The Australian Ugliness (19 page)

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 liberating 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.

The Australian ugliness does need an injection of emotion and poetry, but even if Australia could learn to turn out Frank Lloyd Wrights like she now turns out tennis players and champion swimmers, still there would not be enough architects to give individual attention to all the buildings required. Wright himself offered as a solution to the world's architectural problems nothing more than the proposition that all designers of worldly goods eventually should cultivate the strength and type of imagination which he himself practised for sixty years. But since few enough of his own disciples at Taliesin were able to reach his creative level, this engaging prospect cannot be anticipated with any confidence. ‘A building without poetry has no right to exist,' Wright told his Taliesin Fellowship on his second last birthday, in the Spring of 1957: ‘it should never be built.' But an evening or two earlier when he was asked if he believed that there would ever be enough artists to design all the buildings the world required, he shook his head slowly and answered, ‘No.'

A world where everyone lives, works and plays in structures of high poetry created by brilliant self-portraitists is as unlikely as a world where everyone lives in pure bubbles of technology, and in some respects both prospects are almost as forbidding as the present disjointed mess produced by men who avoid commitments to either side.

The solution, then, is to recognize that there is an appropriate time and place for both the technology of space-enclosure and the architecture of expression, and to work to eliminate the neuter type: neither scientific nor artistic. There is no fundamental conflict between the two logical extremes, between, say, Sydney's Opera House and her Unilever House, for they are not comparable. The poetic expression and the glass box are no more commensurable than the horse and the motorcar. And in the years ahead, as the science of space-enclosure grows more involved, exact and impersonal, the two will inevitably grow further apart—except that science and art, like the opposite ends of a straight line, might meet in an inverted infinite future. On some distant day the scientific builder might arrive at a point he recognizes as perfection, and might realize that his old colleague of the early twentieth century, the artist-architect, might have arrived at the same point from the other side if he had lived long enough. Scientist and artist could meet in a time of perfection, one guilelessly sheltering men whose lives and minds have discovered order and the other intuitively portraying those lives and minds. But we may be fairly certain that the buildings of such an era would bear no more resemblance to any buildings we know now than a perfectly ordered era would bear to our competitive, Featurist society.

And there is the basic objection to Featurism: a moral objection. No matter how successful it may be in pleasing the passing eye, no matter if it pleases to the extent of being judged beautiful, the entirely superficial, frivolous appeal of a Featurist object can never assist human awareness, wisdom and understanding. It is for this reason alone as degrading to human nature as it is to art.

To the average family, unimpressed by architectural theory but eager to get the best house possible, the acceptance of a clear division between creative and machined shelter should provide not less but more satisfaction from the experience of building. Those who derive pleasure from architecture and have the means to indulge their taste would, as always, consult the artist-architect of their choice. He, as always, would create in form and space a sort of personal portrait of the occupants and himself. Those who have no wish or patience to patronize the art of architecture would turn to the machined shelter, would find in it much more space-for-money, and might find even more opportunity for personal expression in arranging and appointing it than they can find now in the conventional housing market.

Indeed, the sooner that the break between the space-enclosing technologist and the creative building-artist is recognized, the better for all concerned. Then the pretence of artistry might be dropped by the great mass of buildings which now only pretend by habit, because it seems the thing to do. Then architecture would not present an even gradation from the sublime to the ridiculous; instead the streets of a cultivated community would present only two types of face: good particular and good universal. When architecture accepts the division a clear line will be drawn below the creative artist and those without his passion will be no more inclined to imitate him than they would ape a conductor's arm movements. Then the art of architecture will be left to those with capacity in the creative medium of shelter while the science and technology of space-enclosure will develop faster free of sentimental strings.

But the problem of Featurism is not, we know, confined to the mother art. It involves all her visual offspring, through engineering, to industrial design and craft work of every kind. The Sydney Harbour Bridge, with its entirely redundant pylons built as features to camouflage the honest steel, may be the crowning achievement of Australian Featurism, but the pylons differ only in scale, not in principle, from most things on three million Australian mantelpieces.

Perhaps two pictures in every hundred which hang in Australian homes and waiting-rooms and the foyers of business offices are not there for Featurist reasons, are there because they mean something as paintings to the person who hung them. The other ninety-eight, whether original oils or reproduced water-colour, whether traditional or modern, impressionist or abstract, serious or decorative, good or bad, are hung because someone first decided that something was needed there on the blank wall: something to destroy the frightening honesty of the blank wall: a Feature.