Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness was first published in 1960. It is mostly a complaint about Australian suburban taste and its insecurities. It is an angry rave against ‘featurism’; Boyd’s word of complaint about the myopic focus on features without an overall aesthetic consideration or design. Basically is a rejection of the previous generation’s love of decoration and patterns, as well as, a rejection of the superficial modernism that Boyd identified as American.
Victorian Artists Society – Romanesque Revival building
Parts of the book are still, unfortunately, a very accurate description of Australia, even prescient in spite of being written fifty-five years ago. Boyd’s critical view of Australian culture is accurate and psychologically astute from arborphobia to insecurity, however he appears psychologically inept, telling an insecure population that they are unable to produce good design because they are too insecure. But then, much of late modernism was appears totally psychologically inept imaging that everyone would adopt their utopian vision.
Some of what Boyd was writing about has been, in part, rectified particularly with the planting of trees in the suburbs and better urban design. Although not by his snobbish dislike for American culture that has perniciously grown in Australia. Australian arborphobia has some practical reasons with many eucalypts shedding not just leaves and bark but whole branches making many Australian trees unsuitable for a city.
Cherry picking evidence to support his claims Boyd fails to mention the first ‘garden suburb’ was built in Australia. In 1901 the Garden Suburb Movement established Haberfield in Sydney. It was Australia’s first planned model suburb with no lanes, no pubs and Edwardian homes with height limits. (See Art and Architecture.)
Many architects and designers, along with Boyd have dreamed of a unified aesthetic but he stumbles at the first hurdle. How to adapt, rather than simply replace, the entire history of European architecture in Australia. Boyd is a modernist hoping that “…gradually, the family itself would become the designers of its own pattern of standardised units, as suggested by Walter Gropius.” (p.137) However, he is practical enough to realise that know that there are not enough designers and architects to complete his vision.
Boyd and other architects who write about aesthetics are like astrophysicists writing metaphysics, both are only playing at philosophy. Playing in that they have no training or experience, imagining that it is as easy as they think. Boyd has an underlying belief in “universal” objective aesthetics of design. When he finally gets around to trying to define ugliness (p.235) we quickly find that featurism doesn’t fit his definition, announcing on that “if beauty were all there is to architecture, Featurism would be enough.” (p.239)
Boyd’s ugliness is not what I think of Australian ugliness? In contemporary architectural design the pastiche of patterns and textures has returned to feature in both suburban homes and urban tower blocks. Some of Boyd’s ugliness is simply a difference in taste. For me the Australian ugliness is the empty, run down waste-land, a pattern of aboriginal genocide, detention camps and environmental destruction on an industrial scale that leaves the land denuded of any natural features, exploited and abandoned like the mullock heaps of the former goldfields.
Although Boyd believes that aesthetics and good design is independent of culture, politics, and the beliefs of the population because he believes that it is objectively good. It is Australian politics that planned and created the vast suburbs that Boyd dislikes, it is the politics of inequality, the exploitation and destruction of the natural environment that created the Australian love of features.
The Australian ugliness is more than just skin deep as Robin Boyd claimed, it goes, if I can continue anthropomorphising the amorphous entity known as Australia, to its heart and soul. Boyd knew this, his contempt for the White Australia policy and the treatment of Aborigines is clear throughout his book.
All quotes from Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness (Text Publishing, 2010 Melbourne)
Black Mark 
November 24th, 2015 at 12:14 PM
Interesting article on Australian Uglyness, but I think Robin Boyd’s critical utopian modernist views were widely held throughout the Western World. I grew up with older architect brothers in the 1950s, and one at least still holds such views. I suspect he prays for a fate like the Christchurch earthquake to be visited on our built environment. I think that Richmond Park London, largely planned by Richard Norman Shaw, may have been the first garden suburb.
November 24th, 2015 at 12:48 PM
Thanks Walter and yes such utopian modernist views were very widely held, not just in the West, but around the whole world. They are so totalitarian that they make the 19th century experiments in urban design, like the garden suburbs, feel benign.