Philip Goad: University of

Featurism and the Fish Bowl: Robin Boyd’s ‘Drive-in’ Design for 1969

In 1960, Melbourne architect and critic Robin Boyd (1919-1971) coined the term ‘Featurism’ in his book, The Australian Ugliness. It was a term directed at an emerging tendency in the late 1950s towards what Boyd described as ‘cloak and camouflage’ in architecture, and with specific reference to the so-called Googie-style architecture of the American commercial strip, where signs, symbols and exaggerated forms in the form of advertising took precedence over function. Nine years later, Boyd’s 1969 design for ‘Neptune’s Fishbowl’, a drive-in takeaway fish and chips outlet on busy Toorak Road in South Yarra caused something of a sensation. It wasn’t just the flamboyant launch with a bare-breasted ‘mermaid’ on the back of an open truck that raised eyebrows. The building’s glazed polygonal form topped by a near geodesic blue fibreglass sphere drew criticism as being ‘Featurist’, an accusation laid at the term’s originator and against which Boyd had to defend himself in the press. This paper outlines Boyd’s design, its genesis within his own design preoccupations of the time, and its reception amongst the public and the profession. It argues that the Fishbowl was not only part of a new postwar architectural idiom designed specifically for the road but also that its design was part of an emerging acceptance that automobile-related architecture might play a decisive role in radically shifting opinions about the aesthetics of the late twentieth century city.

On the 24 November 1970, a new take-away seafood outlet, Neptune’s Fish Bowl, opened to great fanfare at 312-314 Toorak Road in South Yarra, an inner and well- to-do suburb of Melbourne. The launch began with the arrival on an open truck of “Fred Asmussen, silvered and floating in blue and white chiffon, as King Neptune”1 together with blonde model Barbara Challinor, bare breasted (with ‘pasties’) and with

1 AHA 2018 Conference Proceedings a silver-covered mermaid’s undercarriage.2 Behind the striking new outlet with its blue, ball-shaped structure over the selling area, there was a marquee set up over the parking area, where a couple of hundred Melbourne socialites together with the press were packed in drinking champagne and eating from trays of seafood, with “not a dob of urky batter in sight”. Guests were given red goldfish in water-filled plastic bags as they left. MC of the event was hair-dressing empress and Toorak socialite Lillian Frank, whose husband, restaurateur Richard Frank and businessman Peter Shelmerdine were joint owners of the new fast food venture. Also at the opening was the Fish Bowl’s architect, the well-known Robin Boyd (1919-1971), who, when interviewed by ’s Max Beattie, said in an Oscar Wilde-like moment:

Some people will hate it and some people will love it. This is better than not being noticed at all.3

Boyd’s remark was prophetic. Neptune’s Fish Bowl did capture the public’s attention. It was not only a challenge to the increasing phenomenon of roadside, drive-in takeaway food outlets springing up across . It also was a challenge to Boyd’s own diatribe against visual pollution of the urban environment that he had so vehemently championed ten years before in his book, The Australian Ugliness (1960), and where he had coined the term, ‘Featurism’. This paper outlines Boyd’s design, its genesis within his own specific design preoccupations, and its reception amongst the public and the profession. It argues that the Fishbowl was not only part of a shifting post-war roadside landscape in Australia but also that its design sources ran counter to an emerging acceptance that automobile-related urban environment was playing a decisive role in radically shifting opinions about the aesthetics of the late twentieth century city.

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Fig. 1 Neptune’s Fishbowl, South Yarra, , Australia, 1970 Architects: Romberg and Boyd Photographer: David Watson Source: Private Collection

The concept for Neptune’s Fish Bowl had been developed by émigré restaurateur Richard Frank and Peter Shelmerdine. Intent on putting the seafood takeaway business on an international footing and developing recipes adaptable to comparable seafood across the globe, Shelmerdine said bravely at the opening:

It’s time Australia dealt out the franchises instead of buying them from America. We’ve already had enquiries from Honolulu.4

The plan was, given success in South Yarra, to open up a chain of Neptune’s Fish Bowls across Australia’s east coast, with figures like two hundred being mentioned.

