The Australian Ugliness

by Robin Boyd

  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.

  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 com
e 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 li
fe’. 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.