by Robin Boyd
No one can answer this question because the Australian, in common with most people in the world, has never seen so much as a glimpse of the alternative. Featurism is continuously sold to him by the unofficial international propaganda machine for conspicuous consumption: not merely by the overt advertisers, but by the mutually boosting mass-communication decorators: the Houses and Gardens Lovely magazines from far and near, the syndicated home-maker tips in the women’s pages of the daily press, the decoration service of the paint and wallpaper and appliance companies; everyone selling the thought: you can never afford a good home but you can always afford another nice feature.
Nowhere in Australia is there a significant sign of an escape from the shallowness of this approach. On the contrary the drift seems to be downwards again. The crusader spirit which followed the Second World War produced eventually a high point in co-ordinated progressive endeavour early in the nineteen-fifties, when it was possible for the master plans for the bigger cities to be adopted by popular consent and for Elizabeth, Australia’s only experiment with a new town in the European sense, to begin building north of Adelaide.
Elizabeth, as already noted, started with some idealism. If it had not the most imaginative site—the flattest of treeless plains when there were pleasant slopes nearby—it had at least the full treatment of satellite town-planning theory. But look at Elizabeth now after some eight years of construction, with about sixteen thousand people living in the scientifically spaced separate houses, with its civic centre and shopping malls. Here is a horizontal slice of pure contemporary Australia, all the best and worst of it, and most of the unique qualities of it. English migrants make up much of Elizabeth’s population. There could not be a better place for them to assess the typical Australian way of life while they are making up their minds whether or not to identify themselves with the new country. Apart from a few three-storey flat blocks under construction near the centre, almost the whole of the town is single-storied. Among the bungalows, as the English occupants call them, an attic design appears at rare, regular intervals. Otherwise the town presents a rippled sea of low pointed roofs with a surface some twelve feet above the plain and extending a mile or two in every direction, unbroken but for pipes, wires, and television antennae. In designing the houses the State was benevolent. The South Australian Housing Trust did its best to conceal its formidable powers. Confronted with a rare and wonderful opportunity to create a unified environment, an Australian suburb with visual direction, the Trust instead calculated with all the science at its command a balanced reflection of the average established Australian taste. Anxious not to expose itself to the criticism that it was regimenting people into soulless barracks, it produced a variety of designs, ranging from a low glassy Contemporary to the attic style already mentioned, with its touch of the Tudor. The proportion of each style in the mixture was apparently calculated to be relative to the proportion of acceptance of the style in the community at large. One result is that the charge of creating a monotonous, controlled design has not appeared among the criticisms of the Trust. So successful has the Trust been in this regard that it is difficult to tell where its design ends on the Adelaide side of the town. And it is difficult to pick out the free lots in the neighbourhoods where normal private design and construction are permitted.
Elizabeth, so Australian, is the visual antithesis of new towns in Europe which have been based on similar international town-planning theory. It is also the antithesis, socially as well as visually, of European urban housing as found in the Hansa district of West Berlin. On the fringe of the iron curtain, at the same time as Elizabeth was being planned, a number of world-famous architects were invited there to contribute one design each to a park to be spotted with multi-storey flats. The appearance of the complex when opened in 1957 was co-ordinated, controlled and exciting—very conspicuously so, for the propaganda effect of consciously progressive housing on eyes behind the curtain was even more important to West Berlin than progressive housing. Here families lived in the smallest possible huddle of rooms as high as fifteen stories above the lawns but almost within feeling of the pulse of a city’s life. In Elizabeth each family has a quarter or more of an acre to itself, a lawn for its own games, and some seventeen miles to go to the nearest rumble of urban stimulation. Compared with the Hansa development on any intellectual or aesthetic or artistic or stylistic basis Elizabeth is a complete and derisive failure. Yet on a social basis it promises a prospect for family life second to none in its economic range anywhere in the world: as healthy as any, more private than many, and more capable than most of sustaining nonconformist life.