3 AHA 2018 Conference Proceedings At the time of the Bowl’s design and documentation, other sites targeted in Melbourne, included Burke Road, Camberwell, Burwood Road, Hawthorn, Kew, Balaclava, Notting Hill, Sandringham and Preston.5 The aim was to challenge the increasing presence of chains like Kentucky Fried Chicken and Red Barn, and refashion the common image of fish and chips in newspaper with smartly-named items on the menu like Lobster Capricornia, Horn of Plenty (chips) and Bimbi Apple Turnovers.

Boyd’s design for the chain’s initial and signature outlet in South Yarra comprised a 14-sided polygonal sales kiosk sitting on a concrete slab with a broad-eaved polygonal flat roof, surmounted by an eye-catching blue fibreglass sphere, which acted like a giant sign and also formed a skylight over the counter and concealed preparation area behind. , recently graduated and working in the Romberg & Boyd office, oversaw the documentation and construction of the project.6 Paraflood lights were arranged around the steel ring beam supporting the sphere to flood light into it at night. Customers could park at the rear and then make their way to the outlet’s single front door facing Toorak Road. The fully air-conditioned service area was carpeted, internal lights were golden yellow spheres, and there were three stools of white nylon steel based with Cordova vinyl ‘turquoise’ cushions from Concept Interiors and assistants wore outfits of Lemon Prestaline and Gold Gabardine.

The sphere (or the dome) - which Boyd intended would symbolise the name of the chain - was the most sophisticated aspect of the design. After investigating Viking Industrial Plastics ‘K’ dome and a triodetic space frame dome covered with Alcan aluminium sheet roofing,7 it was decided to create a snub dodecahedron (not a geodesic dome) as a self-supporting structure, comprising 60 identical triangles, each approximately six feet (1.8 metres) by six feet (1.8 metres) by seven feet (2.1 metres). All the triangles were shaped to conform to the surface of the sphere. As the press release recounted: “When five triangles are joined they form a pentagonal segment of a sphere. Twelve pentagons form the sphere, which is 20 feet in diameter.”8 Computations for the sphere were undertaken by Dr Lewis Christian Schmidt, an expert in trusses and minimum weight structures from the School of Civil Engineering at the and it was designed by computer

4 AHA 2018 Conference Proceedings analysis on the University’s $2million IBM 70-44 computer. The computer produced a drawing of the three-dimensional sphere, which could not be drawn by normal geometrical methods, thus enabling precise dimensions, angles, and a grid layout of the sphere structure. Made entirely of glass-reinforced polymer (fibreglass) and assembled off site by Trimview Polymarble and Fibreglass Pty Ltd in Ferntree Gully, it was then craned in and dropped gently onto the awaiting timber and steel framed kiosk structure below and bolted into place.

In the months after its opening, reception to Neptune’s Fish Bowl was mixed. From the public, there was a mixture of mild outrage that Robin Boyd could have designed such a structure. But even before the Fish Bowl opened, Boyd had received a letter from Martin Elks, a fourth form schoolboy from Peninsula Grammar School in Mt Eliza, who had written to him quizzing him directly:

But how can you distinguish a food shop made to look like a Red Barn from a fish shop made to look like a fishbowl? Surely both are examples of Featurism? ….your answer to this question would be most appreciated as our Art Master cannot give an answer.9

Boyd put some time into his response, saying that he didn’t see any inconsistency between the two buildings and further elaborating:

I have never objected to advertisements, if they are well designed, or to having a bit of fun in the design of buildings, if it is appropriate. I look mainly for an idea – that is, one main idea per building – instead of the more usual assortment of little ideas which are shaken up together to make a building; typically, the ‘Featuremarket’, with its many loud, stale ideas mixed together.

