by Robin Boyd
The first part of this picture: the planned community with an easy acceptance of nature, mutual respect and a common artistic aim, is no dream. It is seen today in non-Featurist areas in many parts of the world: some suburban areas of Scandinavia, very occasionally in the USA, and, even more tentatively, in parts of Australian suburbs which are known to be slightly rustic and unconventional.
The second part of the picture: the sectionalized houses mass-produced at a fraction of today’s costs while providing infinitely more amenities, is also on the brink of realization. It is postponed all over the world pending a hint to industry that the public is ready to live in logical, realistic, honest-to-goodness shelter.
When people are ready to return to the qualities of the innocent era, while restating them in twentieth-century terms, both parts of the picture will come to life in ordinary suburbs. Then we will know that a psychoneurotic visual block which afflicted the world early in the Industrial Revolution has been cleared, and the world has broken the grip of Featurism at last.
PART THREE
7
THE PURSUIT OF PLEASINGNESS
In earlier chapters it has been suggested that the basis of the Australian ugliness is an unwillingness to be committed on the level of ideas. In all the arts of living, in the shaping of all her artefacts, as in politics, Australia shuffles about vigorously in the middle—as she estimates the middle—of the road, picking up disconnected ideas wherever she finds them. If Australia wanted to build up her mental development to match her muscles she would have to begin by valuing her own ideas more highly, encouraging more of them and gradually building up a climate of confidence and self-reliance. For sake of the argument this undefined term ‘ideas’ has been used earlier to describe a sort of elixir required to transform the crowded, confused, prettified mess of the man-made environment.
Since ideas are the key to all design, and architecture is the key to all the other visual-functional arts, it is not sufficient to leave the nature of the architectural elixir in a muddy state, to substitute for explanation a theocratic term like ‘beauty’. It is necessary to examine more closely the action of ideas and aesthetic theory in architecture, the major field of design which shapes Australia. If and when the grip of Featurism is broken by technology, this triumph for rationalism in the industrialization of building would have to be followed up quickly, to avoid something worse, by the clearest possible expressions of architectural ideas in the buildings which somehow achieved a position in the non-standardized foreground.
Unfortunately, at this time in international architecture ideas are not developing very vigorously. It is a time of action. Ideas, manifestos and the intense, hot eyes of reformers cooled when modern architecture achieved worldly success. About the only article of faith that the modern Modern architect can state with any fervour is that the plain white cemented box of the old Functionalism was not enough; it was materialistic, narrow, dull, even undemocratic, because it reduced man to a sack of flesh and bones and denied him psychological demands, let alone spiritual aspirations. This criticism of the early, simple, butter-box type of modern building is valid if one is judging architecture by conventional values of beauty. But many of the early modernists were fighting for something they felt was more important than beauty. What really mattered to them was ‘the ten-fingered grasp of things’, as the American Louis Sullivan described it. Their archenemy was the aesthete.
Looks were important to the early Moderns, of course, but not what we call good looks. They wanted the look of a functioning thing, the look of a naked, guileless thing. They wanted in seeing to be intellectually convinced of the necessity of every part. They knew of nothing smaller than an architect who thought he could improve on the necessary minimum. On this concept of physical necessity they built up a moral code for building, demanding ‘honesty’ in expression of functions, ‘truth’ in construction and ‘integrity’ in the whole—the first secular architectural theory in history.
Perhaps one should enlarge on this metaphor, for here is the crux of the whole situation in architecture today. The classical aesthetic, for instance, was pagan, with its exacting gods of orders, proportion and ornament which would sanction almost any delinquency if they were appeased. Present-day architecture on the other hand is moving towards theism, without concern for a moral code but sustained by a blinding faith in the unerring rightness and self-justification of one god: Beauty. But the very idea of any sort of deification was anathema to the early moderns, who were brothers of the religious Rationalists. They may have been agnostically unable to describe the actual shapes into which their architecture would eventually turn, but they would have snorted at the thought of introducing a mystical riddle—in this case the word ‘beauty’—to cover the unknown.
There was nothing new in the old Moderns’ demand that every building showed integrity, wholeness and devotion to its own idea; every architectural or aesthetic code requires as much. There was nothing new in ‘truth’. Some of the maddest excesses of the Gothic Revival were done in the name of Honest Architecture. Even the application of science to design was as old as Pythagoras. The past was littered with scientifically reasoned mathematical systems intended to guide the designer. There was, in short, nothing of world-shattering novelty in the old Moderns’ theories of design practice. What was revolutionary was their concept of principle, of the aim and the end of design. For the first time a definable, concrete, material goal was substituted for the indefinable, semi-mystical qualities hitherto referred to, with varying degrees of unctuosity, as beauty.