When so good at heart, why is Elizabeth so depressing to the eyes? This is the crux of the problem of the Australian ugliness. So look at the town more carefully. Each house taken separately is adequate in design. More sophisticated stylists might have coaxed public taste a little further to the left than the Trust’s kid gloves drew it. But, taken separately, the architecture of each house is not important. Elizabeth could have been given the same team of international star architects as was gathered for Berlin; there could have been masterpieces in the collection of houses and yet if everything else were the same Elizabeth would still be a depressing sight. One reason is the absence of trees. The only growths above roof-sea level are the few trees in public planting reserves by the roads. Somehow very few of the young trees which the Trust provided for gardens seem to have escaped above shears height. Only about one household in a hundred is encouraging any sturdy growth, and only one in a thousand seems so eccentric as to be growing gum trees. On the other hand, look over any low front fence and you are likely to find neatly clipped lawn and tended flowerbeds and a red cement urn holding a cactus, or a stork with scarlet legs, or a yellow cement bunny, or a gnome with a coat greener than anything else in Elizabeth. So it is evident that these houses are loved, which is all the justification they need for having been built on their separate lots on their hot, flat plain seventeen miles from town. It is also evident that the language of love is at fault. But more than that, the attitude to trees on the one hand and to gnomes on the other goes deeper than unsophistication in matters of design. The trouble is a deep unawareness, and a wish to remain unaware, of the experience of living here, now. The visual failure of Elizabeth is not the fault of the benevolent State authority or its technicians or professional advisers. It is the choice of the majority, many old Australians and English migrants finding common ground among the cement bunnies.
The contrived variety of house styles to suit all tastes in Elizabeth is not a concession to the people so much as a humiliating insult to them and to the materials of which the houses are built. The attic houses, the conventional suburban villas, the semi-contemporaries and the contemporaries are not different primarily for the sake of difference in character to suit people of different living patterns. This would be most reasonable. But these houses have essentially similar plans and are made different mainly to suit different tastes in decorative external styling, or dreamhousing. The designers must have known which of the styles was the best they could do. All the others were sops to the conservatism or fashion-consciousness of hypothetical future occupiers.
The answers to the problem of building houses for good living for average Australian families are not unknown or obscure. Something close to the ideal can be found empirically by any unselfconscious builder. The text-book logic of Elizabeth’s subdivisional plan is a good beginning. With a small injection of Colonel Light’s kind of daring and conviction it would be excellent. The ordinary evolved suburban house plan is satisfactory. With a little of the freedom won by the pioneers of modern domestic architecture, from Annear to Ancher, it could continue to evolve sympathetically in response to new, less formal, living habits. As for the structural form, the principal problems were solved years ago. If bricks and timber are being used, the methods and shapes of the old colonials were usually exemplary. With a little injection of the ethics and disciplines of twentieth-centur
y design they would be impeccable for today. If new materials or techniques are being used, the machine can be allowed to dictate its own methods. In following the machine and the engineer into unfamiliar shapes, there need be no fear of losing the way so long as the new techniques are concerned with improving the quality of the enclosure for the occupants. There are no real difficulties in the planning and shaping of good houses for Australians, no real reason why every house built is not good. The difficulties are made only by the urges of fashion and prejudices and the misdirected desire to beautify. These are qualities in the community which cannot be very effectively countered by any amount of artistic integrity or technical skill wielded by individuals. They are qualities not confined to Australians. The Englishmen at Elizabeth, like most New Australians in any suburb, are quick to adopt old Australian tastes and tricks. But the uneducated, unguided urge to beautify is a quality in the community which is probably given more expression in Australia than anywhere else. Nowhere else do the ordinary man and woman with untrained, unopened eyes have quite the same opportunity to parade his and her taste in public. Any private decorative indiscretions in the new Berlin apartments are hidden within a fine co-ordinated package made perhaps by Walter Gropius. Everyone is fashion-conscious to some extent, but the Australian, because his home is under his own design control, is fashion-prone.
