The Australian Ugliness

by Robin Boyd

  As to the architect, all that we know certainly is that he was not the gallant rider of Hardy Wilson’s imagination. He might have been Mr W. Porden Kay, a nephew of Sir John’s first wife, working in his little Colonial Architect’s office in Hobart. And if this were so, it is possible that Mr Kay and Lady Franklin decided to base the design on the classic portico of the Old Sessions House at Spilsbury in Lincolnshire, a building which both remembered. The Spilsbury portico, however, is merely an appliqué design. In the museum the portico is extended in depth to form the whole building. It is a classical building, not just a classical front. On the other hand, the architect could have been James Blackburn of the Public Works Department, an architect who knew the Franklins. And it is conceivable that he was Sir F. Chantrey, in London, for Lady Franklin asked her sister to sound him out when she first conceived the idea.

  Three years after the Franklins left Tasmania in 1846, Christ College was founded and the museum was duly handed over to it. The College authorities had control of the building for the next eighty years, and during the whole of this time they apparently were entirely uninterested and unsympathetic with the idea. The building itself was only an embarrassment. The rents from the rest of the estate which the Franklins left were not sufficient, or not used, for its maintenance. It was used as a store-shed for produce. Apparently apples were occupying it when Hardy Wilson called in 1915. Gradually the little building began to decay. Water from the edges of the roof streaked the walls and ate into the soft stone at the base of the columns. Occasional public protests at its treatment went unheeded. Cottages from the nearest suburb wandered up the hill and stood around awkwardly in the presence of decayed architectural gentility. In 1936, under an Act passed ten years earlier, Hobart City Corporation took responsibility for the building and in 1949 the Art Society of Tasmania reopened it as a gallery.

  Now the neglect ended and the destruction took a new turn. The decay at the bases of the columns was patched with grey cement, practical galvanized iron gutters were added to the classical capping on the sides of the roof and downpipes zigzagged over the mouldings on their way to the ground. A public lavatory, painted green and yellow, was added near the back.

  The Tasmania which the Franklins knew, and helped a little to reform, was a brutal young penal colony which had lately killed most of its blacks as objectionable fauna, still kept convict servants almost as slaves and administered bloody lashings for such crimes as insolent looks. The gradual ascent through the next hundred years into a considerably more humane and decent society coincided with the steady decline, at the same speed, of ruling standards of taste and sensibility. Presumably their paths crossed somewhere about 1900.

  5

  THE NON-FEATURISTS

  Every Australian is not, of course, a Featurist or an Arboraphobe or a destructor in any guise. As the attentive reader will have noted, to every distressing action already mentioned there is at least a suggestion of reaction. In some of the widest generalizations in the previous chapters the small influences to improvement have not perhaps been given due attention. Little, earnest, weekender organizations of sensitive individuals, and talented professionals to guide them, have been present in almost every generation and in most towns. They have been regarded with tolerant disrespect by the mass as they tried to discover good ways to live in Australia. Their spirit was exemplified in many respects in a single building: a house in Toorak, Victoria, designed by Harold Desbrowe Annear for Senator R. D. Elliott about the middle of the First World War. It was called Broceliandi, a white roughcast cube, entirely unornamented with horizontal gashes of windows ingeniously devised to slip in and out of the hollow walls. The structure was on a module of three feet: the living-room carefully proportioned: 36 feet, by 18 feet, by 9 feet high. The big allotment was a controlled wilderness of gum trees not greatly appreciated by the neighbours in this conservative retreat. It was a good building trying to be sensibly Australian, and it was one of the world’s early pioneers of rational architecture. The gum trees went in the nineteen-thirties; the building itself went while I was writing the last chapter.

