112

MODERNISM SUNDERED: Intellectual Currents in Architecture in 1950s

Sydney

HARRY MARGALIT

The architectural culture of the 1950s has been the subject of some re-evaluation in recent years. The anthology, Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, presented a range of studies to counter simplistic interpretations of the decline of modernist architecture through the post-war years. In the introduction, Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Rejean Legault take issue with historians who have described this period in terms that diminish its complexity and vitality:

According to this story, postmodernism, by virtue of its prominence in architectural culture after 1970, was the only lasting new trend of these immediate postwar years, one that emerged in opposition to the modern movement's fixation on abstraction or, alternatively, on symbols of industrial culture and mass production... this narrative obscures thediversity and thecomplexity of motivation that led some architects to truck with architecture's tradition.1

This holds as true for Sydney as for anywhere else. The distinctive work of the Sydney School has served as a bookmark for the perkxl. and has ensured that it has not been glossed over, but a close look at the intellectual current that preceded it highlights the depth of feeling that welled up in modernism's wake. Faced with an architecture that appeared increasingly formulaic, a number of Sydney architects such as Milo Dunphy and Peter Kollar. like their contemporaries elsewhere, attempted a recovery of both authenticity and spirituality.

What, then, were the intellectual sources from which the new aesthetic outlook was argued? There was no scarcity of practitioners willing to put their arguments into print, and the pages oi Architecture In Australia of the late 1950s contain many articles presenting the broad thrust of an emergent design philosophy which defined itself against the strict functionalist tenets of the post-war years. The background for this move was the proliferation of housing as a comni(xlity in the form of urban fringe suburbs. Despite the early promise of suburbia—that of the possibilities of low density, controlled development with a considerable design input—the unfolding reality had circumvented architectural design and reproduced the commodity form of housing with little differentiation. Part of the reaction had its basis in a nationalist/ecological perspective, expounded in the writings of Milo Dunphy:

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Thus the individual architect can ignore suburbia or participate in it, but suburbia goes on unchanged. It will march over the brook where he played as a boy. The brook becomes a pipe drain under five feet of garbage fill. It will trample over the centuries-old stand of trees. It calls the crescent beach 'Honeymoon Bay." and lines it with jostling fibro cottages. The pleasant valley is drowned because suburbia must drink. The sandstone cliffs dribble its sewage...

Of all people, the architect must be most conscious of the sweeping mediocrity and inefficiency which is so rapidly swamping our environment and sub-consciously moulding all of us... But the articulate individual can do little against the momentum of suburbia with its strong financial forces and an apathetic public... The purpose of this article is to suggest that one of the major tasks of the Institute [of Architects] should be to 'do something about suburbia.'2

The point was also being taken up at the modernist centre. At the 10th C1AM Congress at Dubrovnik in August 1956 (devoted to 'The Problems of the Human Habitat), attended by Australian delegates Ian McKay and Phillip Jackson, the reversal of decentralist policies was a major issue. Through its constituent Commissions (panicularlv one on 'Change and Growth'), the conference attempted to reassert the primacy of the architect in determining urban form by proposing the identity of the architect-urbanist' who, the conference declared, must "re-establish the power of moral discipline so that his active participation in the affairs of the community is equivalent to that of the economist and politician of the present time."3

Thus the argument for a re-emergent urbanity was cogently put. albeit in the guise of a somewhat idealistic reappraisal of the role of the architect in the construction and planning of the city. The failure of high modernism to address the complex requirements of the urban condition and the continuing spread of the suburbs produced other, more broadly based, arguments for urbanity. Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) is perhaps the best known of these. But the arguments were in train well before the book's publication. In 1958 Pamela Jewett, a visiting Fulbright Student at the University of Sydney, began a study aimed at showing the desirability of increasing residential densities as a partial solution to the problems of urban sprawl. The study was disarmingly simple, yet Hew in the face of much of the planning logic of the post-war years. Jewett commenced from the assumptions that,

many prejudices against high density living areas stem from social and cultural factors, that these prejudices can be changed by eradicating some of the causes of dislikes and providing good examples of high density living areas, and that medium to high density residential areas can be provided to satisfy the desires of many Australians, and attract many who at present prefer individual houses.4

