The Australian Ugliness (31 page)

Aesthetic theory has often observed that the abstract arts have not an extensive repertoire of emotional expression. The traditional expressions of great architecture tend to convey either a great sublimity or a gentle serenity, but here in New Brutalism was a renewed promise of different expressions beyond the aesthetic limitations. The most unfortunate thing about the movement was its catch-phrase name, an only half-ironic conceit which suggested a passing ‘cult of ugliness'; little wonder that New Brutalism met with much dark misunderstanding in its own country, was brushed aside in the USA as ‘poor man's Mies', and has not yet appeared in Australia. The coarse, crude Anti-Featurism of the Brutalists was too much even for architectural students in the land of the Featurists.

Sir Herbert Read has pointed to the need in art for a new word or a new meaning for the old word of beauty: ‘…a Greek Aphrodite, a Byzantine Madonna, and a savage idol from New Guinea or the Ivory Coast cannot all belong to this classical concept of beauty. The latter at least, if words are to have any precise meaning, we must confess to be unbeautiful, or ugly.' Here is the point of collapse of the idiom: to be unbeautiful in the classical concept is to be ‘ugly'. No one wishes to create more ugliness when so much already abounds; hence all good architects should aspire to nothing but beauty. Any building which does not conform to this idea is reprehensible. The external form of Saarinen's sliced dome at MIT has been criticized on the basis of its not appearing at rest from some angles, and photographers are careful to select the viewpoints from which it appears symmetrical, avoiding the disturbing unbalance from some aspects. Australian architectural criticism is usually confined to discussions of whether a dome looks too low or a tower too high. But there is a rich world of visual stimulation, which already happens to include the savage idol and many arts of other eras and civilizations and much mature modern painting, lying between classical beauty and objectionable ugliness.

A command of the technique of architectural composition, of proportion, balance, rhythm, scale and so on, is of course essential to an architect, but the way of everyday modern architecture, as taught in most schools and practised in most streets, is not to control these elements but to be controlled by them. The student is taught not the method of driving so much as the end to which he must drive. He is taught, under the heading of balance, not the sensorial strength of the various forms of unbalance but only how to achieve even balance; under scale, not the odd power over the emotions of unfamiliar scale but only how to preserve ‘perfect scale'; under proportion, not the fascination of the unexpected which Mondrian turned to account, but only how to aim for ‘good proportion'; in the sum, how to design for familiarity.

Gropius has said in explanation of his approach to Functionalism: ‘The slogan “fitness for purpose equals beauty” is only half true. When do we call a human face beautiful? Every face is fit for purpose in its part, but only perfect proportions and colours in a well-balanced harmony deserve that title of honour: beautiful. Just the same is true of architecture. Only perfect harmony in its technical functions as well as in its proportions can result in beauty.' To carry further this analogy with the human face: whether or not we accept Freud's explanation of the aesthetic feeling here as an extension of sexual excitation or Ehrenenzweig's belief that it is a trick of the subconscious to subdue sexual excitement, in any case beauty in human features cannot occur but in a sound healthy structure formed in the nature of the selected materials of bones, flesh, skin, hair and so on. Facial beauty also requires good proportions, which can only mean in this case proportions obeying a familiar rule, proportions which conform to the average features of our own ethnic division of the human race: nose neither too sharp nor too retrousse, eyes big but not bulbous, far but not too far apart, no feature too square or too round or too small or too prominent; everything just right. Thus the judges might select a Miss Universe. But conformation to ‘perfect' proportions may lead only to a vapid prettiness, and ultimately to the demolition of all character down to the perfect mean level: a world of toothpaste models. We do not select our friends by beauty tests; the faces which mean most to most of us are often stern, rugged, noble, perhaps funny faces—but faces of character and as often as not describable as beautiful only if in affection we stretch the word's meaning out of shape. Ugliness of features, on the other hand, is more than the absence of beauty. It requires a positive quality of repulsiveness, perhaps from physical distortion through ill-health or injury or from an expression of evil or some despicable intent.

The analogy between faces and architecture may be pressed a little further, for a positive quality of ugliness is found in building only when the original intention has been frustrated by accidents, clumsiness, mistakes, incompetence—some ill-health in the execution of the concept, or in a dissembling style or structure, or when the concept is in some way despicable, the character of a building pretending to be what it is not or attempting to exalt an unworthy cause or to prettify a grim or unpleasant function.

This last explanation of a cause of ugliness is not, of course, accepted by Featurists, eclectics, or many aesthetes. If one believes in the existence of an independent, eternal quality of beauty one usually believes that it may turn up anywhere. It may, for instance, be borrowed by a department store from a cathedral round the corner provided only that the architecture is reproduced well. A building's ‘beauty need have no relation to its utility (though we like it today if it does)', wrote A. S. G. Butler in 1927 during the morning of modern architecture, ‘and an architect may, therefore, possess an unhampered vehicle for the presentation of any emotional quality which he wishes to appear in his building.' Indeed it is undeniable that the aesthetic qualities of attractiveness, repose, balance and those other pleasing properties of architecture may be transferable; but the beauty so produced—so very easily produced—is cheap. It is not repose so much as an architectural tranquillizer pill of no lasting value. Even if the architecture remains unmoved in the transition from cathedral to department store, the observer's mind will be coloured by the change. Once he knows that the store is exploiting the other, stealing from the collection plate as it were, he can never regain his initial pleasure in the design. The knowledge of the building's function must always, however lightly, alter the beholder's vision, just as a rat may be pleasing to the eye, positively beautiful, a little furry friend, to an innocently fearless child but may look a loathsome plague-carrier and positively repulsive to an alarmed parent.

