ROBIN BOYD: THE CONTEMPORARY UGLINESS

May 2022

Australia has no greater defining architectural figure than Robin Boyd. Even with his early passing in 1971, his work, writings and legacy still reverberate through the professional scene in his hometown of Melbourne. Boyd was born into an Australian artistic dynasty and forged an architectural career that was defined by trying to uncover who Australia was as a nation and the way design can help define this positively. Boyd’s legacy can be seen on the bookshelves of countless Australian architects with his 1960 book The Australian Ugliness – a searing, often satirical study of the underlying concerns in Australian design during the middle of the twentieth century.

Robin Boyd wrote this famous manifesto with a refreshed sense of what Australian should be after returning from a year abroad in Cambridge teaching at MIT in 1957. This stint overseas highlighted to Boyd the alarming trend towards mediocrity in Australia created by the lack of a clear and holistic national image. The Australian Ugliness focused on this notion with the hope of inspiring the expanding nation to positively transition away from its dark colonial roots and embrace both the natural and economic riches that Australia has to offer.

During the boredom of recent lockdowns, many architects in Melbourne were excited to see a new publication After the Australian Ugliness, which was released as a 60-year reflection on the original Boyd publication. The new work was structured as a series of essays from differing and more diverse angles, which intended to reposition and highlight the important legacy of the original publication. Having recently read After The Australian Ugliness myself, I was inspired to develop my own reflections on Boyd’s canonical work and the unpack the concepts from The Australian Ugliness that are now engrained in my own architectural outlook.

As a young student with little background in architecture it was a turning point in my education to be introduced to Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness. My early endeavours into architectural writing were the dense slabs of text that accompanied many of my architecture subjects, which bewildered a second-year student with no previous link to the profession before arriving on campus 14 months earlier.

With a copy of the paperback The Australian Ugliness in hand, midway through my second year of study, I dove into the book. Boyd was one of the rare characters who was able to write passionately about the architectural discourse in a manner that did not scare off the general public. His writing style was mostly without the typical pretence and used dry wit, satire and cartoon portrayals for visual relief throughout. It was in this safe zone that I was able to open up for the first time architecturally and start to unpack some of my own ideas, concerns and concepts around design and more generally living in Australia.

Coincidentally around the time I read The Australian Ugliness, one of my university classes took us through Boyd’s own home ‘Walsh Street’ which he designed for his family in 1958 in South Yarra. This spectacular house was completed while Boyd was writing The Australian Ugliness and exudes all the best that Boyd had hoped Australian design could be. The house is a complete synthesis of the overall design idea, with each element working harmoniously with the next, in a manner that I have rarely outside of the work of Louis Kahn. Much like Kahn, Walsh Street uses the fundamental architectural items of structure (walls), shelter (roof) and outlook (the courtyard at Walsh Street) to create an extremely confident architectural solution that is also a warm and inviting home (something that Kahn was not always able to achieve in his houses).

Walsh Street encapsulated the elements outlined in the sections of The Australian Ugliness, most notably Featurism. This was a term Boyd created to define the unnecessary clutter and layers applied to homes in an attempt to attract the eye, but ultimately confuse the visual clarity of the underlying design. Boyd’s own home at 290 Walsh Street is the refined work of an architect at their peak - a confidently simple building. A design that highlights the importance of a clear and honest concept that is executed holistically. It is these ideals in both Boyd’s designs and writings that lead me to continually find myself returning to his work – especially in contemporary times when the typical built outcomes resemble the opposite of the pure joy and timelessness of Walsh Street.

At the heart of The Australian Ugliness is Boyd striving for Australia to do better. Even in his goading of Australia’s flaws there is the desire for the nation to acknowledge and chart a course towards improvement. Sadly, Boyd got to watch over little of this desired change due to his early passing in 1971. Since this time the trajectory of Australia residential design has followed two paths, with one slowly and mercilessly dominating the other as the years have progressed and it is these two paths that I will explore further below:

Bespoke Architectural Design:

Australian residential architectural design has potentially never been better, especially in Melbourne the contemporary work being produced today largely achieves the ideals that Boyd preached in The Australian Ugliness. The contemporary projects by firms such as Kennedy Nolan and Kerstin Thompson Architects continues and expands upon the legacy of Robin Boyd, with work that is sensitive to its surroundings, acknowledges the history of the land and are well-crafted innovative designs.