Functionalism promised much more than cold, articulated efficiency. It held a beacon up on top of the hill at the end of the road. For if architecture were ultimately to serve every physical need of man with scientific exactness while understanding and obeying precisely the physical laws of matter, then it would succeed in identifying itself with creation; or, if you like, architecture would merge into the cosmic pattern—not directly but through man. When that day came, fashion, taste and style would slough off, and pure architecture would stand alone, the supreme art of man. Along these lines the materialist philosophy promised ultimate exaltation, which raised it from the level of the time-and-motion studies and made it a religion, like atheism.
Every architect in every new design had the opportunity to push a little closer to the ultimate in physical perfection. The aim of the old Modern was clear and unconfused. And because of this the discipline along the way was accepted without question. It was seen to be full of meanings and compulsions. But as time went on and a lot of practice within the discipline turned out to be concentration on the more mundane aspects of creature comfort, and much of it was something less than inspired, architecture gradually lost sight of the beacon at the end. Then the discipline became merely a nuisance—especially restricting and irritatingly austere in a rich, expansive era. Gradually the code was broken. The glass box—basic unit of Functionalism— sought ways of making itself, not more suited to housing the human frame but more interesting, more pleasing to the hedonistic eye. The box began adding the features: fascinating textural effects, gift-wrappings, art work at the entrance, and water, water everywhere. Shell structures took on extraordinary forms as architects sought to make them, not more related to human activities, but more evocative or more fun, like abstract sculpture or mud pies. Thus the new Modern grew up, seeking to win back the attention of the wavering eye, seeking to enchant, to uplift, to excite, to create the Kingdom of Heaven here, now, suddenly, by intuition.
But this is not good enough for the vital art of architecture. Beauty is not good enough; it is too full of mysteries. In the rare instances when this indefinable quality can be tied down, it turns out to be a private understanding between an observer and an object. When beauty is the sole motivation in design, it has a tendency to die at the moment of birth. Nearly all the worst excesses of Victorianism, Revivalism and Contemporary Featurism have been perpetrated while the designers were courting beauty ardently
and fairly sincerely. Most of the Australian veneer has been applied in the name of beauty, and most of it gave to its designer and owner a brief moment of pleasure, like any bad habit. This sort of uncommitted visual beauty is one of the greatest dangers. Some different aim is needed to restore a sense of sane direction to the man-made environment. What, then, is a better description than beauty for the quality that moves us in great architecture?
The most cursory examination of the history of building indicates that the first essential in design is the clarity of a ruling idea in the form. Architecture needs some unequivocal statement strong and convincing enough to sway a whole building. It needs, for example, the plain box and unbroken rhythms of a classical temple, or the concise symmetry of a Palladian villa, or the ascendant sweep of a medieval cathedral. On the other hand it may be satisfied simply by the staccato repetition of a factory’s units, or the decisive all-embracing form of a music bowl, an opera house or a culture centre. Probably the earliest and still the most common method of achieving clarity is to plan the building within a single containing shape, like packing a suitcase. The most elementary type of architectural suitcase is the kind that grows vertically from a geometrical plan: a plain rectangle, a triangle, an exact square. The circle has been considered ‘the most sublime form’ for the plan of a building of worship from Stonehenge to the Roman Pantheon to Palladio’s Church at Maser to Saarinen’s chapel at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to half a dozen new suburban churches in Australia. Every regular geometrical figure must have lent itself at some time to the overall plan of a building. In his Fifth Book on Architecture, 1547, Serlio recommended the ellipse, octagon, hexagon and the pentagon among the ideal plan shapes for churches. The last suggestion eventually was taken up by the US armed services for their headquarters in Washington. In addition many composite but simple geometrical plans have been used through the ages: the Greek Cross, the equilateral Y of the UNESCO Building in Paris, the square ring of the US Embassy in Athens, the circle cut from the square plan of Roy Grounds’ house in Melbourne. Plans in the Soane Museum by Thorpe, the sixteenth-century English architect, include a triangular house enclosing a hexagonal courtyard and a house planned in his own initials: I.T.
There are symbolic plan shapes: the cross of the cathedral, the fish-shape of the Church of St Faith in Burwood, Victoria, the shamrock of an Irish exhibition pavilion, the five-pointed star of the Moscow theatre. In all these cases the walls rise more or less conventionally from the geometrical concept of the ground plan. But the horizontal geometry is not necessarily expressed in three dimensions and the final mass of the building may not reflect the quality of the plan. A more subtle architectural overall is the three-dimensional geometric form, not confined to a plan shape: for example a pyramid—point up as in Cairo or point down as in Caracas, or an all-embracing dome as in Canberra, or a spiral as in New York.