Her study was modelled on one carried out by the Urban Studies Committee at the Institute for

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Research in Social Science, University of North Carolina, under F. Stuart Chapin. Commenced in 1956, the American study aimed to identify so-called livability qualities which residents felt their area should possess. Jewett's study was narrower in scope. She identified four residential areas:

a new, low income, low density outer suburb [Liverpool J; an older, medium to high income, low density outer suburb [Rosevillej; an old, low income, high density, inner suburb [RedfernJ; and a new medium to high income, high density inner area [an amalgam of Darling Point, Double Bay and Kirribilii].5

These were taken to represent a sufficient cross section of living environments in Sydney to make a viable comparison. Within these four areas some 160 questionnaires were filled out. supplemented by information from local estate agents and building managers. The questions included: length of time at current address, nature of tenure, reasons for choice of location, likes and dislikes of the area, alternative desirable locations, household composition and travelling details.

Amongst the Liverpool residents who generally lived in new. undifferentiated but cheap housing the majority would have preferred to live closer to the city in more developed areas: an unsurprising result, given the isolation and lack of services and infrastructure. The residents of Roseville. at the opposite end of Sydney from Liverpool both geographically and in social class, also expressed some measure of dissatisfaction with their area. Over half of the respondents said they would live elsewhere, for a variety of reasons ranging from a desire for more space in a semi-rural location to a desire for less space without a garden. A number of respondents also decried the lack of genuine sociability.

The most illuminating aspect of the study was the attitude of the Redfem residents, long regarded as slum-dwellers, to their location. The population was a surprisingly stable one, with a large proportion having spent their entire lives in the area. .Also surprising was the high level of television and consumer goods ownership, as well as a high level of car ownership and a very high level of participation in sport and social organisations. Hie small yards and proximity to work were cited as reasons for residents having more leisure time than residents of outer suburbs, time which they felt enriched their lives. In response to the question of an ideal residential location, almost all respondents replied that they would prefer to remain in Redfem.

With the interviews taking place in the midst of a veritable boom in home unit construction in Sydney in the late 1950s, Jewett recorded the attitudes of many unit dwellers who had recently moved from larger houses. Few, it seems, regretted the move, with almost all stating they would remain in a unit if free to choose.

The arguments advanced by Jewett have become common currency in Sydney since the 1980s. The increasing cost of servicing suburban blocks, the labour-intensive aspects of suburban existence such as housework and gardening, the time spent in commuting, the destruction of bushland by suburban

Architectural Theory Review

encroachment: all these argument resonate with a currency which belies their longevity. They were made in the 1950s by Milo Dunphy, they were presented on the international scene at Dubrovnik in 1956. and they were certainly heard in Sydney at the time. Yet the implied urbanity and reconsideration of development patterns which they called for still seemed of less concern to architects of the late 1950s than the alternative argument advanced at the time, that of a reappraisal of functionalism in an attempt to expand the formal and spatial vocabulary of modernism to accommodate a particular register of meaning which it was felt had hitherto been absent.

The missing ingredient was variously categorised. The debate had been prefigured by comments made in 1953 by Arthur Baldwinson:

The too severe mechanical approach is not at all satisfying. To-day we have mastered the use of the new materials at our disposal. Functionalism is now taken for granted and the architect is turning towards questions of aesthetics indirectly expressing his own personality.6

For Robin Boyd it was an ambivalent quality rooted in a lack of integrity and earnestness, yet he concedes that the presence of these two attributes did not necessarily ensure architectural quality. In an address to the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects, Boyd proposed his own conclusions as to the direction needed:

The main task of design practice in the industrial future is to be definite, whether working with the head or from the heart; to be strong, whether in feeling or in reasoning; not to be pretty or even beautiful, but to be real; to restore the dignity of the utilitarian building while raising the dignity of ideas; and to set even' force at the command of architectural practice—professional, educational and propagandist—against the trivial whims and passing fancies which still for all our protestations, bedevil design practice as badly today as they did when Flinders Street station was red.7

