The Australian Ugliness (5 page)

But the best Featurism and the main tourist attraction of Canberra is the number of official buildings designed and erected by foreign or other Commonwealth countries. Most of the diplomatic visitors have felt obliged to feature themselves for reasons of public relations or propaganda, to display as much as possible of their own national architectural character. The American Embassy set the example about 1940 with the magnificent propagandist splendour of its group designed, unfortunately, shortly before a change of policy in the State Department transformed American official export design. It was conceived as a little Williamsburg, and is in the pure Norman Rockwell style, splendid but cosy, imposing but friendly. Three separate scrubbed red and white Retired Colonel's homesteads stand in a billowing expanse of lawn set with three or four kindly old eucalypts manfully doing their best to look deciduous. Other nations had no intention of letting the USA get away with this coup and they embarked on projects apparently calculated to make Canberra the architectural equivalent of a full-dress diplomatic levee. Unfortunately the falsity of the costumes becomes so apparent in the bright light that the effect is more like a fancy-dress party. The British High Commissioner's island office block near Parliament House is Whitehall Export Modern and is clearly made of stern stuff, capable of keeping a stiff upper lip in the southern hemisphere. It is symmetrical, bleached and negative. The High Commissioner's Residence, on the other hand, is asymmetrical and suitably informal for the colonies. Both were created in London by the Ministry of Works. Advance scouts reconnoitred from the ministry for some time before these buildings were designed, combing Australia for data and for materials worthy of the conceptions. The scouts sent back reports of conditions and samples, but it is evident from the size and orientation of the windows that the package containing Canberra climate leaked while passing through the tropics. All other nations took a similar stand against recognition of the benign nature of Canberra's weather. Even the Swedish Legation, which is the best of the earlier international bunch and in 1935 won the Sulman Award for public buildings, seems to have been designed with a Scandinavian dread of some pitiless antipodean sun. It was planned in Sweden by E. H. G. Lundquist and supervised by the Sydney firm of Peddle, Thorp and Walker. Being low, long and white, it is vaguely reminiscent of an Old Colonial homestead and by this association seems happiest of all the foreign elements in the broad Australian garden. But it is a disappointing export from the home of mature modern architecture. The Embassies of West Germany and Malaya, built in 1958 and 1959, and Japan, built in 1961, belong to the conventional modern school with strong, and only semi-self-conscious suggestions of their respective national architectural characters. The French Embassy, finished in 1959 to the design of Jean Demaret, in Paris, Architect for Civil Monuments and National Palaces, was more consciously Nationalist and frankly Featurist; it is a sort of ranch-style Petit Trianon. Some other foreign embassies, notably the Dutch, are less Nationalist and more Featurist, but the prize example on both counts is the South African building, done in Old Dutch Farmhouse-Colonial, looking like an inaccurately drawn cardboard backdrop for the finale of a musical comedy about Cecil Rhodes. Thus bureaucratic architecture from all nations finally reduced Canberra's architectural mood to farce.

Furthermore, within the failure of Canberra as a city there was another significant failure to achieve a distinguished environment, another attempt at a unified and comparatively non-Featurist design which started with high ideals and lost the way: the Australian National University, established in 1947 to supplement the various State universities. It is a complex consisting of four research schools— for non-clinical medicine, physical sciences, social studies and Pacific studies—and it sits on more than two hundred acres of lightly wooded, undulating land. A ridge down the centre coincides with one of the axial lines of Griffin's original plan, and Brian Lewis, the Dean of Architecture at Melbourne University who was first entrusted with the design, planned the focus of the university on this ridge. At the top he intended to place the tall, blank block of the library, and in front of that a court. Then he planned arms, slightly spread, extending forward on either side of a series of terraces stepping down the ridge. The open axis thus formed was several hundred yards long on dry land, and at the lower end it waded into the future lake and thus extended itself indefinitely. The strict symmetry and formality of this central scheme was allowed to relax on either side and behind the dominating library tower, where small buildings strung themselves bead-wise along the contours.