The cure to a large part of the Australian ugliness is through the Australian eye. Nothing done in this region will clear the slums or put the wires underground or stop the need for outdoor advertising, but it could remove or restrict the most discomforting source of the ugliness: the attempts to beautify.
Visual re-education could be quite formal and idealistic, beginning with youth. School curricula could include, not necessarily more art history, but the subjects of Awareness and Design Integrity. The scholastic approach, however, seems improbable. The shape which visual re-education will be more likely to take in the next few years is informal and commercial, as has proved fairly successful in America. Firms connected with the promotion of all but the cheapest and most essential consumer goods will begin conducting unofficial propaganda for better design as a means of finding new fields for expansion. At a certain point in the course of prosperity the manufacturing establishment realizes its customers are passing through the Featurist barrier and are ripe for attack on a second level of appreciation. At this stage the gear is changed in all advertising and promotional matter to meet an ‘upgrading’ of popular taste. A living example of the power of a commercial stimulus to taste is the town of Tanunda, in the wine district not far north of Elizabeth. Civic spirit here is stimulated by the brandy that bears the town’s name, and one result is the most unmolested and pleasant street-tree-planting to be found in any comparable town in Australia.
There is little immediate promise of any sort of broad visual reeducation. The schools are still not concerned enough and the manufacturers are still not quite rich enough. And since any kind of educational guidance takes at least a decade to be effective, the prospect for the next ten years is not encouraging. The nineteen-sixties, often announced as Australia’s most promisingly rich decade, sometimes threaten to be also richer than ever in the pepped-up party spirit, in mutilation of anything non-carnival in atmosphere, in wild Featurism—foreboding perhaps by 1984 a nightmare of a kind George Orwell never considered. Not a drab spiritual nightmare of regimentation but a mad visual nightmare of indiscipline. But happily this prospect is not inevitable.
A major part of the whole consumer-product manufacturing and advertising world has at present a vested interest in Featurism. No one as yet has a commercial interest in whole design. But as mass-production of advanced technical processes turns to prefabricating larger and larger components of the house, as more mechanical appliances become less status-symbolic and more a routine minimum demand, the commercial need for encouragement of the idea of wholeness, for an Anti-Featurist movement, will arise. A big section of the communications machine will grind into reverse to present the alternative picture, and twenty-six weeks later society’s immutable concepts of beauty will be turned inside out. To gain some idea of the effect, it may be helpful to consider a hypothetical suburb. Imagine a hillside about five miles beyond the rim of the sprawl of any Australian city. At the present time it is occupied only by a cottage, a low wooden place with white walls and a green galvanized iron roof extended to a veranda on all sides, surrounded by shrubbery, and sitting at the top corner of an apple orchard. The orchard takes about one-quarter of the hillside. The remaining three-quarters are wooded. An occasional wattle shows among the gum trees and the undergrowth is flecked here and there with the orange or violet spots of wildflower.
First consider what is most likely to happen to this hill when the familiar suburban sprawl catches up with it. Look at it two or three years after the subdivider’s bulldozers lurch in. A grid of streets is laid across it. All the trees, native and fruit, are down, except in the garden of one house near the top. This house is wooden, with a low corrugated iron roof, and the owners have a name for being eccentric; it is said they haven’t a television set. Elsewhere the trees have been replaced by rows of electric and telephone poles and the wildflowers by tidy beds of English annuals. The houses which line the streets, standing respectfully back twenty-five feet, are all different—or are they? The colours are different: fuchsia pink, ocean green, Miami tan, Californian yellow, and other contemporary shades—in pastel tints on the walls and full strength on the solid panels below the windows; tiled roofs are striped, speckled and spotted; front porches are fancy with the latest fashion shapes in wrought iron and concrete. But look closer: surely all these people must have identical families and identical living habits, for the plan is clearly the same in every case, and each big picture window stares across the street into the practically identical eye of the picture window opposite. Of course neither sees the other for each window is permanently sealed by a venetian blind: it gets pretty warm behind all that glass. The one cool-looking house in the area is the old farmhouse, now used as a service station; one can still see it behind the smart new brick front with the neon signs.