  All the destruction of recent times, unconscious and conscious, is not for want of critics or experts free with their advice. Anyone who has never visited Australia but who has studied the Australian press would be excused for thinking that Australians are passionate tree-lovers. At least since the last war every large-scale attack on trees in city or suburb has prompted some sort of outcry, and in many communities there are tree-lovers’ associations, like the young, strong Tree Society of Western Australia, and societies for the protection of native flora, not to mention fauna, children, Aborigines, animals. The propaganda of these groups has changed the attitude of the axeman. ‘I’m a tree-lover (swipe) myself,’ he pants to the press columnist, ‘but this one was too big. Its leaves were blocking the roof gutters and its roots were blocking the drains.’

  In this practical sense tree-loving flourishes like town-planning. Every Australian city and big town has a plan, mostly sponsored in the idealistic flush soon after the Second World War and prepared laboriously, with gradually sagging spirits, during the next decade. The problems of the capital cities were too much for idealism. The plans which emerged from the various bureaucratic design departments promised to alleviate the worst tangles of traffic and industrial growth, but they were no help against ugliness. They did not pretend even to scratch the surface of the problems of the violent visual confusion of the streets of competitive architecture or the slightly psychopathic pioneering attitude to the landscape. The corrective plans had no artistic aspirations. They made no attempt to restore unity and dignity or to curb the self-advertising instincts of so many ill-trained or untrained designers. The other type of town-planning, the art, the sort of design which aims for a delightful total environment, is very rare; but it is not unknown.

  From the very beginning there were cultivated men who tried to lead the way to better towns. Governor Phillip attempted to give pattern to Sydney only six months after his settlement had begun. He set aside wide streets and a public square and governmental centre. Colonel Light, in Adelaide, had the advanced idea of a park belt, one of the first ‘green belts’ in the world. He set out the familiar rectangular lots for the bulk of the city, but he allowed for public squares in the middle of the town and he dropped his straight-edge some distance from either bank of the River Torrens, leaving a wedge of river garden to divide the northern suburbs from the city’s heart.

  Artists and architects in Melbourne were criticising Hoddle’s parallelogram plan for Melbourne even before the population outgrew it in the gold rush. In 1850 the Australasian magazine was editorially demanding the appointment of a leading London planner to advise the Board of Works for Melbourne. The city, ‘perhaps destined to become the New York of the future United States of the South,’ was described as it could be if the straight-edge principle were discarded and if Hoddle’s plan was changed to suit the site, with ‘a public forum surrounded by the town hall and post-office, a central fountain, public buildings in elevated positions united by broad streets…boulevards with rows of trees and broad footways encircling the town and separating the suburbs.’

  Canberra, as has been mentioned, set out with good intentions and may yet succeed. The twentieth century also made some other, more modest, attempts to build model communities. Yallourn, a brown-coal town in Gippsland, eastern Victoria, was built in the early nineteen-twenties by the State Electricity Commission under the chairmanship of Sir John Monash. It was conceived as a model town, a symbol of the entry of the state into the new world of power and industry, a showpiece of the Commission. It was given generous children’s playgrounds, sports fields, golf links, swimming pools, a toy town centre and an architectural policy reflecting the nicest taste of the time in cosy, slightly dolls’ house cottages, with high-pitched roofs and suggestions of half-timbering.

  Millions of words of discussion and proposal about city sprawling and satellite towns we
re written during the Second World War and in the readjustment period. None carried more weight than those published in 1950 by the South Australian Housing Trust, which was always the most powerful and vigorous of the various State housing authorities. This report led to the founding in 1955 of Elizabeth, the first self-contained satellite town to an Australian capital. It was seventeen miles from Adelaide and was planned, under Henry P. Smith, the Trust’s chief town-planner, on an area of 5500 acres. Nine residential neighbourhood units surround the town centre, each with its own shopping centres, post-office, schools, churches and so on. A quarter of the whole area was reserved for parks. Each household was given half a dozen seedling trees for its future garden.