Boyd's plea, though, was circumvented by a direct call amongst members of the architectural profession in Sydney for a reassessment of the tenets of functionalism. The terms of this dominant reaction to the crisis of the late 1950s were outlined by Frederick Towndrow, Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at New South Wales University of Technology (as it was then known), in an address to the 6th Australian Architectural Convention in 1956. After surveying his own architectural development, which culminated in a self-confessed catholicity of architectural taste, he proceeded to outline his desires for the direction of architecture:

... we need to bring the human touch back into modem architecture. And quite apart from good public relations, this is ourgreatest architectural problem at the moment. In washing architecture clean of all traces of traditionalism, we have somehow, in emptying the bath, pitched out the baby with dirty water. It is a beautiful and hygienic bathtub full of dynamic spatial relationships,

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but where is the baby for whom we originally bought the bath?

Our next great task is to key the intellectual functionalism, the bony elegance' (as Goodhart-Rendell calls it) and refined logic of our buildings into the emotional responses of ordinary but intelligent people. Perhaps we need a new language of ornament, or decoration, or embellishment that will bring our excellent purposes into harmony with human scale and understanding; a language quite different from that which we threw overboard, but providing something of the pleasure in pattern, in carving and ornament which was enjoyed by our discredited forefathers.8

The individual building rather than the city is the subject here, one whose emotive properties are the fulcrum on which design turns. It can be read as a call for a resurrected individualism, but it can equally be read as an argument for architecture as cultural consumption, whose characteristics are pleasure more than pedantry. Tlie latter reading is given added weight by Towndrow's concluding remarks:

But some day, somebody will have to get down to this job of bringing back some fun and delicate delight into architecture—even at the risk of being called a vulgar cad by his colleagues. Vulgar, that is the word. I am all for a rare touch of vulgarity now and again... Architecture, especially, is an art for the people, quite common ordinary people, who have it at the back of their minds that, occasionally, a little bit of what you fancy does you good.9

The conflation of omament with vulgarity in a self-mocking context reveals the extent and hold of the orthodoxy of anti-omament. and of the intellectualism associated with functionalism which Towndrow parodies elsewhere in the piece.

The points raised by Towndrow were elaborated in an address two years later to the Eighth Australian Architectural Convention. Having dwelt on the question, Towndrow formulated an approach he termed Alto-functionalism' ("higher-functionalism). In a summary of theories of beauty that echoes Bruno Zevi's modes of interpretation in Architecture as Space, he reveals a general measure of aesthetic reappraisal underway within certain influential members of the profession."1 Within his particular grouping of aesthetic theories it is his last categon'—the utilitarian or functionalist theory— that represents for Towndrow the most pressing issue to be addressed. He divides the functionalist school into four variations:

There is thegeomet ric and formalistic and. at times, highly romantic and expressive cult, wherein Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright may be used as the symbol... Tlie second group may be called functional formalism. It is more closely related to the rationale and economics of structural form and it shows influences of modern abstract painting, cubism and Mondriaanesque patterning, but at times it is also queerly formalistic, geometric and sculpturesque ... The third group arc the puritan functionalists... Mies van tie Rohe. an architect-cum-engineer, is the arch-priest of this.

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and so are. in a different way. the exponents of what is called 'the new brutalism.' The fourth group are those who try to be just honest, unaffected, rational and highly concerned with human and social needs. In my opinion they are the most important.''

