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MODERN FUNCTIONALISMAND THE RADICALLY ORDINARY:TOW ARDS A REINTERPRETATION O FARCHITECTS EDUCATEDIN THE 1930s AND 1940sPaul-Alan Johnson

This paper draws in part from interviews being conducted by theauthor in a project entitled the Architects of the M iddle Th ird 1 as partof a larger study re-examining the theory and ideology of Australianarchitects from the 30s to the 60s. To date twenty five interviews havebeen completed with New South Wales architects whose education andearly practice took place during the 30s and 40s. The interviews coverboth ordinary and celebrated architectural production throughout themiddle third of the 20th century (hence the project's title) and illumi-nate the ideas that were finding favour, and those that were not, amongthese architects. Once completed, the results of the project are likely toreorientate the professional impact of and contemporaneous attitudestowards early modernism in Australia.The middle third of the 20th century in Australia is of interest becauseof the significant changes to both architectural ideas and aestheticexpression that accompanied the Modem Movement emanating fromEurope. It is of interest too because of the increased development andits impact on urban form that occurred once restrictions on buildingwere lifted following World War 2. The architecture of this period,especially at the 'humdnun' end of the spectrum, has been either under-represented or totally neglected in Australian architectural histories.Despite its comprehensiveness in many other respects, Max Freeland'sArchitecture in Australia devotes only one paragraph to factories, forinstance, towards the end of his chapter on austerity? and does notinclude illustrations of industrial buildings at all (save for the ubiqui-tous wheat silo on p 242).The Middle Third project, by its own quite serendipitous account, isalready reintegrating the 'ordinary' architect into the archi-historicalrecord, for the interviews provide ample evidence of a rich array ofarchitectural works, ideas and personalities existing at the everyday

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level than might be supposed from conventional histories exalting moreelevated levels of architectural endeavour. This is especially the case inrelation to 'ordinary' buildings that accede to the wisdom of the earlymodernists, most notably those buildings espousing a modern and effi-cient 'functionalism'. One possible reason for the imbalance may bethat certain writers have promoted, in effect, an architectural epiphanyof modem functionalism coming out of Victoria during the mid-1930s,irnmortalised and consolidated later in Robin Boyd's Victorian M odernof 1947.3 Another reason may be in part the result of the lack of anycountering by equally coherent historiographical writings coming outof NSW or the other Australian states at that time.I wish to begin with a few remarks made by the British writer and crit-ic J M Richards, who achieved some prominence in the 1930s andwhose writings have been cited by at least one of those interviewed forthe Middle Third project as being of consequence to young architectsin Australia. In 1940, Richards wrote in his populist book An Intro-duction to M odern Architecture that the term 'modern architecture' wasbeing usedto meansomething more particularthan contemporary architecture. . . the new kind ofarchitecturethat is growing up this centuryas this century's own contribution to the art. . . a social art related to the life of the people it serves, not an academic exercise inapplied ornamentHe quames this further a paragraph later,it is a mistake to suppose that, because modem architectsare ~ c u l a r l yoncerned torelatebuildingsmore closely to the needs they have to serve, they areonly interestedinthe practical side of architecture. They know that they are practising an art, and aretherefore concerned with the pursuit of beauty.The implication from Richards was that, whatever it was, modemarchitecture would serve people in a practical yet beautiful way and thatthis was the kind of present and future world modern architects wereoffering up as their art. Richards expressed any doubts about the ' forerunners of a new architecture' by using the notion of that universalisedpersona, the cynical and cautious 'Man n the Street':But the Man n the Street only sees in the new architectureanother bewilderingadditionto the variety of architectural styles he is already offered:a new style which, he feels,must have something to it, because it looks clean and efficientand not too pompousand because he has heard that it is based on an ideacalledfunctionalism(or 'fitness forpurpose') which at least sounds sensible if rather inhuman; but a style he also rathersuspects, simply because he is naturally conservative. He dislikes having somethingfamiliarreplaced by something unfamiliarwithout any evident reason, and he has anidea that the people who are responsible for the new architecture are cranks, foreigners,

