Philip Goad | University of Melbourne
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Philip Goad | University of Melbourne The Critic and the Car: Robin Boyd, Automobiles and Australian Architecture Australian architect and critic Robin Boyd (1919-1971) loved and hated cars, and the architectural settings that went with them. He famously coined the phrase ‘a humble of Holdens in native habitat’ to accompany a Nigel Buesst photograph in his 1968 paperback edition of The Australian Ugliness (1960). He was a one-time owner of designer classics like the Studebaker Gran Turismo Hawk and the Citroen DS (Goddess). But at the same time, he despaired not only of two-tone colours and extravagant tail-fin designs, but also - and more importantly - much of the commercial architecture and signage that accompanied the irresistible embrace of post-World War II car culture in Australia. While he wrote witheringly about American-influenced visual pollution that was the result of this embrace, he did not reject its source. Instead, he proposed new architectural solutions for buildings like the motel, the petrol station and even the roadside fast-food outlet. In his house designs, cars were invariably accommodated not in garages but beneath all encompassing parasol roofs or hovering glazed boxes. This paper outlines the ambivalent relationship with cars maintained by one of Australia’s most important tastemakers amidst the rise of post-war automobile culture. It shows that even while Boyd expressed disdain for what he perceived as popular culture’s uncritical embrace of automobile culture, his personal fascination with cars and his public critique were in fact productive for the ongoing development of Australian architecture. 1| AHA 2016 Conference Proceedings Philip Goad The Critic and the Car: Robin Boyd, Automobiles and Australian Architecture Introduction: Robin Boyd, the Architect and the Car Between 1947 and his premature death in October 1971, Melbourne architect Robin Boyd (1919-1971) was Australia’s most public commentator on architectural matters. Two of his books, Australia’s Home (1952) and The Australian Ugliness (1960), became bestsellers and are still in print today.1 Boyd was also a gifted architect, designing dozens of houses, as well as a series of institutional buildings and a handful of commercial commissions. He also loved cars. His biographer Geoffrey Serle remarked that: Since the Italian Futurist Manifesto of 1909 declared the racing car more beautiful than ‘The Winged Victory of Samothrace’, modern architects, delighting in industrial cleverness, were besotted with stylish automobiles.2 Boyd was no exception - designer cars were a minor passion.3 But there were some cars that he did not like, and Boyd actively expressed that disdain in his writings. Yet, what has not been observed in the wealth of scholarship on Boyd is the importance of the car as a pivotal reference point for Boyd’s views on Australian taste and on the Australian built environment. Car design for Boyd became a powerful metaphor through which to reflect upon and critique Australian design in its buildings and its urban environment. This paper outlines, for the first time, the ambivalent relationship between one of Australia’s most important trendsetters amidst the rise of post-war automobile culture. It shows that even while Boyd expressed disdain for what he perceived as popular culture’s uncritical embrace of automobile culture, his personal fascination with cars and his public critique were in fact productive for the ongoing development of Australian architecture. Housing the Car In 1946, when Robin Boyd, recently returned from war service, completed his first commissioned residence, a modern flat-roofed house for Howard Pettigrew House in Kew, the accommodation of the motorcar was an intrinsic element of the L-shaped composition.4 Inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1930s Usonian houses, where Wright argued that the garage could be eliminated5 and the emphatic horizontal roof of the ‘car port’ was a key aspect of the house’s pin wheeling plan,6 it was clear that Boyd was, like so many architects of his generation, ready in the immediate postwar years to recast the public face of the modern house as a receptacle and showcase for the sleek lines of the motor car complemented by the abstract aesthetic lines of the 2| AHA 2016 Conference Proceedings Philip Goad The Critic and the Car: Robin Boyd, Automobiles and Australian Architecture modern house. The roof of the house also became the roof of the motorcar: occupant and automobile were granted equal status. That same year, when his own house was completed in Riversdale Road, Camberwell, what was presented to the street, was an extension of the house’s low-pitched gable roof: half of the gable-form was devoted to a pergola, the other half to a car port housing the Boyds’ Standard 8. The conventional garage had been brought to the front of the