Towndrow also considers some opinions of two pre-eminent engineers—Ove Arup and Pier Luigi Nervi—regarding the relationship between structural integrity and beauty, an argument of some contemporary heat. For Arup. the essence of architecture lies in ordering, in making comprehensible the relationship between the various functional elements of a building. Nervi's attitude, as recorded by Towndrow, is more concerned with aestheticizing his own engineering approach, to (he point where the relationship between structure and beauty is mystified. Arup. it would seem, is more closely identified with high modernism, while Nervi is more useful to Towndrow in his attempt to define a functionalism which incorporates its other:

[Nervi) is saying what I have said before and that architecture and engineering can lie expressions of something bigger and deeper than themselves, deeper even than ostensible human needs, perhaps a revelation of biological processes or universal laws.12

The three elements of the design process that Towndrow proposes but which he maintains are, in practice, indivisible, are: functional planning, scientific structure, and aesthetic modality. These three combine to bring into being an architectural unity. This notion of unity is explicit and essential:

In all living things there is an appearance of unity where all the parts are subordinate to one whole and are in harmony with one whole—an organic unity which is often symmetrical. A Siamese twin is an aberration; duality in a composition is an aberration, a dichotomy which is offensive to the eyes. In psychology we learn that there is a good need to avoid duality, as this may produce a schizophrenic condition of the mind.13

The terminology of functionalism is retained, as in the overall term Alto-functionalism: indeed Towndrow characterises his schema as scientific humanism. Yet its dogmatic terms prefigure a sort of fundamentalism, betrayed by the insistence on unity. Founded on a conception of an idealised, isolated architectural endeavour which implies the single building as the appropriate scale for design. Towndrow in fact moves away from the scientific (in the usage of the Enlightenment) in favour of a mystification of the aesthetic (or an aestheticization of the mystic) through his key words of Fitness. Order and Spirit:

Functional Fitness, in planning and structure—the physical and biological need. Order, in the organisation of space and substance so as to make a harmonious pattern which can be seen and understood without mental strain—the psychological need. And Spirit, the force that animates a designer and causes him to do something very good, irrespective of any earthly gain. In its higher phases this is pure altruism or inspiration; and for the most part it is inexplicable It may

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be the Will of God.14

What is of significance here is not the soundness of Towndrow's argument when set against its own inner logic. It is the abandonment of the strict materialist underpinnings of high modernism in favour of a creativity that ultimately defies analysis. In itself it holds no hint of an urbanity which undermines the monadic moment of creation in architecture (itself a problematic historical construct) through the exigencies of context.

Peter Kollar's Writings The whole question was taken up with some vigour by L. Peter Kollar. a lecturer in Architecture in Towndrow's faculty. In his "Ten Lectures of Advanced Architectural Design.'" the first four of which appeared in the architectural press in the same year as Towndrow's lecture, he immediately launches into a discussion titled "The Problem of Duality: Function or Beauty."1* Kollar asserts the primacy of intellect over circumstance—in other words he sees the roots of modern architecture not in changed material circumstances but in enlightenment philosophy. He takes Nikolaus Pevsner to task for a lack of insight exhibited in a lecture delivered at the University of New South Wales, where Pevsner,

... showed us some rarely seen odd buildings, all remarkably ugly, which in his words were to become the ancestors of our architecture to-day. It seemed to me odd that, as a historian and not an architect, he failed to sec that Modern Architecture was motivated primarily by the power of thought, by the philosophy of functionalism. and thus the roots of this movement are to be found in the realm of thought and philosophy and not in accidental and meaningless forms thrown upon the landscape by some chance or other.16

Addressing the same duality identified by Towndrow—that of function and beauty—Kollar argues that there is indeed an equation where Function equals Truth and Truth equals Beauty. But he states that the reason Function does not inevitably result in Beauty lies in the limitations of human agency. Thus he postulates a transcendental form of Function—Perfect Function. To illustrate the limitations of everyday, prosaic functioning of buildings, he lists the possible deficiencies in servicing, in orientation, in construction...

