The Australian Ugliness Read Free Page A

buildings.
    I am indebted to the above books for references in the text, and to Professor C. M. H. Clark’s Select Documents in Australian History (Angus and Robertson, 1950) for the quotations from early visitors to Australia. Parts of Chapter Three, starting with the passage on Austerica, were first published in the Literary Supplement of The Age , Melbourne, in 1957, and parts of Chapter Four first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald . The quotations from Ruskin are taken from The Stones of Venice and Seven Lamps of Architecture , those from Sir Geoffrey Scott are in The Architecture of Humanism , Rudolf Wittkower’s is from Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism , Le Corbusier’s is from Chapter Two of The Modulor , and Piet Mondrian’s is from Plastic Art . The mathematical ‘melody’ in Chartres Cathedral is described by Ernest Levy in an MIT Humanities booklet, and A. S. G. Butler’s comments are taken from The Substance of Architecture . Finally, the quotations from William Hogarth and Horatio Greenough are from two classic statements from opposite sides of the interminable debate. Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty , edited by Professor Joseph Burke (Oxford, 1955), first published in 1753, details the rococo-aesthetic approach, and Greenough’s Form and Functions , edited by Harold A. Small (University of California, 1947), first published a century later in 1852–3, states the rational-functionalist argument.
    I warn you now: this whole thing is old hat. It was old hat when it was first published seven years ago and it is old hat now, but for different reasons. Its initial staleness was due to the fact that various English architects had discovered the ugliness of the technological age years earlier and had been writing about it and drawing it in the Architectural Review and elsewhere. It is old-fashioned now because the war against ugliness has become a cause which has wide support, especially among artistic conservatives, and when any cause gets as respectable as that it draws reaction out of the shadows to gibe at it. At this moment (but the situation may well change again in no time) urban, technological and mass squalor is in: ugliness au go go. It is, some say, a sort of Pop Art. For example, when a few architects in New South Wales published the latest broadside against non-design in 1966, called Australian Outrage , the critic Max Harris called them old fogies and found the photographs ravishing. ‘Vulgarism,’ he wrote in The Australian , ‘is the very life force and dynamic of an affluent urban free-enterprise society…We have to incorporate outrage into our aesthetic. We can’t stem the irresistible cultural tide, but we can change our aesthetic.’
    This can be an acceptable proposition, in a certain half-light. Some of the early Functionalists around the turn of the century were truly anti-aesthetic and argued that honesty to the function was all that mattered. There was really no ugliness anywhere; just eyes which refused to break old habits. If we could all just switch over our aesthetic awareness in tune with the twentieth century, we would realize that the modern world of wires and poles, service stations and soft drink signs, cut-outs, whirlers, flags, fairy lights and mutilated trees, is a beautifully vital place, while real ugliness—first sensed in an unpruned tree—reaches a screaming crescendo in an open, virgin landscape. If Functionalism is a sound principle, then what could make more powerful visual sustenance than the service wires on their crooked poles and the jig-saw puzzles of advertising signs serving so truly the function of making suburban dollars?
    If that argument appeals to you, please read no further. The argument which follows is that the ugliness in the streets of almost every city in the modern world is not art of any sort and is really not very pop either. It is as functional but as artistically