On the other hand, Red Barn is not a Featurist so much as an “idea” building and I don’t dislike it as much as I do a shambles like the New World Supermarket. The thing that I do find slightly objectionable is that its idea is pretty weak: the stage-setting it creates is so unimaginative, nostalgic, foreign, gaudy and unamusing.10

5 AHA 2018 Conference Proceedings Boyd went on to argue that his design was never intended to imitate a real fishbowl but instead the sphere was intended to be “a memorable emblem which may be associated with the idea of fish”.11 He finished his letter, concluding:

If you don’t agree, if you think it looks as gaudy and silly as a New World Supermarket, that is a matter of taste; but I hope you will agree that it has only one idea, simply carried through, and that you can see that the thinking behind it and the New World started out from opposite end of the span of architectural motivations.12

Boyd’s private response coincided with some public negative press. Barbara Bishop in the Sunday Observer commented of the Fishbowl, “what many people believe to be the last word in ugliness”13, and which Tony Moran, director of the Industrial Design Council compared it with the Kentucky Fried Chicken and Red Barn monstrosities.14 Boyd’s response was the same – he defended it as fun architecture15 – a term he’d never used before.

Boyd’s measured response – in many respects less strident than his 1960 assault on taste in The Australian Ugliness – reflected his changing personal views on what constituted contemporary architecture. While in 1960, he been virulent in his attacks on the Holden Special, and the car-connected urban culture of motels and Surfers Paradise, and the looming spectre of what he described as ‘Googie’ architecture,16 by 1970, things had changed.

Internationally, the most prominent, and what would become internationally influential, revisionist ideas on the commercial strip were those of Philadelphia-based architects and husband and wife team of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. In the late 1960s, they began to publish their ideas on the importance of acknowledging that the automobile had recast traditional notions of not just urban space but also architectural meaning and composition. Their first article was titled, “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots or Learning from Las Vegas” and was published in the American journal, Architectural Forum in March 1968.17 Robin Boyd was on the journal’s Board of Contributors and is sure to have read and been aware of the

6 AHA 2018 Conference Proceedings Venturis’ increasing presence in American architecture culture, including in the very next month’s issue, examples of Venturi’s work.

The Venturis mounted a persuasive argument for orthodox culture to overcome its aesthetic and ethical bias against the roadside landscape:

The Commercial Strip, the Las Vegas Strip in particular – it is the example par excellence – challenges the architect to take a positive, non-chip-on-the- shoulder view. Architects are out of the habit of looking nonjudgmentally at the environment because orthodox Modern architecture is progressive, if not revolutionary, utopian and puristic; it is dissatisfied with existing conditions. Modern architecture has been anything but permissive….18

For the Venturis, the expanded landscape of the highway and the commercial strip offered new aesthetic possibilities on the basis of acceptance rather than rejection of its existence. They were excited by:

…the vast and complex setting of a new landscape of big spaces, high speeds and complex programs. Styles and signs make connections among many elements, far apart and seen fast. The message is basely commercial, the context is basically new.19

The experience of this form of city, visually, was essentially car-based and required the architect to adopt new techniques and new strategies to recognise and deal with its special qualities. At the same time, the Venturis added that: “At another scale, the shopping centre off the highway returns in its pedestrian malls to the medieval street.”20 Significantly, they argued that: “The graphic sign in space has become the architecture in this landscape.”21 Indeed, they went further claiming that: “The sign is more important than the architecture” and included the rough version of their now famous diagram of architecture’s two modes in this new landscape: the decorated shed (where the sign was all and the building small) and the ‘duck’, where the building was sculptural symbol and architectural shelter all in one.

7 AHA 2018 Conference Proceedings Following these tenets, Boyd’s Fish Bowl was clearly a ‘duck’ – and a successful one at that - in the ‘new landscape of big spaces, high speeds and complex programs.’ And it would be easy to think that Boyd was responding not just to the practical whims of his clients but also to the shifting, perceptive and prescient musings by the Venturis on an automobile-based urbanism.

