The Australian Ugliness

by Robin Boyd

  Even more abhorrent to the pioneers than the thought of dissembling construction was the very suggestion of any sort of ornament. While no one is likely to defend in principle the cruder fraudulent means of achieving architectural effect, the frank application of adornments is another matter. A tradition of undecorated design for function, older than history, is evident in most primitive housing, military posts, farm structures, silos, bridges, aqueducts, sea walls— wherever building was building and was not confused by self-conscious symbols, conventions, pretensions, or the primitive urge to embellish nature. The Victorian era, which felt this urge more strongly than most and had the means of satisfying it, was hardly under way before reactionaries in its midst began dying for a return to simplicity. Many foresaw the disasters of the decorated jungle ahead and warnings came from near and far.

  ‘Beauty, convenience, strength and economy all more or less depend on architecture’s cardinal virtue—simplicity,’ said The Australasian, Melbourne, in 1850, calling for an architecture of organic design in which beauty and utility were one. Horatio Greenough, the American sculptor, was not the first theoretical Functionalist and Anti-Featurist, but of the early ones certainly he was the most eloquent. The aim of the artist, he explained in Form and Functions in 1853, is to seek the essential and, ‘when the essential hath been found, then, if ever, will be the time to commence embellishment.’ The architectural essential was ‘external expression of the inward functions… the unflinching adaptation of a building to its position and use.’ And he ventured to predict that the essential design, when found, would be complete and that completeness would instantly throw off all irrelevancies, commanding: ‘ ‘‘Thou shalt have no God beside me.” ’ Greenough saw any ornamentation as evidence of ignorance and incompetence, ‘the instinctive effort of infant civilization to disguise its incompleteness’, and he was not dismayed when told that his theories would lead to total nakedness. ‘In nakedness,’ he said, ‘I behold the majesty of the essential instead of the trappings of pretension.’ The first downward step in architecture’s ancient history was the introduction of the first ‘inorganic, non-functional element’, thought Greenough the sculptor, whose art was so close to architecture in language and so far from it in content.

  All warnings against the mechanized multiplication of ornament were lost in the clatter of decorative castings during the second half of the eclectic century. Even architects who professed to agree with ethical theory crowded their buildings with non-functional features. No architect of the time believed that the theorists meant their remarks to be taken quite literally. None could think that a sane man would ask architects to abandon all ornament. This understanding was left to the European rebels of the turn of the century, who insisted that a building which could not stand as conceived before the world without cloak or petty titivating was an ignoble object. Ornament on a building was at worst comparable to the slashes of paint on a savage warrior. At best it was a confusion of media, comparable to a written explanation attached to a canvas by a painter who had been eluded by the full pictorial expression he sought. To scrape decoration from the sides of architecture was a simple act of housekeeping after the Victorians’ squalid behaviour. Ornament’s most bitter adversary was now the Viennese architect Adolf Loos (1870–1933), a sculptor’s son who could distinguish between his father’s medium and his own. He was the first to practise the plainness of which Greenough and others had dreamed. He saw the elimination of ornament as a cultural crusade: ‘Evolution of human culture implies the disappearance of ornament from the object of use.’

  When Loos’s buildings and those of the other early Functionalists proved unpopular, ‘stark, forbidding, unlovable’, the psycho-analysts produced a ready explanation: the sexual symbolism of many familiar architectural forms—column, tower, dome, doorway and so on— long-recognized but decently camouflaged by decoration, was now laid bare to the conscious mind. The elements were shocking now that they were stripped of their string courses and acanthus leaves. When the psycho-analysts noted the appearance after the First World War of streamlining and Paris Moderne fashions, they were inclined to misconstrue these cheap commercial styles as heralding the inevitable return of architectural clothing. In fact these styles were not caught in the middle of re-dressing, as it were, but in the middle of undressing. These were merely delaying tactics, part of a transition period between Victorian furbelows and the popular style of today which, though not entirely unadorned, likes to leave its symbols sportively free.

  The question of dress or applied ornament was never, however, the cause of many arguments on the higher levels of design discussion. No serious architectural theorist has countenanced the idea of pinning decorative objects on a wall to clothe or enrich a building already artistically complete in itself. The enrichment which is admired is rationalized by its admirers to be an essential element of the building irremovable without artistic calamity, something in an entirely different category from any applied titivation.

  Those crafts-lovers who have found enjoyment in ornament, from Ruskin to Wright, have wanted to explain their taste, as if they really recognized deep down that there might be something small-minded about their interest. Ruskin, dedicated to ‘war upon affectation, falsehood and prejudice of every kind’, insisted that the only ornament which he admired was not applied, extraneous, or superfluous. ‘You do not build a temple and then dress it,’ he wrote in The Stones of Venice. ‘You create it in its loveliness, and leave it, as her Maker left Eve. Not unadorned, I believe, but so well adorned as to need no feather crowns. And I use the words ornament and beauty interchangeably, in order that architects may understand this.’ Ruskin emphasized that all ornament is relative to the object ornamented. It is not something to be made separately and fastened on. It cannot be good in itself, in the stonemason’s yard, or in the ironmonger’s shop. Before we can judge it, ‘we must know what it is to adorn, and how. As, for instance, a gold ring is a pretty thing; it is good ornament on a woman’s finger; not a good ornament hung through her under lip.’ Ruskin of course is very old hat. No one could be more scornful of him than a bright modern Featurist who keeps his features up to date. Yet the Featurist, if called upon to explain a liking for some featured ornamentation, will argue in precisely Ruskin’s terms. The feature is by no means redundant and superfluous, he will claim; it self-evidently was conceived as an inherent part of the total design.