In all cases the effectiveness of the suitcase selected depends primarily on the scale and the complexity of the functions to be sheltered. In a comparatively small, single-cell structure: a temple or a chapel or an open living-room, the form is perceptible inside as well as outside and the desired effect of oneness, of an all-inclusive formal idea, is achieved in the simplest and purest way. But as the building grows and is subdivided, it reaches a point where it escapes comprehension unless the human eye is assisted mechanically. The idea behind the vast Pentagon Building in Washington cannot be sensed by a pedestrian. One may gain some impression of it speeding by in a car, and if the human eye is elevated by an aeroplane the building shrinks to a child’s toy and the pentagonal ring reads clearly again for the first time since it left the drawing-board.
Glass assists the architect who tries to keep the overall form visible within a building which function demands must be subdivided. By using glass-topped partitions and low ‘space dividers’ he hopes to minimize interruptions to the form of the main enclosure. But there comes a point, even with the help of the most fashionable substitutes for walls, when the size of the whole or the number of subdividers grows beyond comprehension and the eye loses the impression of singleness. Another familiar type of motive which does not suffer this unfortunate disadvantage is the cellular scheme. Some unit of structural space, based on either a geometric plan shape or an overall form, is adopted as the largest common denominator of the spaces required in the building complex. No matter where or how this unit is used, no matter how informal or unruly is the arrangement dictated by function, the steady repetition ensures an all-embracing unity. Thus a medieval town or a motel may achieve its homogeneity. But sometimes the unit is not recognizable in its multiplied form and the eye loses track again.
The idea, then, may sometimes be no more than an abstraction, a draftsman’s diagram which never could be perceived after translation into the various volumes of an actual, usable building.
The degree of impressiveness of the idea ranges from lost abstractions up to the comparatively rare succinct visual image so simple and sharply focused that it is photographed on the brain after one short exposure. Between these extremes architecture has various subtle means of imprinting itself on the perambulating eye. Although a great architectural complex often is not comprehensible from a single viewpoint, an image builds up in the course of time as the observer passes round and through: thus the tenuous connection sometimes made with Einstein’s space-time concept. Again, the form may be based on a motive of some intricate regularity or internal geometry producing not visual simplicity but an ordered and clearly directed complexity. Sometimes the form may have no apparent basis in geometry—as in the voluptuous Baroque facade, or Sydney Opera House—and yet still be manifestly controlled by an idea comprehensible to the observer.
Even the simplest container rarely is sufficient in itself without various adjuncts, and openings to admit light, air and people. The additions to or subtractions from the basic form may make new points of emphasis and change the direction; indeed the main ingredient of many designs is subtraction, the effect of hollows, voids, and spaces on elementary forms.
With complicated modern functions the search for a motivating idea grows more difficult. What is required now is a simple interpretation which crystallizes or typifies the complex functions. Without this any form which naively follows function will undoubtedly appear to wander aimlessly, and a combination of forms may be so involved and uncertain that all the artifices of composition, all the desperate beckoning to a centre of interest, cannot endow the whole with a single meaning. The great idea is no more and no less than a suitable discipline to mould gently but firmly all the inert matter of the physical requirements, pointing to a reconciliation of all conflicts in a united presentation of a clear statement.
As the psychologists’ theory of gestalt indicates, the unanalytical eye is the busy Featurist-designer’s greatest ally. The conscious mind tends to extract a memorably compact, articulate image even from incoherent form combinations. It gravitates gratefully to any feature. The casual observer, like the tourist with a camera viewfinders’ eyes, is inclined to ignore any elements not directly relevant to the gestalt, or dominating image, the feature eye-trap set by the architect. The test of the comprehensiveness and value of an idea is not simply the persistence of an image, but the extent to which that image recalls and represents the building or composite of buildings.
Advanced techniques now make it possible to extend the range of ideas in economical forms of structure into the subtler shapes of solid geometry: parabolic arches, the twisted planes known as hyperbolic paraboloids, and complex curves as in the giant funnel of Melbourne’s Sidney Myer Music Bowl by Yuncken, Freeman, architects.
With each exciting new mathematical form in pre-stressed concrete or tension cables the world gains a confusing but optimistic impression of change, invention and progress. Undoubtedly many more unfamiliar forms lie ahead of the century, but no shape in itself has ever added to the strength or depth of architectural communication. Experiments with structural sh
apes and expressive shapes fascinate many of the most prominent and imaginative architects and a new shape is often fortunate in its first showing. But novelty’s fascination may be delusive. An unexpected shape sometimes gives an effect so startling that the observer is deceived into crediting it with more power than it really possesses over the whole building. The test is whether the shape, new, second-hand, or antique, is in fact the ruling motive of the entire building or whether it has been applied like a feature: a scoop of flavouring to a tasteless pudding. Technological developments assist architectural expression only as they extend the potential range of motives. The great idea seldom is found in a floundering sprint ahead of the engineers by an architect in search of spectacle; it grows from a wide background knowledge of general technical potential and from the specific information which has been gathered on the problem in hand.
