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Authors: Robin Boyd
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to some degree in every free and vital modern society, but in no other country is it more apparent, all pervasive and devastating in its effect. Peasant villages are not Featuristic, nor is Stuyvesant Town nor Stalinallee nor Regentâs Park Terrace. A degree of freedom and unruliness is the first essential for its flowering.
If the devastation seems worst in Sydney, this is only because nature provided so much more to start with and the loss is so much more apparent. In fact, unruliness and ugliness within the precincts of a big, clean, progressive, self-respecting town could not be worse than in her competitive sister city, Melbourne, the capital of Victoria.
2
THE FEATURIST CAPITAL
Melbourneâs city plan is a rigid, typical nineteenth century gridiron permitting long wide vistas down every street. And every block down the entire length of every street is cut up into dozens of different buildings, cheek to cheek, some no more than twelve feet six inches wide, few more than fifty feet, some only two storeys, some nowadays over twenty storeys and growing higher. And every facade is a different colour, differently ornamented, and within its two-dimensional limitations a different shape. It is a dressmakerâs floor strewn with snippings of style.
Some of these buildingsâmore every day in this building boomâare described in their company literature as streamlined ultramodern, and some of them are described in the limited local architectural press with well-deserved praise. Nowadays all the new ones are resolutely modern: some ultra-modern, some sensitive modern. But since even the best is intent on its own private problems, it usually adds to the confusion of the Gothicky, Greekish, or Italianate masonry left over from last century. Few of the plainest new buildings are big enough to create an environment. Usually they aggravate rather than ease the old visual tensions.
Meanwhile, because it is a proud and prosperous city, painting of the old buildings is always in hand. By this means even those which were not especially Featurist when handed down to us by the Victorians are converted to conform with the later twentieth century. Terraces of shops, for example, with which the poorer city streets and the inner-suburban shopping districts are lined, were usually comparatively broad statements beneath the urns which cluttered the skyline. Now each narrow holding within the terrace strip is featured by its separate owner or tenant in a different colour.
The predominance of small properties and the absence of a mutual visual goal has meant that the architectural atmosphere of the total environment has hardly changed during the period between ornamental arch and aluminium louvre. Melbourneâs atmosphere is still essentially Victorian: in scale, in intricacy, and in Featurism. Other young cities in other parts of the world certainly are not free of the splintering effect on the street scene of commercial competition, but seldom are others so splintered into such small holdings and seldom is frank, blatant advertising so rampant. But, most important, probably no other city in the world was ever so exclusively and enthusiastically Victorian as the capital of the State of Victoria. Anything other than avid Featurism could hardly have been expected, considering the circumstances of its childhood.
The State of Victoria lived its youth in time and in turn with the queen who gave it her name. It was born, it thrived and subsided gracefully with her reign, growing from an explorerâs mud hut to a quite highly civilized community in the half-century that was Victoriaâsâin the spirit, the letter, and in the image of Victorian taste and Victorian endeavour.
The older colonies in AustraliaâNew South Wales and Tasmaniaâwere established fifty important years earlier. They grew up between 1790 and 1840 in the manners of the eighteenth century to which their military governors were accustomed.
If the devastation seems worst in Sydney, this is only because nature provided so much more to start with and the loss is so much more apparent. In fact, unruliness and ugliness within the precincts of a big, clean, progressive, self-respecting town could not be worse than in her competitive sister city, Melbourne, the capital of Victoria.
2
THE FEATURIST CAPITAL
Melbourneâs city plan is a rigid, typical nineteenth century gridiron permitting long wide vistas down every street. And every block down the entire length of every street is cut up into dozens of different buildings, cheek to cheek, some no more than twelve feet six inches wide, few more than fifty feet, some only two storeys, some nowadays over twenty storeys and growing higher. And every facade is a different colour, differently ornamented, and within its two-dimensional limitations a different shape. It is a dressmakerâs floor strewn with snippings of style.
Some of these buildingsâmore every day in this building boomâare described in their company literature as streamlined ultramodern, and some of them are described in the limited local architectural press with well-deserved praise. Nowadays all the new ones are resolutely modern: some ultra-modern, some sensitive modern. But since even the best is intent on its own private problems, it usually adds to the confusion of the Gothicky, Greekish, or Italianate masonry left over from last century. Few of the plainest new buildings are big enough to create an environment. Usually they aggravate rather than ease the old visual tensions.
Meanwhile, because it is a proud and prosperous city, painting of the old buildings is always in hand. By this means even those which were not especially Featurist when handed down to us by the Victorians are converted to conform with the later twentieth century. Terraces of shops, for example, with which the poorer city streets and the inner-suburban shopping districts are lined, were usually comparatively broad statements beneath the urns which cluttered the skyline. Now each narrow holding within the terrace strip is featured by its separate owner or tenant in a different colour.
The predominance of small properties and the absence of a mutual visual goal has meant that the architectural atmosphere of the total environment has hardly changed during the period between ornamental arch and aluminium louvre. Melbourneâs atmosphere is still essentially Victorian: in scale, in intricacy, and in Featurism. Other young cities in other parts of the world certainly are not free of the splintering effect on the street scene of commercial competition, but seldom are others so splintered into such small holdings and seldom is frank, blatant advertising so rampant. But, most important, probably no other city in the world was ever so exclusively and enthusiastically Victorian as the capital of the State of Victoria. Anything other than avid Featurism could hardly have been expected, considering the circumstances of its childhood.
The State of Victoria lived its youth in time and in turn with the queen who gave it her name. It was born, it thrived and subsided gracefully with her reign, growing from an explorerâs mud hut to a quite highly civilized community in the half-century that was Victoriaâsâin the spirit, the letter, and in the image of Victorian taste and Victorian endeavour.
The older colonies in AustraliaâNew South Wales and Tasmaniaâwere established fifty important years earlier. They grew up between 1790 and 1840 in the manners of the eighteenth century to which their military governors were accustomed.
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