house, replaced and made an architectural virtue. It was also a demonstration of convenience. Ownership of the car was proudly displayed. In Boyd’s subsequent houses through the 1950s and 1960s, this strategy of doing away with the conventional freestanding garage down the side and in the back yard was almost always followed. While cars were frequently accommodated beneath the house due to its aerial form or a sloping site,7 most of Boyd’s roofs for his houses, whether grand or small, were often consciously designed to cover all, and include the car as a natural, expected and integral part of the house’s design.8 The combined image of house and car echoed the trope of the early twentieth century’s modernist obsession with cars and architecture, most famously exemplified by the image of Le Corbusier’s Voisin contrasted with the cubist lines of Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein at Garches (1929). The placement of the car against the architecture was deliberate: the analogy straightforward. Both car and house were projected to present similar ideals of combined progressive aesthetics and mechanical perfection. For Le Corbusier: All motors cars have the same essential arrangements. But, by reason of the unceasing competition between the innumerable firms who make them, every maker has found himself obliged to get to the top of this competition and, over and above the standard of practical realization, to prosecute the search for a perfection and a harmony beyond the mere practical side, a manifestation not only of perfection and harmony, but of beauty.9 The house was a machine for living in (a machine-a-habiter), 10 the car was a machine for modern movement. It was a theme that fascinated architects for decades, even the reason for English New Brutalist architects Alison and Peter Smithson, in a moment of deliberate critical echo, to have Peter Smithson’s 1962 photograph of their weekend house at Upper Lawn, Wiltshire, England (1959-62) 3| AHA 2016 Conference Proceedings Philip Goad The Critic and the Car: Robin Boyd, Automobiles and Australian Architecture given special historical parallel with Le Corbusier with their Citroen DS Goddess parked out the front.11 But this time, the aesthetic connection between house and car was far less clear. The Smithsons deliberately made the point of contrast: the French car as sophisticated artful machine and designer object; the house as a mélange of existing as-found stone wall, old and new openings with new building form grafted onto it. They were making a deliberate point: that there was no direct relationship between house and car. Mark Strizic’s 1960 street-view photograph of Boyd’s second house for his family at 290 Walsh Street, South Yarra (1958-59) has the same message.12 Boyd’s Citroen Goddess noses into the left-hand side of Strizic’s photograph. The visual focus is neither the car nor the house so much as the sculptural beauty of the massive cypress pine between the house and the footpath, and the dainty striped canvas canopy over the entrance stair-bridge leaning to the front door. House and car read as comfortable opposites rather than as mutual reinforcement: a theme repeated, ironically, perhaps in Boyd’s ‘house’-like gable-roof carports for his display homes designed for the Appletree Hill housing estate at Glen Waverley (1965).13 Writing About the Car In writing about Australian architecture, Boyd occasionally reflected on the influence of the motorcar on the shape and character of the Australian suburb. In his best- known book of the 1950s, Australia’s Home (1952), Boyd acknowledged the appearance of the garage in Australia as early as 1915: Inside, high and excitable, lived the new car. Last year it had been housed in the stable, or had been given a makeshift shelter of weatherboards or iron. From now on, its port would become increasingly important as a feature of the house. It would edge nearer, as the kitchen had, until in the thirties, most houses would incorporate a garage under an extension of the main roof.14 Boyd did not illustrate what he meant here, but examples in 1930s Melbourne abounded, where period revival houses, be they Georgian Revival or his reviled Spanish Mission, grand or humble, would invariable house cars, antipathetic to the house’s stylistic origins. 15 Even Boyd’s idol, Harold Desbrowe-Annear, designed some of the most elegantly historically styled porte cocheres to adorn houses for his wealthy clientele. 16 Significantly, Boyd acknowledged the persistent and ongoing 4| AHA 2016 Conference Proceedings Philip Goad The Critic and the Car: Robin Boyd, Automobiles and Australian Architecture spatial influence that owning a car would have on the morphology of everyday Australian suburbia: The car had the effect of spacing houses a little further apart. Before 1910, suburban builders customarily made as much as possible of the width of the lot by taking the house to within five or six feet of either side fence.