  This most accommodating argument may be stretched to cover the most repulsive piece of superficial prettification ever devised by man. Ruskin’s analogy with the gold ring merely argues that the antisocial practice of holing a woman’s lips to carry a ring produces deformity, which is ugly per se. This has nothing to do with the crucial questions: Why ornament? Why the nervous, savage urge? How could the sensitive Ruskin say a ring is good on a woman’s finger when she is already ‘so well adorned as to need no feather crowns’? He escaped this issue by likening bodily adornment to a building’s furnishings, which are ‘not the architecture’ (his italics) and no concern of the architect. At another time, in Seven Lamps, he showed in one of his moments of pique that he did in his heart view all ornament in the only light which sanity will allow: as a separate entity from the honest solid stuff of the building. It was to be applied or omitted according to taste and appropriateness. He had this thought while waiting for his train: ‘There was never a more flagrant nor impertinent folly than the smallest portion of ornament in anything concerned with railroads or near them.’

  Despite all pleas of mid nineteenth century critics in America and Australia, the ideological fight against ornament took place almost entirely on the face of European walls. It was a foreign war to America and to Australia almost as remote as any Old World fighting of the time. Even in Chicago, where the sky-scraper and the candid expression of the big building frame were pioneered, ornament clung to the terra cotta. There was one exception: the great, gloomy, powerful Monadnock building by Burnham and Root, which sweeps in an unbrok
en line from pavement to parapet. But Louis Sullivan, the leader of the Chicago School, was also the first and best of the flam-boyant decorators of the new century. ‘It is not evident to me,’ he once admitted, ‘that ornament can intrinsically heighten [architecture’s] elemental qualities.’ But he could not resist adding it to every building he designed. Frank Lloyd Wright, his pupil, never forsook applied ornament for long, arguing as Ruskin did that every decorative strip of wood or fold of metal, which may appear so unnecessary to some observers, is in fact essential to his motive, conceived in the moment of inspiration, and ‘growing like the blossom from the tree’.

  The early European expressions of Adolf Loos’s creed were in concrete and plaster, steel and glass, and other self-consciously machined materials which in their naked state were attractive for all purposes only while the novelty lasted. The Loos revolution failed. Ornament gradually returned, taking new guises including abstract mural paintings, pierced metals, bas-reliefs and Italian mosaic tiles. The new humanist welcomes this. He has no time for ethical shibboleths and depends upon his taste: If I cannot tell by external examination that a column is redundant, he says, I am not concerned with the engineer’s theory that it could be removed without disaster. If it delights me it rises to a plane above the reach of logarithms.

  This attitude is a godsend to the tired architect who cannot achieve proportions and emphases which satisfy him by a sensitive arrangement of the essential elements. It permits him to bring in new elements to complete the composition. A line of ornament, whether a cornice borrowed from Greece or a row of louvres from Brazil, may improve the building’s apparent proportions. A mural by the entrance will give the desired accent which he could not provide in the motive. Arbitrary features, breaks and bends will relieve the monotony of a dull expanse. But honesty of intent and the abhorrence of misrepresentation are no more than a timeless code of craftsmanship. Whenever a new, stricter, convincing interpretation of that code is understood by a craftsman he cannot allow himself to return to looser methods. The integrity of a building is not divisible. Dissembling of any sort reduces the dignity and meaning of architecture. Without this discipline it is only a semi-paralysed sort of sculpture. Discipline does not condemn architecture to naive functionalism. There is all the scope for poetry which any architect could desire in the interpretation of the reality of the function, and the devising of a form to typify it. But the poetic looseness should cease once the formal motive is adopted.

  Observation of the ethics need not imply sanctimony or demand a self-righteous display of every element and the expression of all means to the end. A man may be deemed truthful without his opening his bankbook to everyone he meets. The ethics condemn redundancies and deliberate disguises. But they still permit the sympathetic control of all the essential elements in accordance with the building’s motive. The great builders of the world have demonstrated a number of times that it is within the bounds of possibility, economy and even ordinary everyday architectural practice, to create character while observing the natural laws of structure, the practical rules of use, and the code of Adolf Loos. Architecture is simply the manipulation of necessary elements of shelter, and an architect would seem to have missed his vocation if he finds it impossible to achieve the kind of character he seeks within the structural and practical rules.

