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Loading... The Australian uglinessby Robin Boyd, Robin Boyd
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Belongs to Publisher SeriesInspiredNotable ListsAustralia's Greatest Books (1960)
Brilliant, witty, scathing, The Australian Ugliness is the classic postwar account of Australian society, how we live in the environments we create, and the consequences of our failure to think about how we live. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)720.994The arts Architecture Architecture - modified standard subdivisions History, geographic treatment, biography Pacific AustraliaLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. Penguin Australia2 editions of this book were published by Penguin Australia. Editions: 1921656220, 1921922443 |
Featurism, is described by Boyd as a form of aesthetic chattering; a subordination of the essential whole by accentuating separate features. But Featurism goes deeper than the built environment (veneer and camouflage) and reveals itself in Government policies (White Australia Policy) as well as in a mishmash of ideologies adopted as arbitrary distractions competing for attention by people who desperately want to be noticed.
Following an extensive (sometimes dated) analysis, Boyd shifts gear into possible solutions. Here, with the benefit of hindsight, I found his faith in modernism and his optimism about industrialised construction somewhat inconsistent. This is mainly because my view of architecture and its impossibilities was shaped by Christopher Alexander and his emphasis on the connectedness of living buildings i.e. buildings that we recognise as being alive. Connectedness includes the importance of context and surrounds. Boyd’s faith stems from what he calls scientific building where somehow perfection of space enclosure is achieved by building technologies.
Yet he then refers to Frank Lloyd Wright’s assertion that a building without poetry has no right to exist. He proposes two kinds of buildings: good universal (machined shelter) and good particular (by the artist architect). That many of Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings were unfit for purpose doesn’t seem to exclude them from being ‘good’. Part 3 extends the angst about the relevance of architecture and architects as Boyd searches for an objective system of making beauty. I was particularly interested in his references the work of Talbot Hamlin, Architecture – an Art for All Men, as he had clearly influenced Christopher Alexander’s 15 properties of living centres. Ultimately Boyd rejects golden dimensions and ideas of beauty in favour of pertinence by which he means definite form that reflects specific solutions to the problems at hand.
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