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revolutionaries or other kinds of people that he disapproves ofThere have been so many misunderstandings about modem architecturethat . . . itmay be as well to mention a few things that it is not. It is not, for one thing, a fashion-able style of jazz ornament; it is not the custom of building in concrete, or w~thlatroofs and horizontal window panes; t is not 'functionalism'. It is quite simply, likeall good architecture, he honest product of science and art. It aims at once more relat-ing methods of building as closely as possible to real needs.The prose, while not exactly rallying, certainly is an imprint of themodernist banner, sentiments that most modern British and Europeanarchitects had by then been espousing vigorously for the past twodecades. Richards became more hortatory on the next page when hebegan decrying the imitators of modem architecture, the 'vulgarizerswho join up with the movement only in order to cash in,' the 'makersof jazz-modern shop-fronts,' the 'purveyors of smart angularfurniture,' and the 'builders of nasty "modernistic" villas.' These werethe harbingers of evil, these, and the ignorance of the populace at largewho were Richards's readership, were the ones who interfered with theevolution of the brave new world. These miscreants were in need ofcorrection and redirection because. . . his bogus modemism, whether it is the result of the commercial exploitationofnovelty or merely the wish to be in the fashion, obviously does greatham to the causeof good modem architecture. It brings it into disrepute. And the only way to preventthe fine ideals of the one fmm being vulgarized into insignificance by the other is forpeople to discriminate betterbetween them. If people understand the point of genuinemodem architectureand appreciatewhat t is trying to do, they will see quickly enoughthat the ungenuine- which is oftencalled modemisti' - as no basis beyond itself.It consists of a few flashy hicks and the use (often the wrong use) of a number of fash-ionable materials.Despite his protestations immediately following about 'our own goodtaste' being unreliable, the discernment for which Richards calledinvolved taste and style, just what modern architecture was notsupposed to be about at all. Of course, we know now that this kind ofpolemic was all to do with prosecuting a certain reformist aestheticagenda, and that not every architect heeded its call. Some might say itis unnecessary to re-focus on the events of those years if it is merely toshow that the polemic failed to deliver all it promised. But this is whatwe will now briefly do, based in the Australian experience of thedecade from 1929 to 1939especially, for it illuminates the complexitiesof personalities and issues that have been surreptitiously sidelined byhistorical over-simplification and tidy-mindedness.

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The attitudes of Richards's eponymous 'Man in the Street' are just likethose of a number of Australian architects of the 30s, if we are to judgeby those interviewed for the Middle Third, the emphasis for thembeing precisely on the stylistic, the functional, and on formal tricks.One architect described the 'modem' as comprising 'curved comers'and horizontal windows and 'box type buildings with glass fronts,'that is, precisely in stylistic terms, not philosophical, while another saidhis own style was 'a three-dimensional, functional solution to a problem. . .' and that '"Form follows Function" . . . sets the basics for goodarchitecture,' 8 that is, architecture is entirely 'functional' in its basis,not ideological. A comment by yet another architect, describing hisBeaux-Arts education at the University of Sydney, picks up the instru-mental aspect of modem design:I think hey thought they had us as students for five years and in those five years theycould only give us culture. We wuld learn the dirty tricks afterwards and I think herewould be some justification for that. I have a general feeling that a student goingthrough a school of architecturecan't of course be taught all the dirty tricks hut theyshould a t least be e x p e d to the range.While these so-called 'dirty tricks' are from the same ethical stable asthe 'flashy tricks' of Richards' 'bogus modernism', they differ marked-ly in being willingly and inevitably embraced by Australian architectsbecause it was only sensible to do so, rather than being disdainfully setaside. A cautionary tale by another architect, relating to his educationat the University of Melbourne in the 30s, demonstrates the ambiva-lence surrounding both the licence and the dangers modem designoffered:MC: If we had a subject like a school, [Le~ghtonrwin] would give a short talk onschools. One tlung I'll always remember and this was at the ttmeof theearly modemmovement, the Bauhaus movement, was that flat roofs gave you a cerkun freedomI'm tallung of smaller scale buildmgs and not city office bul d~ ng s l c h always hadflat roofs anyway. I'm talhng about houses and schools and so on. We felt a sort offreedom because you wuld do almost anytlung and put a flat roof on itI remember Leighton Irwin telling us, 'Yes, you have this freedom but the buildingwill not be a successful design unless it could have a pitched roof put on it.' Nowa-days you get very complicated pitched roofs but he was talking about a simple pitchedroof. I think he was trying to stop us from going a bit haywire. . loFreeland describes the early modern architecture of the 30s in Archi-tecture in Australia asplainand . . . simpleindividualelements. . . puttogether in an austerely ce~bra l ay. . . a highly directionalarchiteclurefull f violent and positive movement, assertiveformsand spectacular gymnastics. . . mechanical, hard and austere but extraordinarilyFABRICATIONS 116 PAULALANJOHNSON