Professor Lewis's proposed architectural treatment was also relaxed, and generally domestic in quality. Beyond the symmetrical central axis there was no formal unity, but a balance of comparatively small-scale units. He deliberately broke each bigger element of the university into a number of articulated sections, allowing each to be self-governing in form, but he avoided contemporary cliches with as much aversion as he did advanced engineering. He used load-bearing brick walls, tiles and other humble materials to coax vernacular building techniques into a harmonious and easy-going environment. Unfortunately, as in Griffin's case with Canberra as a whole, the university never developed far enough under the original designer to allow the expected quality to take substance. The informal elements remote from the central axis were built first, and without the one thing that linked them: the dominating little-Versailles in their midst. Waiting for years without any real hope of the future lake, they looked merely undisciplined instead of easy-going.

University House, a residential block, social centre and place for formal university functions, was built first and is Professor Lewis's main contribution. It is a big building of flats and bedrooms, a refectory, meeting rooms and offices. The residential section is in a U of three-storey wings yawning to the south, and the rest of the accommodation is in a low wing curved like a hand over the yawn. The hand and the mouth are separate elements, and in this way the design develops: it is Featurism, but of a calm and cultivated kind. The glazed wall on the inner side of the curved front wing looks over a veranda and the long pool, which is a tranquil feature of the courtyard. The refectory is a very tall room, taking the full height of the three residential storeys, and even their roof space, making a big starkly ribbed volume, impressively austere, without as yet the mural intended some day to be featured on the end wall.

The physics block is utilitarian, but impressively so, as these things always are, inside the research laboratory beneath the beaded high-tension towers. About the time it was completed the university began to drift away from the policy of one architect and homogeneity. The John Curtin School of Medical Research, opened in 1958, follows the H-shaped plan set down in the original plan. Its symmetrical facade and central portico avoid, however, even the informality which loosely binds the early university buildings together. After the Curtin School the later buildings of the National University forsook all thought of creating a symbol of the national intellectual centre, forsook all idea of unity, and even of harmony. As in any other Australian university each new project had its own architect, its own brickwork, its own colour-scheme, its own theory, concept, style. Like any ordinary Australian building each new one of the National University knew no higher discipline above the one which someone had arbitrarily selected for it in an isolated moment of conception.

Isolated is the operative word. Absurdly proud, alone in a vacuum, each new Australian building sets out to create an isolated, competitive grain of beauty, like a rose carried on the wind, unconnected with the living bush, like a hank of seaweed drifting in the tide of fashion.

On the higher planes of creative architecture, the buildings are isolated from one another by their lack of a co-ordinating current of artistic philosophy. But now there follows an important secondary consequence of the Featurist approach: on the lower echelons the buildings try to isolate themselves from Australia itself by denuding the ground around them so that they may be better set apart and savoured separately for all the pleasures they offer the eye.

Many sensitive Australians are uncomfortably aware of the rootless nature of their artificial environment. Nevertheless Featurism is frequently perpetrated as much by the artistic section of the community as by the commercialisers, as much by sentimentalists as by the crass and uncaring. As the suburbs grow outwards, as the holiday resorts round the beaches and on the hills fill with campers and weekenders, the continuous process of denudation accelerates. It is the same non-pattern of unrelated snippets of blight whether the countryside which is being overtaken happens to be beautiful or barren. Nature's features of beauty—the waterways, glades, hills, headlands—are not so familiar in the neighbourhood of Australian cities that one would expect them to be treated with contempt, yet the process of their development is this:

Long before civilization reaches out to the beautiful region a few non-conformists find it, love it, and make sympathetic, uncomfortable homes among, and possibly of, the trees. Often these pioneers are artists, some complete with canvas and some content to talk about it. Then comes the first wave of domestication. The people are still comparatively non-conformist, artistic and sympathetic, but they have families and want a house and garden of reasonable conventional form. Like the pioneers, they were attracted to the area by its natural beauty, but unlike the pioneers they do not realize—simply because they never analyse it—what makes the beauty. They are not wanton, but in the course of solving the practical problems of making a comfortable shelter, several trees may have to go. This minimizes the danger of roots in the drains. Then the wandering creek may have to be filled in to reduce the mosquito menace. The newcomers are not without artistic soul, and please do not think they are without taste or aesthetic education. They are as sophisticated in these ways as most readers of Herbert Read or the
Ladies' Home Journal
. Frequently they commission one of the more imaginative architects, even if his fees mean abandoning the idea of an extra bedroom and some clever architectural device means postponing the acquisition of a dishwasher and central heating. Each newcomer builds an attractive house, an original house, a nice feature on the landscape. After several of these have been built, each tugging at nature in a different direction, the earlier settlers look about in dismay and pronounce the area spoiled. About this time the subdividers arrive, and behind them the main wave of suburbia. Then all the remaining native trees come crashing down before the bulldozers, and soon rows of cottages and raw paling fences create a new landscape. The time required for this metamorphosis varies from place to place, but once any man sets his eyes on any pretty place in Australia the inexorable process of uglification begins. It is inevitable because, even while the intentions of the early settlers towards the landscape are honourable, every one of them has different intentions. They condemn one another for spoiling the landscape, but in fact none is to blame individually while all are to blame collectively. It is not lack of imagination or sensitivity or originality which causes the spoliation, but an over-abundance of these qualities without the co-ordinating discipline of traditional craft technique and, more important of course, without a common artistic aim. Behind the tidy gardens of English annuals and feature shrubs in the vanquished beauty-spot each house is a little cluster of Featurist elements. Many of the occupants know that their neighbours have spoiled the area, and hate them and Australia for their Featurism. Yet when they themselves build again, even when they redecorate, they will be drawn back to Featurism as to a drug, hating themselves for it and knowing inside, even as they apply the Peony Blush paint to the wrought iron, how terrible it will all look tomorrow morning.

The visitor who arrives first by air, not from the north at Darwin, but from across the Pacific at Sydney, sees man-made Australia at its very best. He sees indeed an outstandingly beautiful city; none in the world looks better from the air. The interminable stretch of coastline is intricately eroded by the ocean in this place. Dark blue water within the harbour is clutched by dozens of green fingers encrusted with brown roofs, and in a central patch the grey and white teeth of a crowded commercial centre rise into the hazy air. Even the famous bridge is an insignificant incident in such homogeneous magnificence.

Sydney is all Australian. It is the oldest and biggest city, and proud of being the biggest. It has the tallest buildings, the brightest lights, the best and closest beaches with the burliest lifesavers, the fiercest colours on the fastest taxis with the toughest drivers, the brightest benches in the patchiest parks, the busiest traffic. Sydney has the only facilities for night-life worth mentioning, the highest standard in popular entertainment, the smartest and the tawdriest elements of the Australian pattern.

Her three principal contributions to the visible background of Australian life are her early colonial architecture, her harbour bridge and her contemporary hotel bars. The first of these—the good plain vernacular and the sensitive cultivated building from the protracted end of the Georgian era—she has destroyed so industriously as to relieve us of consideration of it at this point. The second, opened in 1932, is still the world's largest suspended-deck arch bridge and is still the most spectacular single man-made object in the land. It is the image of Australia adopted by airlines' advertisers and by Hollywood to establish the Australian locale in a three-second shot. It is a typical Australian big government project in that it was designed outside Australia, as even today the bridges being built over Canberra's proposed lakes were designed in England. It is also characteristic of Australia in that its design is a spectacular example of Featurist irrationality. The giant arch of trussed steel, the suspension rods, and the wide, thin deck they support make up the whole bridge. But they were not enough. The stone pylons at each end of the arch were raised as towers above the deck almost to the soffit of the arch. Most people at the time it was built appreciated that the pylons were redundant features, but the stonework was welcome as a necessary addition to make the steel presentable. The steel itself was understood to be necessarily ugly; it needed camouflage. The pylon towers reversed the natural shape of the arch by transferring the emphasis from the centre to each end, where everyone who was used to suspension bridges expected to see high pylons. The silhouette now became vaguely, cosily reminiscent also of the Tower Bridge in London. The pylon features thus successfully destroyed the visual reality of the steel bridge, while relieving Sydney of the expense of covering the whole arch with stone veneer. They were a triumph of disruptive patterning.