  In the flush of industrial expansion about 1950 several new towns, like Eildon in Victoria, were built in remote parts to house the workers of new enterprises. In Eildon’s case the work was a weir and when this was finished the town was sold to private buyers. Most of these towns were planned with a heavy practical bias. The principal buildings were designed by capable architects, but the quality of the whole was only slightly more enticing than that of an army camp. The one town which achieved the homogeneity which is the elementary aim of the art of town-planning was Mary Kathleen, a village of 1300 people in lonely outback Queensland, forty-five miles west of Cloncurry. Mary Kathleen was built in 1956–7 by an international octopus, the Rio Tinto Mining Company, at a cost of something under two million pounds, for the employees at Mary Kathleen Uranium Ltd, a mining and treatment works producing a fortune in uranium. The site selected was more than a hundred acres of comparatively luxuriant land for these dry parts: a wooded river valley three miles from the mine workings. The town-planners selected were unusually sensitive designers for this sort of work: Ernest Milston and Donald Fulton of Melbourne. Unlike other model towns, Mary Kathleen was almost a total design, nearly everything in it being made specially for it. The houses were not standard prefabricated cottages, but were planned specially for the gruelling climate. They were based on a pre-cut modular unit and made in a single string of rooms as cross-ventilated as a railway carriage. One side had a continuous veranda on to which the louvred glass walls of the rooms opened. All the houses were oriented on the north-south axis to catch the prevailing breeze and they were raised on long stumps two feet above the grassed flat which the river watered annually when it swelled in the wet season. The rest of the little town followed model specifications. The houses were placed in four neighbourhood groups round the town centre. The boundaries of each group were determined by the natural divisions formed by trees or rock outcrops. The roads followed the ground’s natural contours. The town centre was formed as a ring around a wooded square. The school was reached by a system of footpaths connecting the backs of the houses and separated from the traffic roads. The buildings were trim, rectangular, economical to the point of austerity, but graced throughout by a touch of elegance in detail, characteristic of these architects’ work.

  In Australia there are these few pleasantly designed towns; there are also artists and nature-lovers and sympathetic souls—probably as many per head of population as in any country. If it were not for them, if the whole of man-made Australia were hideous, there might be more hope for a revolution. But even amid the worst squalor are moments of maturity and great visual delight. Separated by acres of the mean mediocrity of housing developments and miles of cynical ugliness in the commercial streets, there are the few buildings which have been produced by a sympathetic partnership of a sensitive owner and an imaginative designer. These works are the antithesis of Featurism and advertising architecture, and without their little flights of the spirit this era would be unredeemed, but the rare dedicated patrons and architects hardly can be looked upon as the potential saviours of the whole Australian scene. For one thing, although more trained architects per capita probably exist now than ever before, there are still so few that they cannot be expected to be responsible for more than an occasional oasis in the desert. If art is the cure of the ugliness, as many critics suggest, the twentieth century needs many more artists in every country, but here is a fundamental problem. How can the number ever be increased greatly? More schools of architecture with more sympathetic tuition might draw out more latent talents, but the best schools are limited by the capacities of the human material fed to them. They can train and encourage, but they cannot teach the spark of artistic invention which transforms building techniques. The international architectural giants of the century were self-taught in the matter of their art, as are all creators. They were immensely stimulated, perhaps, by some personal contact with a master, but if they had formal training they succeeded in spite of it. Schools cannot be blamed if many practitioners of architecture are conscientious copyists without originality in their make-up. And even if every architect in practice had a brilliant creative flair and an indomitable will, still the greater part of building, being done without architects, by builders, publicity designers, engineers and others, would be unaffected. The architectural profession and its friends have always believed, and probably in the majority still believe, that this is the root of the trouble, that there is nothing wrong with the design of the world that a few more good architects could not correct. A vague article of progressive belief has been that, as time goes on, more and more buildings will be put into the hands of better and better architects until eventually, one assumes, a thousand Wrens and Wrights will be available to care for all new buildings in all towns. But in fact it is not possible to imagine education ever being stepped up to the high pitch required to produce enough architects to care individually for all the houses of Australia, not to mention the multitude of buildings required to shelter decently the more prolific human races of Asia, or the rest of the world.

