by Robin Boyd
Thus technology upset the even tenor of architectural development by beginning to fulfil a promise it made a century earlier in London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. It became capable, with its standard steel sections and its prefabricated curtains of aluminium and glass, of delivering mass-produced, factory-made shelter. This is a modern wonder which promises the only satisfactory means yet invented of covering one day the world’s exploding population. It promises a way to end Featurism. It also promises, if industrial development continues in a straight line, the eventual elimination of the artist-architect.
ICI House demonstrated that even in a frantically Featurist society a non-Featurist building can be a popular success. In the first week after its opening, visitors were welcomed, and twenty thousand of them paid nearly two thousand pounds to charity for the privilege of looking over the building. It continues to be popular, but despite its non-Featurist design, not because of it. Other equally simple glass boxes without ICI’s claim to sky-scraping were criticized frequently by laymen, from the Governor-General (Sir William Slim in 1958) down. People want Featurism. It fills a need. Its success is a symptom of maladjustment in modern society, which has failed so notably, and not of course only in Australia, to adjust itself to changed conditions on two levels: firstly to the machine, to the replacement of an artist-craftsman by a production line of workers and wiring circuits; secondly, to the disappearance of the patron. After the political and economic struggles were won by the forces of democratic equal-opportunity, there remained the problem of the adjustment of the equalized democrat to the new toys and opportunities, to the realization that the shape of the world around him was no longer safely in the hands of his social superiors. The old patrons of the arts, with the time, means and inclination to cultivate good taste, were seldom now in a position to promote architecture; they wrote books about it which other patrons read. The new promoters of building were corporations, governments, private businesses, and the new class of mammoth speculative builders, the ‘Developers’, all of which will never make an architectural move until, directly or indirectly, they have asked the equalized democrat for his artistic opinion. A share in the responsibilities of the patron was divided out to everyone with his share in the responsibilities of government and trade. But of course it was not accepted. The citizen still exercises practically no control or interest in the shape of his daily surroundings until the sudden need for a new home goads him into a brief predatory quest for the most acceptable good taste. A sort of cottage-and-castle division lingers in equalized society, the ordinary man and woman clinging to the cosiest traditions in their own home while content to leave the nature of all the rest of their environment to others.
The only ultimate cure for visual squalor is the redirection of public interest and responsibility to the entire field of the artificial background of life, and a first step to this end is a better understanding of architecture’s aims and means. However, most attempts to promote this step which have been taken in books and articles of architectural propaganda take the form of a short course in the history and compositional devices of building; and so much of this is confusing and irrelevant. The aim cannot be to make a world of amateur architects. Furthermore, although artistic values may not change, new rules are needed now. For one thing, the effects of industry remove the architecture of this half of the twentieth century from anything but academic connection with the great buildings of the past. The scale of expansion in all younger countries, the enormous spread of cities, the speed of travel everywhere, have increased the scale of visual comprehension in public places. What was once a fetching intricacy of ornament is likely now to be merely finicking, and what was once a bald box is likely now to be a satisfactorily bold element in the vast mosaic. But an elementary article of Featurist lore is that no technological or other new conditions should be allowed special concessions. Anything new must attract the bustling modern worker in exactly the same way as craftsmen-carved masonry used to attract the leisured classes.
The plainness of the new curtain-wall boxes was never accepted as a relief from the visual confusion of the city. ‘Imagine a whole street of them!’ complained the Featurist. Industrial processes, having no wish to offend, responded to the complaint and dressed themselves ingratiatingly. The glass and metal panels of the curtain walls were inclined, very soon after beginning, to look back to decoration of the repetitive type to which a stamping press or a moulding machine so readily lends itself. Technical problems aside, the age of efficient industrialization of the building industry is held at bay by the aesthetic barrier. Awaiting the long postponed conquest by technology, the world today is witnessing a transitional stage. During this time the industrial product is trying to carry on in the tradition of individual building, making each structure appear as personal to the occupants and as individual for the circumstances as possible. The central part of Queen Street, Melbourne, displays more separate new glazed walls than almost any other street in the world—and more variety: two dozen different ways of combining glass, metal strips and coloured panels, all doing precisely the same job. This variety can be provided only at the expense of the economics inherent in the industrial mass-production process.