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confident. . . A glib formula which could be applied to any situation . . . A faciearchitecture to be sure. l 1In contradistinction, the general run of young Australian architects,among whom there were of course some willing to experiment withmodem ideas when they could, were essentially conservative, skepticaland ambivalent about the new architecture of the preceding decade anda half. Some indeed were even scornful. Take the way R LindsayLittle describes and counters the reaction to a project he undertookduring his student days:We did a p r o p a l for the enhancement of the Sydney TechnicalCollegeand I did adesign for that in the modern style. It shook the boys and they said, 'Oh . . . dreadfulstuff.' phey] thought Fancy puttingthat in. . .dreadful.' But i t was the beginning ofthe modern architecturewhich was taking place. . . loved the Colonial and Georgianand that type of architecture. . . pu t] I summed it up at that time: 'Why not try every-thing you can? l2These few extracts from the Middle Third interviews merely highhghtthe pragmatic reality that faced many architects of the 30s and 40sgeneration who aspired, not to greatness, but to providing a solid anddependable service to their clients. It is to recognise, too, that ordinaryarchitects of varying ability and talent were now legitimised by themodem design milieu and thereby gained access to what rapidly becamea culture of commodification in line with the economic transformationof the world that was soon to become the great hallmark of twentieth-century productivity. But they knew, and their clients insisted, thatthey were not about changing the world; the best they could hope forwas to be 'radically ordinary'. More of that shortly. I would now liketo review briefly the education of some of these architects.Le Corbusier's essays from just after the end of World War 1 inL'Esprit Nouveau - compiled in 1923 into Vers Une Architecture l3- laborated upon the novel conditions of the modem world and advo-cated a new architecture to match. Le Corbusier was critical of thecapability of historical styles to manage the demands of contemporarymateriality, saying, 'Construction has undergone innovations so greatthat the old "styles", which still obsess us, can no longer clothe it.'More particularly, a paragraph later he was so scathing about the ethi-cal value of historical styles that he virtually willed them away alto-gether:The 'styles' no longer exist, they are outside our ken; if they still trouble us, it is asparasites. If we set our selves against the past, we are forced to the conclusion that theold architectuml code, with its mass of rules and regulations evolvedduring four thou-

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sand years, i s no longer of any interest: it no longer wn cerns u s: all the values havebeen revised; there has been a revolution in the conception of what Architecture is. l4Notwithstanding Le Corbusier's stylistic admonitions and his revolu-tionary conception of architecture, students during the 30s in Australiawere still being inculcated in the historical styles via Banister Fletcherand their Mediterranean vernacular equivalents promoted from thetwenties initially by Walter Butler in Melbourne and subsequently byRodney Alsop at the University of Melbourne's Architectural DesignAtelier (to 1932), and also by Leslie Wilkinson in Sydney. While theuniversities and institutes of technology also taught up-to-date materiali-ty in the more practical subjects, they did not relate aesthetics and tech-nics in the comprehensive Corbusian sense at all. The two worldsinformed Tom O'Mahony's education at the Gordon Institute of Tech-nology, Geelong, during the early thirties,Classical, Gothic , and Renaissance were the w r e of the course there - plus otherstudies to pass the then Institute of Architects examinations. Th ose were the usualthings, professional practice, construction, sanitary science and sciagmphy . . . Wealso did perspecm e drawing and som e design.15On the one hand the historical styles as the design armature, on theother the structural and engineering aspectsas state of the 'art', precise-ly the same unreconciled dichotomy about which Le Corbusier waswriting.All good architecture students, of course, listened to their teachers, bethey in academe or in the workplace, and Australian student architectswere no different. 'I started to realise you had to express yourself insome way or another and the only way I knew how then was to imitatemy tutors,' says Laurie Malanot. But some, including Laurie, readdifferently - hey read Le Corbusier and other writers, listened totheir colleagues' tales of travelling around Europe, and reachedforward a little. Of the talks given to the Modem ArchitectureResearch Society- he Sydney version of the British MARS group, ofwhich he was a member - Laurie Malanot recalled: 'We did invitepeople, usually students from Tech who had been abroad and couldguide us in design and outlook . . .' l6Of course there were those who rarely read any philosophical or theo-retical material at all and were merely carried along by the day-to-dayinsights their employment and education provided them. The TechnicalColleges in particular showed a way through, but very much in practi-cal terns. 'I really think the experience we had was very practical . . .They didn't endeavour to teach us anything in the way of design. . . weFABRICATTONS 118 PAULALANJOHNSON