In all fairness to beauty it should be admitted here and now that a beautiful building can be not only enchanting but absolutely right for the occasion. But the question remains: is every occasion right for it? The vagueness of the word complicates this question; we know there can be many sorts of beauty. Nonetheless, there are times and places when any sort seems inappropriate. Francis Greenway's Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney is beautiful to many people, but every time this famous colonial building of 1817 comes up for public discussion— should it be demolished, restored, preserved?—others state their dislike of it. To these sensitive people the barracks' associations with the brutalities of convict existence overrule any niceties of proportion and mouldings. Indeed the obvious thought and attention given to these trivialities seems offensively incongruous. Beauty which seems out of place is not beauty at all. It is like sentiment out of place: saccharine, inane and self-destructive.

Morality is a personal, very private qualification of beauty. The effect of evil depends largely on how close the evil is to home, to oneself. Consider the remote, beautiful ugliness of Port Arthur, Tasmania. Consider a German concentration camp: Dachau, as it looked shortly after it had been cleaned and opened for public inspection. The leafy courtyard between the dark red brick buildings was a pretty green turning yellow under the gentle autumn sky, and visitors were politely requested by neat signs erected by the American Army not to throw their orange peel, cigarette butts or other trash on the trim new lawns. All was serene, reposeful, restful, and in good proportion. Yet the knowledge of the function of the murder offices and disposal ovens still permeated the court. No building has had a viler function than a Nazi extermination camp; the odium still attached to its architecture was surely strong enough to convince any aesthete who visited of the relevance of the known function to one's total visual experience of a building. In the light of the recent function of this court beauty could exist only in tormented parody, and the normal elements of beautiful surroundings, the same kinds of trees which were beautiful in the open fields beyond the brick wall, were almost obscene in their inappropriateness.

Even in a healthy society, normal concepts of beauty can become in certain circumstances offensively unsuitable, as even Ruskin testily discovered while waiting in a beautified railway station. No one is in temper while waiting, he argued in
Seven Lamps
, and no one wants the symbol of his discomfort beautified. To be appropriate is more blessed than to be beautiful.

The principal distinct functions in the community demand of architecture a distinctive appearance. This was firmly believed by architects through the eclectic era, and to this end the nineteenth century developed a code of styles related to functions. Architects achieved a kind of visual appropriateness by means of the crudest symbolism and association with ancient stylistic periods: Gothic was for churches, impressive columns were for banks, Scottish Baronial was fitting for a clothing magnate's mansion, and so on. The early pioneers of the twentieth century reacted violently against all such conceits and deceits and placed these practices at the head of their black-list. However, in the course of ridding architecture of the association of style, they also tossed out the principle of appropriateness of character. For nearly half a century the
avant-garde
stood for a character so pure and sterilized that it could be applied universally. Moreover, technical developments continuously tended to level all architectural character by leading the motive away from functional planning to structure, and from structure to mechanics. For example, in the tropical areas of north Australia during the nineteenth century comfort was provided by planning devices: the free passage of air under raised buildings, open verandas, breezeways, shaded courts: a pronounced character grew from these distinctive devices. This century has extended to the tropics its sturdier construction, better insulation and mechanical cooling, and comfort now is often accomplished within a building which might have been built in Hobart, except for the somewhat self-conscious louvred concrete sunshades. Within the foreseeable future the cost of power to operate air-conditioning may drop so low in proportion to building costs that the outer walls of a building may be reduced to the thinnest film while a purring mechanical heart produces halcyon interior conditions in Alice Springs or Marble Bar. But what of the buildings not content to be so impersonal? How can modern architects seek appropriate character for special buildings now that the direct association of functions with ancient stylistic categories is taboo? Even symbolism is now suspect: a cross placed on a factory may advertise that it is serving as a church but will not make the building more appropriate. A genuine quality of pertinence is above symbolism and more subtle than the nineteenth century's demand that a building should ‘speak well', as Ruskin put it: advertise by its style and character its function in society. It need not be necessary for the man in the street, before he reads the name above the doors, to know that this building is an apartment block, and that is a hotel, and the third is a sanitarium. It is not necessary for him to be able to tell by a high-pointed roof that the soulful structure across the square is a place of worship or by symbols of solidity that the pompous little edifice is a branch insurance office. These are external and Featurist kinds of appropriateness. A less frivolous approach demands that any architectural sensations should stem from the use of the building, that the occupiers should be presented with a sense of space which is attuned and sympathetic to the activity of the building and its environment and, as an artistic ideal, that the architectural character should heighten the experience of the phase of life being sheltered. If beauty were all there is to architecture, Featurism would be enough. A Featurist building can be as beautiful as one could wish, in a soothing, eye-resting, feeble sort of way. But architecture is more than this. The architect is a portraitist rather than a non-objective abstractionist. He portrays an incident in human life in the medium of its shelter, by the arrangement of the spaces and subdivisions and enclosing forms of structure, and by the nuances of balance, scale, proportion, and the effect upon them of colour, texture and the details of finish. While the forms, spaces, structure and materials may be expressed or expressive in passing, they are important to the building only in their relevance to the character formed in the idea, the motive: whether they support or confuse the issue. The motive, if it is worth anything at all, is everything in the artistic structure of the building. It is the first rule of design, taking charge, superseding all other rules, contradicting the authority of any absolute canon. The technical hints and tips on proportion, scale, balance, and so on are useful only so long as they remain in submission to the motive: the temple's proportions are keyed to the temple's motive; the restaurant's proportions are keyed to the restaurant's motive. The act of architectural creation is the statement of a particular definitive rule, or order, or discipline for the portrait in hand; the proportions which accept the discipline are ‘good proportions' for the building, and those which do not support it, though they may be observing some private agreement with a mathematician, are ‘bad proportions'.