The Australian Ugliness by Robin Boyd

Author:Robin Boyd
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: ARC000000, ARC001000, HIS004000
ISBN: 9781921656224
Publisher: Text Publishing Company
Published: 1979-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

A recognition of the split between creative architecture and honest machine-building, and the elimination of in-betweens, has many side effects. The prospect is not attractive to a workaday designer who likes to do his best with any industrialized products that are available while injecting them with a tasteful portion of his own modest personality. He will fight hard to retain the pleasant status of a semi-artist. The prospect will not be welcomed universally when it comes close to home. It may be argued, even by people who are aware of the inexorable approach of industrialized structure, that a neutrality in architectural character is not an essential concomitant. It may be said that the hodgepodge of the vast suburban plain, stretching between the artist and the machine, is not simply the work of advertisers. It can be argued that the average untrained suburban house designer, though he may be motivated entirely by sales-appeal, gives the community what it wants in his heartless repetition of saccharine house trimmings: even a coarse and crippled colonial Georgian effect or the hybrid empirical style of the veneer villa is socially valuable if it gives the community a sense of familiarity and security. So the developer argues.

The machine is fairly accommodating. It may be turned without economic disaster to produce Georgian or Modernistic or any other style, and for many years yet it will spend a lot of its time, undoubtedly, in the reproduction of handicraft designs. And many who live behind the shallow facades will continue to delude themselves into believing that their mass-produced copy of a caricature is lending them some sort of individual personality. The irony is that prefabrication of the physical matter of the house is not progressing as quickly as was expected largely because people objected to the idea of being regimented; yet the same people accept a much more chilling prefabricated thinking which grips the very spirit of the private home. It is not simply that the mass-produced designs of many site-built houses are as impersonal as the products of any machine; the paralysis goes deeper than the thousandfold reproduction of the conventional veneer cottage.

Even when a building is a lone product on a ten-acre paddock, free to be or to express anything, the strong modern tendency is for it to be cast in a standard mould, like a character in a soap opera. Its conception or motivating idea usually bears no burden of original thought, no artistic passion, no inspiration stemming from the heart of the particular human problem of shelter. The quality which may recommend some new building to our passing interest usually is contained in but a single feature of its front. At the best, architectural quality is often no more than one of a few generally accepted ‘treatments’. For the convenience of the workaday designer a little unofficial stock of standard architectural characters gradually has built up. Each standard is a more or less conscious plagiarism of one of the few spirited leaders of architecture. Select the flavour that suits you best; here is Instant Architecture.

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