Robin Boyd - The Australian Ugliness

THE AUSTRALIAN UGLINESS

PRAISE FOR ROBIN BOYD
AND THE AUSTRALIAN UGLINESS

Effortlessly readable, sharply observant and witty, The Australian Ugliness is an Australian classic. Robin Boyds prophetic, timeless work shows his distinctive gifts as a public intellectual, a creative thinker, an architect with a sense of history and a writer of rare talent. BRENDA NIALL

Robin Boyd was a social historian when political history was the vogue in Australia. He was a long way ahead of his time. The natural and built environments were not yet issues of common concern, but they were already his special concern. Whatever he did had the mark of originality and flair. GEOFFREY BLAINEY

The Australian Ugliness remains an indispensible account of the built environment on the biggest island. More than that, it is a passionate and committed study of national character from which there is still much to be learned. ALAN SAUNDERS

Robin Boyds The Australian Ugliness is a classic of cultural criticism. Judging by the unstoppable spread of treeless, wooden-fenced houses in outlying suburbs and bad buildings in prominent places in Australian cities, its a voice that needs urgently to be heard again. PATRICK McCAUGHEY

Incisive witBoyd portrays most eloquently Australian suburbia the merciless bulldozing of trees to turn farmland around our cities into the endless, low-density sprawl of individual house subdivisions. HARRY SEIDLER

The Australian Ugliness remains a most important book. As our major metropolises near five million population, the suburban sprawl with unimaginative architecture creeps on relentlessly and green wedges shrink. Bold new ideas are needed and Robin Boyd continues to be an inspiration. SIR GUSTAV NOSSAL

Robin Boyds book clarified for all of us that Australian uglinesshow we would bludgeon the land into fertility, cut forests so that power lines could go through, so that cars could take precedence over everything Conservatism reigned supreme; it had to be like that regardless of whether it was logical, whether it was appropriate, whether it responded to climatic variationsThe buildings were the same from Melbourne to Darwin, and they still are the same. GLENN MURCUTT

Fifty years on, Robin Boyds brilliant analysis of the enduring, yet underappreciated, place of the arts and creativity in Australia rings true. He suggests there is something about the Australian sun and meaty diet that produces a high proportion of talented people. The continuing international success of our artists, actors and architects proves this. But, as Boyd argued, we need to value creativity more: it is an essential part of the spirit of Australia. JULIANNE SCHULTZ

Robin Boyd wrote wittily of the post-war Australian suburbia that Barry Humphries knew as a child, and which formed the basis of much of Humphries satire and, in turn, the satire of Kath & Kim. Boyds waspish observations about the material triumph and aesthetic calamity of the suburbs apply more than ever today. SIMON CATERSON

Remains remarkablefor Boyd, architecture means more than the fabrication of shelters: it is the art that most explicitly measures humanitys relationship to natureHis book is less a work of architectural criticism than a scathing literary satire; it belongs in a tradition inaugurated in the eighteenth century by Pope and Swift, who also scourged ugliness and considered it a moral flaw as well as an aesthetic failing. PETER CONRAD

As interesting and amusing and untechnical as a novel. SIR JOHN BETJEMAN

Lucid, passionate and witty. GEOFFREY SERLE

ROBIN BOYD, 1970.
PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK STRIZIC.

ROBIN BOYD (191971) is arguably Australias most influential architect.

An idealist who believed that good design would improve the quality of peoples lives, a tireless public educator and outspoken social commentator, he designed more than two hundred buildings and wrote such classics as Australias Home. The Australian Ugliness was first published in 1960.

CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS is the author of four novels: Loaded (made into the film Head On), The Jesus Man, Dead Europe and the award-winning bestseller The Slap, which is being made into a series by the ABC.

JOHN DENTON is a Director of Denton Corker Marshall, a proudly Australian international architecture and urban design practice with offices in Melbourne, London and Jakarta. PHILIP GOAD is Professor and Chair of Architecture, and Director of the Melbourne School of Design, at the University of Melbourne. GEOFFREY LONDON is the Professor of Architecture at the University of Western Australia and the Victorian Government Architect, having previously been the Western Australian Government Architect.

THE
AUSTRALIAN
UGLINESS
ROBIN BOYD

FOREWORD BY CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS

AFTERWORD BY JOHN DENTON,
PHILIP GOAD & GEOFFREY LONDON

DRAWINGS BY ROBIN BOYD

TEXT PUBLISHING MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA

The paper used in this book is manufactured only from
wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.

The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
www.textpublishing.com.au

Copyright Robin Boyd
Foundation 2010
Foreword copyright Christos Tsiolkas 2010
Afterword copyright John Denton, Philip Goad & Geoffrey London 2010

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

First published in 1960 by F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne; second edition, 1961. Published in 1963 by Penguin Books; revised edition, 1968; second revised edition, 1980. This fiftieth-anniversary edition published in 2010 by The Text Publishing Company.

Cover and text design by W. H. Chong
Typeset in Granjon by J&M Typesetting
Printed in Australia by Griffin Press

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Boyd, Robin, 1919-1971.
The Australian ugliness / Robin Boyd.
ISBN 9781921656224
Architecture--Australia. Architecture and society--Australia.
National characteristics, Australian.

720.994

It is taken for granted that Australia is ugly
ANTHONY TROLLOPE

CONTENTS

Christos Tsiolkas

John Denton, Philip Goad & Geoffrey London

Christos Tsiolkas

A few years ago I was sitting in a friends apartment in Barcelona. She was living on a small street off the Parc de la Ciutadella, near the Arc de Triomf, walking distance from the tourist mecca of the Barri Gtic. It seemed full of old-world character, with rows of ramshackle working-class apartments that housed the citys immigrant population. Every evening we would hear music outside on the street: the frenetic beating of drums; the call and response of English- and Spanish-language hip-hop; the chanting of the Call to Prayer. Music, motion, life lived on the streetseverything missing, I said, from our cities back home. My friend, an expat, nodded her head in agreement at my criticisms of Australian suburbia. But a Catalan colleague of hers who had joined us for a drink rolled her eyes in frustration at our whingeing. You havent seen