Boyd however never acknowledged the Venturis as a design influence nor did he comment in any detail on their theories. Instead, at the time, what was preoccupying him in his practice and in his international writings was the architecture of the international exposition. A visitor to expos, a commentator on them, and a designer for Australian pavilions at Expo 67 in Montreal and Expo 70 in Osaka, Boyd sustained a decade-long interest in the exposition as a site of Modernism’s shifting and, as he admitted himself, uncertain evolution. If one looks differently at Neptune’s Fish Bowl – from the perspective of an architect used to solving the issue of identity, symbolism and the holding of visual attention through the auspices of refined design, heightened spatial and sensory experience or technological invention – then all of a sudden, its appearance from the hands Australia’s arch anti-Featurist seems expected, even welcomed.

The Fish Bowl, even from its conceptual beginnings, was about the idea of a sign. For Boyd, as a designer, it could have been abstracted from the base building of the Atomium for the World Expo in Brussels in 1958, which Boyd visited, or a wish on his part to explore the ideas of Buckminster Fuller, whose ideas had been on display at virtually every expo since 1967. Or it might have been a combined wish by Boyd to extend ideas of his own, such as the sphere of the world in the centre of the Australian Pavilion in Osaka for Expo 70. Or more particularly, as Norman Day has hinted22, Boyd may have borrowed conceptually from the Ricoh Pavilion in Osaka – with its inflatable pneumatic sphere – a balloon - sitting atop a grey cylinder which in the daytime was a strong and simple message, while at night, the sphere, illuminated from within, lifted off into the night to become the “Eye of the Sky” – perhaps one of first aerial ‘drones’.23 Then the grey cylinder actually came into its own as a projection screen. Each night, the balloon lifted off and then a film was projected on the cylinder exterior. As Pieter van Wesemael has written of the Ricoh pavilion,

8 AHA 2018 Conference Proceedings “there was no longer mention of an architectural façade but rather of the architecture of projections.”24

The Fish Bowl might therefore be seen as

Fig. 2 Ricoh Pavilion (far right), Expo 70, Osaka, Japan, April 1970 Photographer: Takato Marui Source: Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Osaka_Expo%2770_Kodak%2BRicoh_Pavilion.jpg#filelinks

Boyd behaving as a resolutely anti-Featurist, immersed in contemporary thinking about sophisticated new structural technologies and the integration of design and visual media, and as participating in a larger international conversation about architecture: that was his desired intellectual context. In other words, the Fishbowl can be seen as part of a broader mission by Boyd that was not necessarily about roadside architecture primarily but instead was part of a personal exploration of ideas that had relevance to the trajectory of global architecture. It just so happened that Boyd’s case study for experiment was a takeaway fish and chip outlet.

Neptune’s Fish Bowl lasted just two years almost to the day. At 11am on 21 November 1972, the building (with a sign attached saying ‘Take It From Here’25) and

9 AHA 2018 Conference Proceedings its food equipment, together with a 1968 Mercedes Benz was put up for auction by Mason Green & Associates.26 The building was dismantled and taken away. But no- one knows to where the structure went. There were rumours of fragments of the sphere being stored by Shelmerdine at his brother Ross’s winery at Mitchelton.27 Boyd himself was able to have no opinion on the matter – he had died a year before, in October 1971, too early to see the demise of his experimental architecture for the roadside.

There is some irony that the book, Learning from Las Vegas (1972) by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour became internationally influential and institutionalized the Venturis once radical ideas, and further that in 1984, the firm of Venturi, Rauch & Scott Brown proposed a similar structure to the Fishbowl for New York – ‘The Big Apple’ at Times Square.28 However, it had no functional purpose other than to act as a sculptural counterpoint (literally a six-storey high big red apple placed on a three-storey Classical pedestal) In retrospect then, one might argue that Boyd’s Fishbowl had been utterly contemporary, even ahead of its time in 1970, as accepting of and promoting a new automotive-influenced urbanism.

The question as to why the Fishbowl failed is open to many answers. For one, seafood doesn’t keep and as a fast food model it had inherent flaws in terms of food preparation, storage and easy spoiling. Another reason was that the everyday fish and chip shop was already a cheap option and there was no need or market demand to compete with the time-honoured (English-influenced) Australian tradition of the working family’s takeaway meal. The example of Australian business response to the American-based fast food chains is far more telling: Red Rooster was launched by the Kailis family in Western Australia in 197229 as a local rival to Kentucky Fried Chicken, and its survival for more than forty years has been predicated on direct market competition.