  It may be possible to imagine that some future Utopia could produce a race so cultivated and rich in creative talent that all its buildings could be designed at leisure by fine artists, but there is no practical lesson for the twentieth century in this dream. For we can envisage this world of art only in terms of art as practised now. Thus we can picture it only as the over-exciting if tasteful sort of chaos which develops every time a group of the most sensitive of the century’s creators of form are brought together for an exposition. The world’s creative leaders could not be expected to agree on the shape of a single building for Utopia if they were given a free hand by some benign world government. A paddock full of the modern world’s twelve best architects’ work would be more like a new World Fair than the fair new world which this century might have been.

  The world-wide artistic problem of Featurism grows from the lack of any consistent aesthetic appreciation or digested artistic code permeating the building classes. The jumpy twentieth century has instead a nervous, wavering eye. It knows much about architecture but not what it likes. The international leaders have long been concerned by this and they propose various methods for re-instituting some sort of unifying code. Le Corbusier has Le Modulor, a system of proportioning based on the Golden Section, which he advocates for every draftsman and artist, hoping that its discipline would unite their separate activities in something like the way ruled lines in exercise books unify the writing in a classroom. Walter Gropius proposes team work, collaboration, groups pooling their artistic resources, to the distraction of the prima donna designer and the general elevation of the common taste of all involved in construction. Mies van der Rohe rests on the principle of intellectually controlled technology, for ‘architecture is more reason than emotion,’ he remarks. All of these solutions to the visual confusion of today deliberately curb to some extent the free spirit of the architect and imply firmly that the salvation of the ugly world can never be left to the great originators. However important and delightful their work may be in isolation, the more creative individualist architect’s work is frequently as full of fight against its neighbours as a new service station. There are not enough artists to cover the world’s architecture; but if there were it might be too many. />
  In the second half of the twentieth century the world has followed Gropius, Mies and Le Corbusier, if not exactly in the way they intended, to allow modern technology to produce unselfconsciously its own building type. This, of course, is the glass box, the international urban vernacular building of this century, counterpart of the carpenters’ and masons’ languages which are still the vernacular in parts of the country. City office blocks in Australia, as everywhere else, adopted the glass box soon after 1950, following the example of the United Nations Secretariat in New York. The first free-standing, fully fledged glass boxes in Australia were the Imperial Chemical Industries building by Bates, Smart and McCutcheon, and Unilever building by Stephenson and Turner, which transformed Sydney Harbour about 1956, and the most impressive before 1960 was ICI House in Melbourne, also by Bates, Smart and McCutcheon, on Eastern Hill. ICI House also turned out to be the tallest building in Melbourne, having successfully beaten its way through a nineteenth-century height-limit regulation of 132 feet. It is more than twice as high as this, twenty storeys, and elevated on land already some hundred feet above the retail valley. Thus it is decidedly a feature of the city skyline; but it is not a Featurist building. In form it has a clear, simple concept of a tall, thin, blind tower of services hugging the side of a much broader and slightly shorter slab of glazed offices. It is a finely polished example of the international glass filing-cabinet type of office block and as good a representative of this type as one could find. It is in fact as good a representative of the crystallized mid-century style as can be found anywhere in the world. Others soon followed it, polishing the glass and metal a little more carefully every time. Next door to ICI a little three-storey cube, Feltex House, built in 1959 by Guildford Bell, has an even simpler window grid, and has eliminated even the subdued colouring of ICI House. Shell House on Bourke Street and William Street corner, 1960, was designed by the giant American firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (and supervised by Buchan, Laird and Buchan), and is again more direct and sober, with great dark sheets of glass held in dull aluminium frames. Meanwhile in Sydney other glass towers were even higher, if not so polished, and eventually there was not a country town which did not have a glass box or two serving as a bank or an insurance company office, or perhaps a factory, a school, or even a church.