The lucky ones among us who can overcome both the financial impediments to build them and the social impediments to access them, are blessed with some of the finest architecturally designed residential outcomes anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, these barriers have been too great for most Australians, with the use of architectural design in the residential sector diminishing to a very small percentage. This has created a concerning trend where the importance of the profession is reducing year on year, slowly pigeon holing the profession as a folly for the elites.

Volume Built Housing:

The Australian residential housing sector is whole-heartedly dominated by the volume-built housing companies that build new homes by the tens of thousands each year. These companies have perfected the refinement of limited selection housing to achieve the most homogeneously cost-efficient homes possible. These developments continue irrespective of their location or setting – devoid of any true connection to the rich Australian landscape. The combination of these often careless efficiencies do obviously create houses that are typically significantly more affordable than bespoke architecturally designed homes.

Somewhat amusingly these volume-built houses have avoided Boyd’s key concern of Featurism. Given their unfortunate consistency from house to house, street to street, greenfield estate to greenfield estate, all notions of the visual clutter expressed by Boyd are long gone – replaced by the opposite issue. As noted in my January 2022 post on ‘Scale’ these developments are seemingly producing worse and worse outcomes at larger and larger scales. This process over time is creating a bigger gulf every year between volume-built and architecturally designed house – a growing concern that is becoming tougher to bridge every year.

The evolving void appearing between the ‘two sides’ of residential design is a trend that is only gaining momentum with each side typically unwilling to yield any ground on their agenda: the architect as the high-minded visionary and the volume builder as the capitalist machine. The general view of the market in Australia in 2022 is one where the prospective home owner / buyer has to choose from these two sides of the divide. These generalisations are just that, and there are companies working in the middle ground, but they are a small minority and much like architectural design are struggling to compete against the trends of the mammoth volume building machine. This is something Robin Boyd strived for himself as the original director of the Small Homes Service – one of the rare, but ultimately not sustained, successful programs for architecturally designed homes for the general public.

For a substantial portion of the market the volume-built product serves an important asset in delivering cost effective housing to those who cannot afford most options and would otherwise have to remain renting. Although I do wish that there would be a greater focus on the quality over quantity – with the owners of these homes typically driven towards larger floor areas, at the dismissal of better design and more durable materials. The financial constraints limit the options for this portion of the market and therefore the ability to obtain a newly built house that meets contemporary building and energy codes cannot be dismissed – but this does not mean we cannot strive for more and callout the shortcomings of these volume-built developments.

The concern at the centre of my architectural thought loop, the one that was first triggered by Boyd back in my early years of study, continually ends up back at the same confusion and sadness with the middle portion of the market: those who can afford better design, an enhanced living environment and an asset that is proven to have a higher typical resale value (RAsP 2020 Study) and choose not to. This decision usually falls into one of two baskets:

1. Those who prioritise an excessively big house and eliminate architectural design due to the cost of their chosen large scale.

2. Those who don’t realise there are (or cannot access) the options out there due to the inability of architecture to market itself well enough (or provide enough options) against the might of the volume-built marketing machine that every year seems to be further and further pushing architecture into the slimmest minority.

Given this current state we must do all that we can to reduce the number of missed opportunities across the generations of residential construction currently underway.

The Horsham Conundrum:

This conundrum of how to activate design options in this ‘gap’ has always been something that I have only explored academically, as I have been employed in high-end residential design ever since graduating from university. In this time, I have worked across Melbourne, San Francisco and now back in rural Victoria and for the first time in my career I am looking at designing for the ‘gap’ between the two sides of the home options divide. Currently I am exploring how to design an architecturally responsible house as a standard investment property in Horsham, Victoria, a town almost entirely dominated by volume-built houses.

This opportunity has arisen after subdividing a block in inner Horsham and completing an architecturally designed house for my mother on one half of the original site. My mother’s house was completed earlier this year and now the focus has turned to the adjacent site. For the first time in my career, I am grappling with the task of utilising the budget of a standard volume-built house and looking to build a house for future resale. A task in the Australian market that is often harder than designing a bespoke home for a client with financial and ideological flexibility. This process has me questioning how can we create designs that have comparable or ideally better value than the volume-built competition, but achieve an outcome that has true design and environmental integrity to the site and occupants of the dwelling.

The earliest phases of design and research for the house in the ‘gap’ has begun and I am thankful as always for the enduring ideas and passion of Robin Boyd at this time. Even over 50 years after his passing he is still giving voice and energy to design culture in Australia. Although some of the ideas in The Australian Ugliness have not aged timelessly, the passion to make Australia better are still inspiring to this day. Hopefully his ideals can continue motivating the next generation of designers to create a path forward towards improved residential outcomes in Australia.