Yet I have merely touched upon a small realm: the material world. Beyond that, being concerned with man, would lie an equally important realm, the psychological world. And beyond that, again, the spiritual world.17

The goal, for Kollar. is a perfect building.'IX But the notion of perfection, in his terms, transcends the problematic duality of Function and Beauty. Waxing lyrical, the whole question is posed and answered again in relation to a flower:

Architectural Theory Review

Consider a flower. You may ask: are your petals functional or beautiful? Is your stem functional or beautiful? How childish these questions sound! 'Hie flower's answer will be this: 1 am perfect. I appear to be functional and beautiful, yet I am neither. I am a flower, and as such I am one. If you wish to grasp my existence, you must comprehend that the principle that governs me is one.19

The embodiment in architectural terms, in Kollar's argument, of this one-ness is the architectural Idea, itself ultimately representative of a trans-historical Principle. The schema is passionately elaborated through subsequent sections on "The Nature of Architectural Thought." "Form." and "Perennial Principles of Architectural Form." If the terms seem Hegelian, through the historical persistence of the Idea, the central thrust of the argument with its emphasis on a perfectibility of inhabitation echoes Heidegger's concept of Dwelling. The terms Kollar uses underline his struggle with modernity, and ultimately point to his major sources: A. K. Coomaraswamy and Rene Guenon, whose task, according to Coomaraswamy.

has been to expound the universal metaphysical tradition that has been the essential foundation of every past culture, and which represents the indispensable basis for any civilisation deserving to be so called.20

The Traditionalism of these thinkers held tremendous appeal for Kollar and a number of his contemporaries, including Peter Muller.21 But the significant point here is Kollar's concentration on the perfectibility of the single work of architectural design, as in Towndrow's scheme, over a messier and more quotidian urbanist notion which was emerging at the same time.22

Given the subsequent emergence of the so-called Sydney School on the architectural high ground in the late 1950s and 1960s, it would appear that this isolated notion of architectural production remained paramount until the advent of a widely supported policy of urban consolidation a decade or more into the future. This is borne out by the continued focus of architectural publications on the single building, generally the single house. Often small and situated on marginal building sites or locations on the urban periphery, these houses are testimony to the continuing anti-urban thrust of mainstream architectural concern.

Despite his sources. Kollar could not evade the dilemmas of his position. His own designs may have been influenced by Traditionalism, yet they sat comfortably within their times.23 This invites the reading that his concern with the spiritual was not simply a recovery of a metaphysical binding principle but rather onethatattemptedtovalorisecontemporanarchitecturewithan "authentic'dimension through the medium of the spiritually aware architect. The intensely site- and context-specific principles of this argument are historically static, as befits an approach which is predicated on an acceptance of a conventional relationship between client, architect and builder, and which asserts that the moment of completion of the building is the moment of potential perfection.

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Figure 1. L Peter Kollar, House at Mosman Source. Architecture in Australia. October-December 1958. p. 57

Conclusion It is clear from the foregoing that the disillusionment with high modernism, which had found widespread adherence in Sydney after the war. devolved into two separate approaches: that which favoured a rejuvenated urbanity (in truth a minority position) and that which sought a path through the reaffirmation of the perceived spiritual potential in architectural design. The strong influence of the latter through the 1960s and 1970s indicates something of the constellation offerees that defined the practice of architecture in Sydney in those years. The key point for an ideological analysis of this shift is the reification of architectural history and practice which marked it. In Kollar's writings, for instance, the narrative of architectural history is not only embraced but represents the trace of architectural representation of Truth through history:

Beyond the physical and human plane there exits a vast realm that contains man's deeply rooted desire to reach higher than himself... When architectural thought is focussed upon this plane, it unveils some aspect or pan of the perennial Truth, recognisable beyond its own time and context with universal validitv.

This is the hallmark of architectural masterpieces that thus become endowed with everlasting significance,24

Architectural practice, for Kollar, thus aims to connect with this trans-historical principle, and if successful the result takes its place amongst the great architectural works.

While not directly translatable, the intent behind the arguments espoused by both Towndrow and Kollar are discernible in much of the published Sydney architecture—most notably domestic—of the late 1950s and 1960s. Commercial urban buildings are circumvented intellectually, their tight design constraints seemingly antithetical to any acts of great historical moment. Their intimation, or lack of intimation, towards a creative urbanity are not debated, and would not be for some two decades.