  Nothing is easier for a clever stylist than the designing of an attractive building exterior, redolent of any desired atmosphere, if he separates it entirely from the realities of function and structure. This is done every day for the backdrops of the stage, films and advertisements. With his greater facilities for illusion, a modern architect could go further and, outstripping the Baroque, build beautiful gauze and plastic screens in front of his buildings, permanently coloured in any fetching design he desired. But even the most uncaring or cynical Featurist will guess that this proposal is made in heavy sarcasm, because he knows that underneath every responsible human’s apparent insensibility to his shelter there is a desire for some sense of reality in the background of life. The most frivolous Featurist designer, moulding like putty the tastes of a public hypnotized by fashion, acknowledges an instinctive revulsion against blatant counterfeit. Even in the abstract sphere of car design, the fins and dips and chromium strips pretend to be practical. The swept-wing tail fin of useless metal is given a taillight to hold so that it may try to look useful. Arbitrary breaks in the body line are often given little black slots suggestive of a ventilator or perhaps some electronic aid to comfort.

  Not all surface adornment is arbitrary, or bolstering some weakness in the basic form. Sometimes the building is strong in itself, but the ornament is added somewhere along the path of design as an unsolicited gift of love from the architect. Much of Walter Burley Griffin’s ornament in Australia had this look of a sentimental gift, and it may be accepted in this spirit without our having solemnly to hunt for the significance which the donor saw in the gift. Colour may be an architect’s ornamental, irrational gift to a motive. Since something must be applied the architect should be able to select materials which support his motive. So far the ethics are fairly precise: if an element must be included, select the best for the case. But what of murals, mosaics, sculptural pieces, or symbolic or iconic objects like the cross on the church?

  At this point the ethical rules change, as it were, into small type on the back of the sheet. The introduction of other arts and crafts by sub-commissioned painters and carvers may be a helpful type of feature to an irresolute architect, allowing him to dispense with some descriptive lettering and freeing him from the moral and economic responsibility of adding a feature of his own invention to a weak spot in his composition. Painting and sculpture can add their own descriptive and symbolic overtones to the architectural range of expression, projecting currents which could never be started by architecture’s own abstract means, but these emotional overtones have nothing to do with architecture. And, in any case, the ‘free’ arts seldom are invited to add their own messages; usually they are no more than decoration by proxy, the painter or sculptor being used by the architect to escape with clear conscience, within the accepted terms of modern architecture, from the drabness of his creation.

  There are, in short, three kinds of architectural ornamental feature. One is a gift from the architect’s heart, and one is descriptive extrinsic art or symbol. But the third and most common type is the architect’s admission of his own indecision. For a little of each sort no better example could be found anywhere than Wilson Hall, the ceremonial hall of the University of Melbourne and the crowning jewel of Australian Featurism. The circumstances of this building and the character of its undoubted beauty are worthy of examination as a record of the highest level of Australian public taste in the mid nineteen-fifties, and the highest levels to which Featurism and sensitive creative ornamentation can aspire.

  The building is named after Sir Samuel Wilson, who gave £30,000 for the erection in 1879 of the first hall to the design of Joseph Reed, who chose for this special occasion ‘Tudor Perpendicular’. In 1952 it was gutted by fire, and the ashes of its oak-faced oregon beams were hardly cold before a discussion was raging on the style of the building required immediately to replace the burnt one. The division was more complicated than in the usual traditional-versus-modern argument, for the bulk of the Hawkesbury sandstone walls remained upright, and a third school of thought advocated that these be left as a comparatively genuine Gothic ruin, grassed within, and that a new, uncompromising modern building be erected elsewhere. No matter what was to be done, the choice of architect was a foregone conclusion: Bates, Smart and McCutcheon, the firm Joseph Reed founded, was still one of the biggest and the most distinguished in Australia. No doubt the university authorities had in mind also that this office would still possess the original drawings, and reconstruction would be for it a simple task. Mr Osborn McCutcheon, the principal of the firm, succeeded, however, in convincing his clients that neither a reconstruction nor a ruin would be economic or e
fficient or architecturally satisfactory. Eventually the stone remains were removed, and a great square hall of cream bricks and heat-absorbing glass took their place. This was counted as an unquestionable victory for modernism.

  The new hall was opened on 22 March 1956. The praise for it was hardly qualified, except by a lone cry in the Sydney Bulletin from the Jorgensen art colony which lives in a Gothicky stone chateau at Eltham, Victoria, made from pieces of wreckers’ salvage including bits of the old Wilson Hall. Several prominent men from the university, and outside, who had been strong advocates of reviving the Gothic Revival went so far as to admit their mistake and to acclaim the new building not only for being practical but for being beautiful, impressive, and dignified as well, for which qualities modern architecture was not well-known at the time. The new hall was a personal triumph for Osborn McCutcheon, for without his persuasive advocacy it would not have existed except as rehashed Gothic, and without his masterly diplomacy it might have been far less of a popular success. When introducing his design to the university authorities, McCutcheon announced ‘it will be a box’, and went on to explain what means he had in mind for relieving the severity of the box. This is the spirit, then, in which the architects offered it—and let us remember that at the same time they were engaged in building the unrelieved non-Featurist ICI buildings in Sydney and Melbourne.