There were also architectural reasons for the Fishbowl’s demise. It wasn’t actually an efficient roadside design. It was not actually a ‘drive-in’ design. To purchase food, one had to park, get out of the car, order and wait for the food to be cooked and then walk back to the car – by which time the fish would have been near cold! There was no eating area within the structure either. There were later plans for umbrellas and

10 AHA 2018 Conference Proceedings an outdoor eating area but these never went ahead. Putting aside its architectural qualities as a visible ‘sign’ on busy Toorak Road, the whole model was partially flawed from a marketing and practical point of view.

To date in Australia, Graeme Davison and Sheryl Yelland’s Car Wars: How the Car Won Our Hearts and Conquered Our Cities (2004) is the most complete and definitive history of the effect of the automobile on Australian society.30 However a comprehensive ’s roadside architecture has yet to be written. There are highs and lows in such architecture, buildings of pedigree and buildings with none, but there are examples that have heritage listings such as the Big Pineapple (1971) at Woombye on ’s Sunshine Coast, which was listed by Queensland Heritage Council in 2009.31 There are isolated reports on specific building types associated with automobiles like petrol stations and occasional exhibition catalogues, book chapters and articles on motels and drive-in cinemas but no overarching national study, a necessary requirement as the landscape of the road often transcended Australian state boundaries through brand and franchise (e.g. Mobil and Caltex service stations; fast food outlets like Kentucky Fried Chicken and Red Rooster) and specific provision for the automobile (e.g. any drive-in facility like a bottle shop or a drive-in cinema or a building type like a multi-storey car parking structure). There is no question that as physical and cultural landmarks, as bearers of popular imagery and as markers of a road trip, such buildings and sites have been an integral part of our urban, peri-urban, rural and coastal landscapes. Robin Boyd’s Fish Bowl, while arguably sitting though at the margins of such a story is however part of it – though one suspects he may not have always wished or intended it.

1 Newspaper clipping (undated), Neptune’s Fish Bowl, Neptune’s Fish Bowl file, Box 112, GRB Archive, State Library of Victoria. 2 Max Beattie, “Bare breasts for a day and then just fish”, The Age (25 November 1970). 3 Max Beattie, “Bare breasts for a day and then just fish”, The Age (25 November 1970). 4 Newspaper clipping (undated), Neptune’s Fish Bowl, Neptune’s Fish Bowl file, GRB Archive, State Library of Victoria. 5 Other sites proposed include the corner of Burwood Road & Power Street, Hawthorn (Letter, Norman Day to Richard Frank (2 March 1971, plan drawing [undated] shows it attached to an existing building); corner Ferntree Gully Road and Blackburn Rd, Notting Hill (Letter, Norman Day to Richard Frank (28 January 1971; undated sketch plan location); 710 Burke Road (at Railway Walk), Camberwell (Memo, Robin Boyd phone call to Richard Frank, dated 22-2-1971); 211 Balaclava Road (undated sketch plan of property); Trentham Street, Sandringham (undated sketch location drawing); Victoria Street, Gowerville [Preston] (near Bell St) (undated sketch location drawing); Cotham Road, Kew (corner Gellibrand Street) (undated sketch location plan). Neptune’s Fish Bowl file, Box 112, GRB Archive, State Library of Victoria.

