The Idealised Image of the Australian Home: a Myth in the Making
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School of the Built Environment Department of Architecture and Interior Architecture The Idealised Image of the Australian Home: A Myth in the Making Irene (Oi Ling) Low This thesis is presented for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Curtin University July 2015 Declaration To the best of my knowledge and belief, this thesis contains no material previously published by any other person, except where due acknowledgment has been made. This thesis contains no material that has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university. Signature: …………………………………………. Date: ………………………. ii Abstract This thesis questions and challenges the idealised image of the Australian home in the context of architecture and the media. In the Australian public’s imagination, the house—as a social, cultural and architectural ideal—has a very important mythological role. This was especially true in the 1950s after World War II, when it was considered that a single-storey bungalow with its own garden and the constant presence of women in proper aprons, deftly wielding electrical appliances, were normative home ideals to which most Australians aspired. Stemming from a desire to expose and demystify the underlying idealisations of the Western home, this thesis questions the values and attitudes implicit in the variety of messages with which mass culture bombards society, with images that attempt to universalise and naturalise meanings and values. In a society avid for images, the concept of myth provides a basis for a critique of the ‘naturalising effect’ of ideology of the idealised image of the Western architectural home. By adopting the concept of myth as a theoretical position, this thesis speculates on the spectacle and images of the architecture, society and culture of the home. It does so by drawing on the main hypothesis that images represent no more than a constructed ideal that is drawn from various operations in the media, against which the perpetual norms of the home become appropriated and transposed into a myth. By adopting the theoretical strategy of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies and employing a semiotic approach, this thesis is structured so that elements of the idealised Australian home in the media are targeted and analysed based on four key themes: the ‘modern’ 1950s kitchen, the suburban ‘quarter-acre and garden’ home, the ‘architect-designed’ home and the twenty-first century ‘Tuscan’ home and ‘home theatre’. The outcomes of the analyses reveal that the image of the home is a symbolic mediated fantasy that is intricately linked to mythology. This thesis concludes that, since the reality of the home is ultimately unapproachable, mythologies are used as a bridge to understand the home as a socially constructed reality that is accepted as being ‘natural’. As such, images of the home are inherently mythological when the historically constructed power relations embodied therein are made to seem natural or eternal, and therefore unquestioned. iii Contents Declaration ....................................................................................................................... ii Abstract ........................................................................................................................... iii Contents .......................................................................................................................... iii List of figures ................................................................................................................... v List of tables .................................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................... vii Main introduction ............................................................................................................. 1 Home: A concept, an idea, an object ........................................................................... 3 Objects of study ............................................................................................................ 5 Background to the study: Identifying research issues and problem ............................. 6 Media’s influence on the idealised perception of home ............................................... 8 Research problems and contribution of this thesis ..................................................... 12 Research hypothesis, objectives and significance ...................................................... 17 Definition of terms to be used in this thesis................................................................. 18 Strategy, approach and theoretical significance of this thesis .................................... 25 Overview of the thesis ................................................................................................. 31 Summary ..................................................................................................................... 33 Chapter One: Origins of the Western home ideals .................................................... 35 Chapter introduction .................................................................................................... 35 Overview of the home based on Western ideologies of family, class and gender in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries .............................................................. 36 Representations of the Western home in the nineteenth-century Victorian and twentieth-century Modernism eras ........................................................................ 38 Representations of the Western home in the Australian context ................................ 42 The Western ‘modern’ home: Origins and architectural implications ......................... 52 The Western ‘modern’ home in the Australian context .............................................. 60 Discussion on the modern home: A delusion? ........................................................... 61 Chapter conclusion and discussion ............................................................................. 68 Chapter Two: Theoretical stance and approach ........................................................ 71 Chapter introduction .................................................................................................... 71 Research questions for the case study chapters ........................................................ 71 Barthes’s model of myth .............................................................................................. 73 Methodological approach of this thesis ....................................................................... 88 Significance of the thesis’s theoretical stance ............................................................ 93 Theoretical articulations of contemporary myth ......................................................... 96 Other significant theoretical stances for this thesis .................................................... 98 Chapter conclusion and discussion ........................................................................... 100 Chapter Three: The ‘modern’ 1950s home and kitchen .......................................... 102 Chapter introduction .................................................................................................. 102 Setting the scene: The making of the ‘modern’ living myth ...................................... 103 Research methods and analysis ............................................................................... 105 Objects of study ........................................................................................................ 107 Analysis and discussion ............................................................................................ 110 Reading the ‘modern’ home myth ............................................................................. 116 Myth and ideology: The modern home as a depoliticised speech ............................ 124 Chapter conclusion and discussion ........................................................................... 135 iii Chapter Four: The suburban quarter-acre and garden ideal .................................. 138 Chapter introduction .................................................................................................. 138 Setting the scene: The making of the suburban quarter-acre and garden myth ...... 138 Research methods and analysis ............................................................................... 143 Objects of study ........................................................................................................ 145 Analysis and discussion ............................................................................................ 150 Reading the suburban quarter-acre and garden myth .............................................. 155 Origins of the garden myth: Representations and reality ......................................... 156 Chapter conclusion and discussion ........................................................................... 162 Chapter Five: The architect-designed home ............................................................ 164 Chapter introduction .................................................................................................. 164 Imagery of DCM architects: A myth in the making .................................................... 165 Professional cultures of architecture versus popular media constructions