Government acted cautiously. It appointed a board to report on the results of the competition, and the board duly decided that Griffin's plan was impractical. It prepared one of its own, and began forthwith to put this into effect. The new design was so terrible that professional opinion, which hitherto had been hesitant about Griffin, now swung solidly behind him. Patrick Abercrombie wrote in the English
Town Planning Review
that the board's planners were evidently ‘utterly untrained in the elements of architectural composition…Indeed the whole layout is entirely outside the pale of serious criticism…It is the work of an amateur who has yet to learn the elementary principles.' The Sydney magazine
Building
began a campaign to ‘Save Canberra'. It organized a petition which nearly three hundred architects throughout the country signed within a matter of days. Eventually, after a change of Government in June 1913, Griffin was invited to Australia, the departmental board was abolished and Griffin was appointed Federal Capital Director of design and construction. For seven years then he laboured to put his plan on the ground, opposed continuously by the bureaucratic heads whose plan had been turned down. He suffered maddening frustrations. Plans he required would mysteriously go astray. His own drawings would disappear from files; some were discovered more than thirty years later. He kept himself sane by opening an architectural office in Melbourne, but finally bureaucracy beat him. At the end of 1920, when all he had been able to accomplish was the construction of some of the main avenues and roads, the position of Capital Director was abolished and Griffin's services were dispensed with finally.

Nevertheless the official intention was still to preserve the broad lines of his plan. Several inroads were made, and there were many attempts to scrap it before an official revision—a compromise intended to make the Griffin spirit practical—was gazetted and thus sanctified by Parliament. It was, however, no more than a map, a system of roads. It lacked the lakes and it lacked any sign of the co-ordinated, horizontally stressed, monumental architectural scheme which Griffin had outlined in his prize-winning plans and had later developed in sketches and in his mind. The Canberra in which the mid-century Australian motorist lost himself, in which a pedestrian was confounded as in a Victorian maze, had all the practical disadvantages of Griffin's idea without one of the artistic advantages which motivated him.

Canberra's fathers, including Griffin, had conceived the thing as a governmental and administrative monument. They never contemplated commercial, much less industrial, activities. Griffin saw it as a Capital Splendid, imposing and impressive from the start with grand perspectives and great flights of steps reflected in placid lakes, all set on axial lines between the natural features of the site. Perhaps his concept was too swaggering and ambitious from the start, as many asserted. In any case it never had the opportunity to prove itself. The suburban areas were not strong elements of Griffin's plan, but these, characteristically of Australia, grew most rapidly. By the time of the Second World War they were Spanishy, shaded and cosy. Then wooden wartime cottages occupied acres of treeless ground on the less favoured side of town, and afterwards new suburbs grew almost as undisciplined as in any other Australian city. Canberra reached its nadir about 1954. A rule which required roads to be made before houses were constructed was about all that now remained of the early idealism. The centre was still dry and empty, Parliament House was still the ‘provisional' 1927 building next door to the permanent site, and as ill-assorted a group of offices, banks and commercial buildings as ever were built—blue tiles, bacon-striped stone, yellow porcelain, concrete grilles, aluminium—began to disgrace the once-sleepy, arcaded Civic Centre. There were no effective building regulations. The airport reception building was a wooden shed.

The renaissance of Canberra began in 1955 when Parliament set up a Senate Committee of Enquiry under Senator J. A. McCallum. The committee recommended that a new central authority should control all planning, construction, and development. In 1957 the English planner Sir William Holford was invited to visit to recommend modifications to Griffin's plan, and in 1958 John Overall, chief architect of the Federal Works Department, was appointed as National Capital Development Commissioner. It was evident that Parliament, which for thirty years had been divided and doubtful whether the whole experiment of a bush capital should not be abandoned, had finally decided it was there to stay and was concerned at the state it was in. The new Commission reintroduced a measure of control on private buildings and planned an ambitious series of public buildings. A population of 75,000 was expected by 1968 and the total building programme ran into many millions of pounds. Work began on the water basins. At this stage—late, but perhaps not too late— Canberra returned to the principle of planning.

It was already much too late, however, to return to the principle of wholeness. If the Griffin road system struck difficulties, the Griffin architectural system was never even considered seriously. To most eyes unaccustomed to the Chicago School and the Frank Lloyd Wright idiom Griffin's stratified sweeps of shadowy terraces, sudden blank walls and romantic towers, were merely hideous. To anyone who liked the appearance they were plainly idealistic. Griffin was not asked to build a single building (he was busy in Melbourne anyway by the time construction began in Canberra) and the idea of architectural unity floundered. It was not, however, submerged immediately. At first there were tentative efforts to shape the buildings with some sort of consistency in the architectural approach. ‘Provisional' Parliament House still stands as a clean white stucco building of surprising clarity and strength, designed by Government architects at the height of Griffin's influence in the mid-twenties. It has a simple monumental concept of steps and portico, but undoubtedly because it was considered only temporary it was not pompous in scale and it was not over-ornamented. Nor was it ever popular. Its only decoration was designed with a draughtsman's set-square and compasses. Between the blue sky and the pink blossoms of its gardens in springtime it is a picture postcard, inspired, without doubt, by someone's recollection of the Lincoln Memorial. The Hotel Canberra is also successfully watered-down Griffin. It is a series of roughcast pavilion blocks, now painted pink, strung on a figure-eight plan around two courtyard gardens. A little later, in the shopping blocks at Civic Centre and housing estates nearby, the Griffin mould was dropped, but another was picked up: a sort of Colonial Mediterranean of stucco and arcades, a reserved Spanish Mission. Soon after this all idea of unity was forsaken. Every new structure featured a new style. The last big building before the Commission took charge, the Government Administrative office block of 1957, was made in the tradition of permanent governmental buildings anywhere in the world: a stolid, austere monumentality which has found favour with Fascist, Communist, and Australian bureaucracy. About the same time Featurism laid its sticky fingers on the remains of the early attempt at unity. The long arcaded facades of the shopping blocks at Civic Centre began to break up into stripes of different colours as shopkeepers decided to feature their own arches.