The Australian Ugliness

by Robin Boyd

  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 t
heir 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.

  Sydney’s third main visual contribution, the contemporary bar lounges, are a product of only the last two or three years and their influence throughout the rest of the country has not yet taken full effect. In these constructions Sydney has given vivid architectural expression for the first time in the twentieth century to Australia’s phenomenal beer consumption and gregariousness. Other popular Australian mass activities have not yet produced distinctive architectural types, nor are they of a kind likely to produce new forms. Watching Australian football may have distinctive qualities as an experience: consuming two twenty-six-ounce cans of beer per hour while hemmed in to the bleachers by eighty thousand roaring rain-coated fans. But the stadia required for this activity are much the same as sports stadia the world over. Again, the distinctive habit of having night-club performers entertain two or three thousand people at a time has not yet produced its own building type. Sydney’s new beer palaces, on the other hand, are unique.

  The ordinary Sydney male drinking bars are not very different from those of any other Australian city. Late on any long summer afternoon, with the temperature and relative humidity both in the high eighties, hundreds of cream-tiled and stainless steel trimmed bars roar behind their street doors with the combined racket of glassware, beer dispensers, electric apparatus and amiable oaths. Below the solid jam of red male faces there is a jungle of brown arms, white shirtsleeves rolled to the armpits and slathers of beer held in enormous glasses; above face level are shelves of seldom-opened spirits and never-opened exotic liqueurs and a grey mist of cigarette smoke swirled by a mammoth chromium-plated fan past an inaudibly mouthing television screen.

  This is the bar pattern throughout Australia, with minor regional variations. The new arrangements in the newest hotels of Sydney make a first attempt to civilize the beast. They start with the revolutionary concepts of providing for both sexes and for fresh air. The space set aside in the hotel is usually a very big room, the size of a nineteenth-century ball-room but with no more than a few square feet of free floor area. All the rest is occupied by small, square, metal-legged, plastic-topped tables and a great number of oddly proportioned metal chairs: of normal height but with plastic seats hardly wider than a hand’s span. The big room usually opens through a glass wall on one side to a terrace, perhaps twice as expansive as the room, which is similarly packed with little tables and midget chairs. A muffled Dixieland rhythm from a four-piece band in one corner of the big room manages to rise at times a decibel or two above the level of the conversation of the brilliantly coloured throng perched on the pinhead chairs round the tables of beer glasses. Always there is a television set in view and in some cases, as at the hotel in Sylvania, a southern suburb, the bar terrace extends to take in also a view of a swimming pool.

  The total facility is not exactly describable, in international parlance, as a beer garden, and it is certainly not a night-club. But it is somewhere between the two and the unvarying decorative style heightens the ambivalent atmosphere. The usual colouring is in saturated primaries. The usual materials are split stone veneer, chromium-plated steel, anodised aluminium, sprayed vermiculite plaster, crocodile-patterned hardboard and striated plywood, not to mention the customary plastics. Every element is separated from the next by a dramatic change in tone and texture and is divided within itself by violent contrasts of colour introduced in stripes, wiggles, or random squares.

  Sydney is a summer city, tensed for action round an outdoor life. Every year, when the thermometer drops, winter comes as a bitter unexpected turn of fate. Now the wind thrashes rain among the pinhead chairs on the terraces and against the window-walls, and the drinkers in the unheated ball-rooms huddle closer in their woollens around the icy beer glasses on the plastic tables. Somehow it is a part of the architectural style to put two-tone crocodiled surfacing on the wallboards before comfort in the unseen air.

  Sydney is the unconstituted capital of Australian popular culture. It is larger than Melbourne, older than Hobart and prettier than Perth, and it has by nature and by acquisition most of the things that visitors remark as typically Australian. Sydney is indeed the most proudly Australian of all cities, and the frankest admirer of American ideas. Sydney is alive, impatient to be even bigger and to short-cut ways to be smarter. It is a shop window city. It has more new houses and television sets with fewer new sewerage mains. It has more illustrated advertising painted on higher walls, more moving neon signs, the oldest rows of narrow terrace houses curving over twisting hills in the most picturesque slums. And in such modern palaces of amusement as the musical bar lounges, Sydney carries the contemporary style of the country to its highest intensity.

  The Australian ugliness is bigger and better here, but in substance Sydney is only a sharper example of the general Australian townscape. There is beauty to be discovered here, in two categories,
natural and artistic, but the trouble is that it must be discovered. The fine things, from the glimpses of magnificent landscape to the rare good buildings, old and new, are all but suffocated by the ugliness. The ugliness also falls into two categories: accepted and unintentional. Australia’s accepted, recognized ugliness is no more than the normal blight which afflicts growing communities, especially rich, young, industrialized, growing communities. Part of it is the blight of age: the old buildings, the slum houses, the leaning fences, hoardings, structures of all kinds that were not very good in the first place and have long since outlived their prime, but are left behind to decay as development moves away to new fields. Another part is the blight of expediency: trees uprooted to save diverting a few yards of drain, the ill-considered and uncoordinated assortment of posts, hydrants, bins, transformers, benches, guards, traffic signs, tram standards, a hundred other necessary public appliances, and neons, placards, stickers, posters, slogans—all bundled together like an incompetently rolled swag with loops and tangles of overhead wires. This kind of mess, as made by any progressive community, sometimes is done unconsciously, without thought or care. But often it is done consciously, with a little regret, but with resignation to what seem to be the inescapable facts of industrial life. The mess is accepted without pleasure or complacency, yet without sufficient distaste to kindle a reaction. It is unfortunate, but it is not tragic.