Down where the central road meets the passing highway a little explosion of colours and alphabets marks the shopping centre. This is rather special. For three years before it was built a big signboard announced ‘Glamorous American-Style Drive-In Shopping Center’. It is a row of shops set back from the street quite far enough to park a row of Volkswagens in front on the yellow gravel. The building is made of fibro-cement but one would hardly guess this because each sheet is painted a different contemporary colour, and there are enough advertisements pinned on the front to make the building stand up without any wall whatever. All the shop windows slope forward alarmingly and altogether one couldn’t wish to see a more exciting building. The best of the houses is equally enticing. It is on the corner of the highway opposite the shops, a split-level design with a stone porch made of hard polyvinyl plastic and fibre-glass weather-boards finished in two tones of Las Vegas Sand. It is a little too contemporary for most of the rest of the citizens of this new suburb of Applegrove, but still they regard it with envious respect. It has a kidney-shaped plastic swimming pool set in the concrete stone slabs of the front garden.
This is the likely development, following current practice. What is the alternative? Picture the hillside now developed in a different way, by a community slightly more mature, calmer, realistic and keen to enjoy the best things of life even in the suburbs. Firstly, in such an enlightened community, the very fact that the hillside is developed at all indicates that it has some natural or acquired features which recommend it for residential use. A town-planning authority with real authority and the money necessary to back its decisions must have zoned this area for private housing. Secondly, a certain sympathy with the shape of the land and its natural growth runs through the by-laws of the municipality and the plans of the subdivider. The streets are not in a rectilinear grid. The main roads sweep
round the hillside following the contours. The trees were not entirely bulldozed by the developer; only those in the way of the roads went at first. The others were left on the allotments for each owner to decide whether or not he wanted them. The wires are out of sight at the backs of the blocks, or underground. Two or three acres at the crest of the hill are set aside for community use and a few communal amenities such as a swimming pool of swimmable proportions are set in lawns in a central clearing. Many of the area’s residents have shares in the little company which built and maintains this park. These and other co-operative enterprises provide a potentially pleasant background for the residents of the area. But the third and most important aspect of this new community is displayed in the way each citizen has treated the little slice of Australia under his control.
The houses now are all the same—or are they? They seem to be built of similar materials and they sit amicably together among the trees because none tries to dominate. No front porch or sky-scraper chimney cries for special attention. The visitor can seek out the front door he wants, but all front doors don’t seek him out. There are no special excitements. But on closer inspection it can be sensed that the occupants do not all have entirely the same number of children and precisely the same habits, for their different requirement and tastes in living seem to be reflected in the essential form of each house. One lies in a long thin line along the contour of the hill, the next one curls itself round a courtyard, another steps down the slope crabwise. Yet the whole hill is homogeneous. The shopping centre is clearly an independent unit, but it is part of the pattern.
The homogeneity is partly because of a mutual respect for the natural contours and growth of the hill, partly because of a mutual desire to subdue anarchical display in order to create aearlier chapters it has been suggested that the basis whole community, and partly because most manufactured building products in this hypothetical near future are less frivolous than they are today, having accepted their responsibilities to the world’s homeless millions. Industry saw its opportunity in the growing public reaction against Featurism and the growing desire for more unity and dignity in the home environment. It turned its resources to producing big sectional parts for buildings. It submitted to regimentation to the extent of recognising and adopting standard sizes. This was the big break-through for reason. Suddenly everything fitted together: all manufacturers’ wall panels, floor and roof sections, baths, air-conditioning packages, stoves, sinks, were interrelated and interlocking. Each buyer was able to make his choice of structural units and the new unobtrusive appliances and to arrange these jig-saw fashion during evenings of togetherness, into a plan suited to his family living pattern of the moment. Next year he might change the arrangement, buying a few more wall panels or an extra bathroom package.