Within the domestic, much ofKollar's thinking concerns individuation: the context—andclient—specific responses which inform the design of individual houses. The reiteration of these qualities is a direct response to the undifferentiated housing of suburbia—in other words, architect-designed houses are conceived as a head-on challenge to the commodification of housing by virtue of their capacity to undermine the commodity nature of housing through individualised design. In a sense the pitch is made too high—the situation had already made the individually-designed house, regardless of its quality, a symbol of exclusive consumption.

The response to exclusivity does, indeed, define the particular anxieties that marked proponents of both the urbanist solution and the spiritual one. The urbanists. at heart, valued the distinction between city and country. They were inclined to embrace increased density in order to sharpen the distinction, muddied by suburbia, between the city and nature. As the evils of the Victorian city—against which early modernism defined itself—receded, so did the anxiety about the alienation and criminality associated with higher living densities. This opened the way for a previously unpalatable argument: to save the countryside (both rural and uncultivated), the city must contract and render the individual house obsolete.

For the traditionalists, the retreat to save the authentic was not geographic but intellectual and the individually designed house had a significant part to play. Consequently their anti-modernism had to contend with a practice and a building industry they would not abandon. The results of their irregular tilt at modernity, in the form of their built works and other allied buildings of the Sydney School, have a charm that belies the intensity of the turning that inspired them.

Notes 1 Sarah Williams Golclhagen and Rejean Legault (eds). Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar

Architectural Culture, Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press. 2000, p.l 1 1 Milo Dunphy. "A View of Sydney." Architecture in Australia. July-September 195", p. 69. Emphasis as in the

original.

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Ian McKay and Phillip Jackson. "The 10th CIAM Conference" Architecture in Australia. July-September 195". pp. 82-84. See also Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism. 1928-1960. Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press. 2000, pp.248-256.

* Pamela R. Jewett. Higher Density Residential Development. A Partial Solution to the Problems of Urban Sprawl. Unpublished thesis for the Department of Town and Country Planning. University of Sydnn. N( ► vember 1959. p. 23. Jewett. Higher Density Residential Development, p. 28.

0 Architect and Engineer (USA). January 1953. p. 3-t. Robin Boyd. "The Future of Design Practice." Architecture in Australia, July-September 195". p. 76. F.E.A. Towndrow, "Architecture and Everyman."' Architecture in Australia, July-September 1956. p. 66. Towndrow. "Architecture and Everyman."

10 Bruno Zevi. Architecture as Space. New York: Horizon Press. 195". The date of publication seems significant here.

11 F.E.A.Towntlr()w.',Alt(>Functi()nalism:.\iiAppr()achtoaPhil()S()phy()f.'\rchitecttiralAesthetics.".\ichitectiire in Australia. April-June 1958. p. 86.

'■' Towndrow,'Alto-Functionalism,"p.87. 0 Towndrow, "Alto-Functionalism," p. 99-'' Towndrow, "Alto-Functionalism," p. 99. " Architecture in Australia. October-December 1958, pp. "8-81. '" L. Peter Kollar. "Four Lectures," Architecture in Australia. October-December 1958, p. "8. '" Kollar. "Four Lectures." p. 80. 18 Kollar, "Four Lectures," p. 80. 19 Kollar. "Four Lectures." p. 81. "° Roger Lipsey. Coomaraswamy: His Life and Work. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1977. p. 169. :1 See. for instance. Peter Muller's reproduction of an article, via Coomaraswamy, by the German archaeolo­

gist Walter Andrae. as a preface to the publication of his Richardson House: Walter Andrae. "On the Life of Symbols." Architecture in Australia. October-December 1958, p. 63. Also Adrian Snodgrass. interview with the author. 18 August 2003.

" Even when addressing how buildings sit together. Kollar is at pains to stress issues of form related by hier­archy, itself a derivative of Traditionalism. Sec L Peter Kollar, "The Problems of Co-Relation." Architecture in Australia. September 1959. pp. ~3-~6.

° Indeed, they appear entirely contemporary. See. for example, his House at Mosman,' published in Archi­tecture in Australia. October -December 1958. pp. 56-5". and the 'House at Balgowlah.' Architecture in Australia, June 1961, pp. 84-88.

21 Kollar. "Four Lectures." p. 83.