Mass-produced shelter—whether it is a single box, or a balloon, or is made of adjustable components—has by nature a universal neutrality, a negation of individual character. At the most it may be a chameleon in the colours which it adopts. Its form is fixed by the requirements of the central factory and the general demands of the average human animal, not by the demands of any specific site or occupant. If the prospect of a world of frankly industrialized shelter is depressing to some minds, the prospect of these shelters being less frank and attempting a pretence of sympathy is worse. The idea of anything but neutral character being mass-produced and endlessly repeated has a farcical note; one is reminded of a New Yorker cartoon of a tract development of houses, each with a reproduction of Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘Falling Water’ with its own diminutive waterfall.
On the other hand, if the industrialized building is left to its own nature, to be negative, anonymous and impersonal, it will never offend an educated eye; it will never disturb. While remaining neutral, it may be beautifully neutral. If it is wisely and sensitively directed, if the advice of the great teacher of universal principles in the machine age, Walter Gropius, is heeded, if the terrible temptations of the stamping press and the injection moulding machine and the industrial printery are conquered, then the impersonal aesthetic of the machine may provide a background to life which will restore the dignity that was lost about the time Australia was founded.
If the housing industry were to embrace modern factory methods with even half the enthusiasm of the car industry, in no time it would be producing standardized components or space-enclosures of some kind which could be assembled in various ways to suit the needs of each buyer. Gradually the family itself would become the designer of its own pattern of standardized units, as suggested by Walter Gropius as early as 1909, changing them about if necessary as the pattern of the family life developed. To be sure the spaces themselves and the outside of the house might be as impersonal as a new washing machine.
Whether we like the idea or not it would be blindly unrealistic not to recognize in the ICI and Unilever offices on Sydney Harbour a hint of the machine-made character which will ultimately overtake all construction. Their glass and metal walls were forerunners of a future now forecast with bated breath by research men, of a coming age when the space-enclosure fabric of any building—office, church, home, or school—is some sort of plastic sandwich coursing internally with all kinds of creature comforts, and these sandwich skins, propped perhaps on central service masts, are made so they can be linked together in a matter of hours to make a structure to suit any requirements, and unlinked as casually to change the shape when the needs change. It is a future which will have many jobs for technologists, but no studio to offer the special sort of artist who has been known hitherto as the
architect. He might instead be occupied as one member of some large town-planning organization and his old art of space manipulation would be confined to the siting of various standard components. It would be a future in which the world at long last would be free of Featurism.
It would not be, however, a future free of features. The research man’s forecast of an industrialized landscape wiped of all individual expression is profoundly disturbing to some people; it is also as unlikely as the familiar film set of a city on Venus. Someone will always insist on featuring something: if not a free citizen wanting to feature some symbol of his own success or aspirations, then governments featuring the symbols of their power. Shelter, food and features seem to be fundamental human needs; this is understood. The construction of features only becomes an ism when the object featured has no intrinsic importance or claim to be featured; for instance, the popular ‘feature wall’ of interior decoration: featured for the sake of creating a feature to occupy momentarily the dull, hedonistic eye.
If the negative, impersonal industrialized landscape is considered only as a background on which genuine features may be arranged to taste, it becomes a more acceptable idea even in our present state of visual delinquency. It is the black velvet on which the gems are sprinkled. It enhances the feature gems. They would stand in relief, magnificently featured, like Christopher Wren’s churches among the phlegmatic brick houses of Georgian London, or Francis Greenway’s in Colonial Sydney. But however attractive may be the vision of this future of two clearly defined architectures, it could not evolve easily or naturally from the present twilight world of commercial design, with its established and accepted false effects and empty imitations. The realization of non-Featurism would demand fulfilment of two conditions with which the present age is not in a mood to comply. One is the purging of advertising-architecture and ornament and all pretensions to expressive art from the industrialized buildings of the background. The other is the stepping up of the architectural quality of the foreground: the feature buildings worthy of special design and construction. Bathed in such limelight architecture would be obliged to wade out from the present pleasant luke-warm shallows into greater depths of artistic perception.
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. Your home? Simply add water to Frank Lloyd Wright. Your office? Simply add water to Mies van der Rohe.