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6 A graduate in architecture from the University of Melbourne in 1971, Norman Day (1947-) worked in the Romberg & Boyd office from 1967 until 1972, when he then set up his own practice. He later became well known as an architecture critic for The Age newspaper (1976-) and as editor of Architect and Architecture Australia. See Conrad Hamann, “Norman Day”, Philip Goad and Julie Willis (eds), The Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture, Port Melbourne, Vic.: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 196. 7 Photographs of these two options are in the Neptune’s Fish Bowl file, Box 112, GRB Archive, State Library of Victoria. Press material for the triodetic dome illustrated a 98 feet diameter dome built over a water reservoir in Ipswich, Queensland, and which was claimed as “Australia’s first triodetic dome”. The triodetic structure was a true space frame: a lightweight triangulated lattice dome consisting of a series of tubes held together in various planes by special aluminium hubs, supplied by Alcan Australia Ltd and specially extruded at its Granville plant in NSW. 8 Press release, Neptune’s Fish Bowl file, Box 112, GRB Archive, State Library of Victoria. 9 Letter, Martin Elks to Robin Boyd, undated (c. November 1970). Neptune’s Fish Bowl file, Box 112, GRB Archive, State Library of Victoria. 10 Letter, Robin Boyd to Martin Elks, date 9 November 1970. Neptune’s Fish Bowl file, Box 112, GRB Archive, State Library of Victoria. 11 Letter, Robin Boyd to Martin Elks, date 9 November 1970. Neptune’s Fish Bowl file, Box 112, GRB Archive, State Library of Victoria. 12 Letter, Robin Boyd to Martin Elks, date 9 November 1970. Neptune’s Fish Bowl file, Box 112, GRB Archive, State Library of Victoria. 13 Barbara Bishop, “Design for Street Living”, Sunday Observer, 29 November 1970, p. 9. 14 Tony Moran, quoted in Barbara Bishop, “Design for Street Living”, Sunday Observer, 29 November 1970, 9. 15 Robin Boyd, quoted in Barbara Bishop, “Design for Street Living”, Sunday Observer, 29 November 1970, 9. 16 Philip Goad, “The Critic and the Car: Robin Boyd, Automobiles and Australian Architecture”, in H. Edquist, M. Richardson, and S. Lockrey (eds), Proceedings of Automotive Historians Australia Automotive Histories: Driving Futures (AHA 2016), Melbourne, 2017, 15pp. 17 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots or Learning from Las Vegas”, Architectural Forum, 128: 2 (March 1968), 36-43, 89, 91. 18 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots or Learning from Las Vegas”, Architectural Forum, 128: 2 (March 1968), 37. 19 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots or Learning from Las Vegas”, Architectural Forum, 128: 2 (March 1968), 38. 20 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots or Learning from Las Vegas”, Architectural Forum, 128: 2 (March 1968), 38. 21 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots or Learning from Las Vegas”, Architectural Forum, 128: 2 (March 1968), 38. 22 Norman Day, quoted in notes taken by Hans Liu, M.Arch student, University of Melbourne, August 2016. I am extremely grateful to Liu for lending me these interview notes. 23 See Architectural Design, 6/7 (June 1970), 301 and Japan Architect, May/June 1970, 132-3. 24 Pieter van Wesemael, Architecture of Instruction and Delight: A Socio-Historical Analysis of World Exhibitions as a didactic phenomenon (1798-1851-1970), Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2002, 627. 25 Roland Perry, “Economics of Survival”, The Age (14 September 1972). 26 Auction notice, The Age (20 November 1972). 27 , Robin Boyd: A Life, Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press, 1995, 314 28 “Venturi and Johnson: The Big Apple”, see “Times Square 1984” https://www.skyscraper.org/EXHIBITIONS/TIMES_SQUARE/venturi.php (accessed 5 June 2016). 29 “Red Rooster: About Us”, see https://web.archive.org/web/20130626012259/http://www.redrooster.com.au/Corporate/Our-Story/ (accessed 5 June 2016). 30 Graeme Davison and Sheryl Yelland, Car Wars: How the Car Won Our Hearts and Conquered Our Cities, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, 2004. 31 Heritage Listing, “The Big Pineapple (former Sunshine Plantation)”, Queensland Heritage Council, see https://apps.des.qld.gov.au/heritage-register/detail/?id=602694 (accessed 5 June 2018). For further research on Australia’s ‘big things’ and heritage, see Amy Clarke, “Australia’s Big Dilemma: Regional/National Identities, Heritage Listing and Big Things”, in G. Hartoonian and J. Ting (eds), Quotation, Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 34, , 2017, 45-55.

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