House-building postpones the economies of mass-production for fear of losing individuality and personality around the family hearthstone, and the trade perseveres with ancient craft methods barely modified by the atomic age. But if these laborious site-construction methods are to be directed by a pattern of design-thinking which is mass-produced, their greatest asset is wasted. Workaday architecture is in—not a rut, but a number of parallel ruts, each producing no more than a thin shadow of the qualities by which architecture could be transforming building materials. In all the thousands of acres of new housing developments across Australia one can count on ten fingers the different basic types: Brick-Area-Conservative, Georgian-Nostalgic, Holiday-Contemporary, Young-Executive-Contemporary, New-Old-Colonial and so on, each symbolic of a certain economic-social-cultural level to which the area and the occupants aspire. Underneath a few ‘personalising’ features, hundreds of thousands of individually produced villas almost give the impression that they want to appear mass-produced, just as potentially mass-produced buildings of metal and glass want to look individually produced.
Nearly half a century ago a certain group of European rebel architects, Mart Stam, Hannes Meyer and others, revolting against the various forms of Edwardian artiness, declared architecture’s abdication from the fine arts and attempted an entirely rationalized process of design, wishing to skip from function direct to technique without an intervening stage of artistic conception. They were always frustrated because somewhere during the nimblest skip the form of the functional arrangement had to be determined by a mind, and something of the emotional quality of that mind rubbed off on the building. The rebellious school gradually accepted as inevitable this discoloration of the science of building and crept back, somewhat shamefaced, to the fringe of the fine art fold. But while the scientific morality of this early splinter movement faded and was forgotten, the search of economy through standardization and mass-production kept reducing the architect’s area of free creation. In commercial buildings now the area for artistry is so restricted that, almost without realising it, we have come close suddenly to the once desired but unattainable state of inartistry. At last buildings can be erected without trace of an architect’s individuality or evidence of any flicker of emotion.
The great architectural significance of modern technology is that it marks the beginning of the end of the gentleman’s profession of architecture which has served the world with varying success for two centuries. Gradually the science of space-enclosure is drawing away from the creative art of building. It has been a long struggle for modern architecture since the day when a little leaderless international band of explorers turned into the twentieth century and discovered the ethics of design for function and total simplicity. Not all of them read into these ethics the elimination of the artist; on the contrary many recognized them from the beginning as liber
ating him to create free architecture uncontaminated for the first time since builders began toying with painting and carving. The world’s response to the discovery of total simplicity lacked enthusiasm. The naked forms fought against prejudice through the first half of the century. Although the new architecture thought of itself as being in the forefront of the fight for democratic culture it did not share in the victory of the First World War and was denied a place in the League of Nations building at Geneva. But it gained ground steadily between the wars, and then, after the Second World War, it was recognized publicly and internationally in the United Nations building. But even now the glass boxes are usually accepted for the wrong reasons: not as the welcome forerunners of a negative, impersonal background to everyday living in which building technology at last is permitted to come into its own, but as ivory towers, exciting things expected to occupy the same place in our consciousness as the old-fashioned art of creative building.
For as long as the novelty lasts the plain boxes will indeed give a touch of visual pleasure, like fresh air after too long in a fuggy room. But since there is little intrinsic interest in a plain curtain which is merely clean, the excitement derived must be even more transient than that which diverted the world from Gothic to Classic and back again in and out the years of last century. This new fashion, like all the old ones, has no solid cultural foundation. Before long the plain glass walls will be asked to convey something more than wobbly reflections, and the clever stylist will be only too delighted to respond to this challenge. The simplicity is only skin deep; already it begins to pall. The tendency to ginger it up is likely to increase during the next few years. The design of the Chevron-Hilton Hotel in Sydney includes at least six different wall treatments in its two attached but contrasted blocks. The curved slab of the BP sky-scraper in St Kilda Road, Melbourne, has its bold white spandril strips between windows teased by a shallow key pattern, like a dress-makers’ braiding. Before long the architectural equivalents of a car’s tail fins may spring above parapet lines and urban architecture will retire back to the position in the cultural scene which it occupied when the century began. The trouble is that the boxes still have pretensions. They even introduce sometimes a cautious, unoffending mural to try to prove they have a soul. If they were honest with themselves the boxes would admit that emotional expression was the last consideration at the time of their conception.