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were just aided by the more experienced people we worked with,'remarks Allan Gamble of life as a student in Western Australia.17 Andso it was elsewhere:Q: Would you also say your course was very downfo arth?JM: Absolutely, you must remember I was seventeen or eighteen years old andcertainly had no high flown aspirations or knowledge of architecture. There wasn'tany stany eyed business about it at all.Q: You diAn't have any lecturers who were 'stanyeyed'?JM: In those days Tech Colleges taught the real things of architecture and didn't dealwith the stars and the firmament much - heir devotion was to classical models. Wehad drawing and we had brickworkand we had all the business of ordering mortarandbricks and timberand how-a window fitted intoa wall. Those days of atchikxtnmltminingwere mnpletelydifferen tfr even the universitiesof those days, I think. Itis my impression it was a more hade oriented course. I never did Philosophy orJapanese or Psychology and I distrust all that. I thiukit is the kind of thing that hasgone wrong with architechuaI training these daYs.l8If they languished in matters of design or style though, these studentsand the younger architects progressed in matters of construction, to thepoint where they saw in technics a ready substitute for design or stylis-tic concerns. 'I was much more interested in constmction than design,'declares Stanlev Brandon. while Ivor Tacon ~roffered: Mv oninion ofarchitects, in the main, i s that they are eiiher constmcl?ion' men ordesieners but rarely good at both.'lg A recent interviewee declared'[MY partner] had a -dif?erent geme but I would sometimes escape. mis]genre was Cubist, Gropius . . . flat roof and purity. I enjoyed it too,but I would escape and do ordinary stuff with pitched roofs and casement windows.' This view that architects could find sufficient fulfill-ment i n 'ordinary stuff', especially in the practical-minded andconstructional aspects of their profession, recurs in a number of theMiddle Third interviews. Yet this emphasis hardly features in conven-tional architectural histories.Le Corbusier had not only written that 'the conclusion has often beendrawn that architecture is construction . . . [but] that is not a reason formixing different things. It is quite true that the architect should haveconstruction at least as much at his fingers' ends as a thinker his gram-mar . . .' He had also gone on to say that 'an architect's efforts areconcentrated on it for a large part of his career; but he should not vegetate there.' One wonders whether the derogatory 'vegetate' has perhapsconvinced many architectural historians and commentators that a'construction' mentality was not a legitimate preoccupation of architec-FABRICATIONS PAUL-ALAN JOHNSON

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turd history and whether this attitude has led to a preponderance ofnarrowly focussed high-style histories. Notwithstanding his prolificacy,most of those interviewed for the Middle Third admitted to not havingabsorbed or been influenced by Le Corbusier's writings,20 and, asstudents, of being aware of modem design ideas in only a generalisedway.Most surprising of all, most of those interviewed have been reluctant toadmit to any external architectural influences at all, apparently for fearof denying their own design creativity, or of being seen as too easilyswayed, no matter how their design skills might have been awarded orreported favourably by others. Talk of influences raises what amountsto a defensive barrier among these practitioners of early modernism.I suppose somethmg came from ra &ng about and seelng ~llustrahous f work byGmp~us, eCorbus~er,Alvar Aalto, Maxwell Fry, [FR S]Yorke and other arclutectsof that bmeadmits one architect dubious l~ .~ 'No, they were my ideas. . . I just did it, not copying another. . . I was not influencedby any trend. I was only influencedby the problemsas I saw them. . . I think1 didthe best I could, though I never followed anybody. . . whatever job I got I did to thebest of my ability,declares a second defiantly.22 Which prompts the question of just whowere offered up as influences by those prepared to admit them?Of the twenty four interviewed for the Middle Third, among overseasarchitects half professed an interest in 'the Dutchman, Dudok . . . thebrick man,'= especially his Hilversum Town Hall, Frank Lloyd Wrightcamea close second, Gropius was mentioned by a quarter, and Aalto byfour. 'For me the great light was Dudok from Holland.' 24 'There wasone favourite of the young architects of our time . . . Dudok of Hollandwho was one of our pin-up ar~hite cts. '~~m d o k was] very good in theuse of brickwork particularly . . .all in clean and bold massing . . '26We reckoned that Dudok's Hilversum Town Hall was the greatest building we hadseen in those days. . . [Although] We sort of followed Le Corbusier but we didn'treally think hat much of his work compared to Dudok and Frank Lloyd Wright. . .there was a lot of brickwork and horizontal lines with both.'My final design thesis was a bit Dudok-ish, if you know what I mean . . . my designwas in brickwork. Dudok had the capabilities o get the proportions rigbt in the brickpanels and the brick elementsof a place. . . Hilversum Town Hall in Holland was oneof the pieces de resistance of architectnre.28What impressed them about the work of Dudok, and of Gropius when

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he was mentioned, was 'the clean lines, and the modem architecture wasso tidy and clean and neat . . . and all so simple.'29 There were, howev-er, a few doubters. 'As a young man I examined all this sort of thingbut I don't remember being overly impressed. It seemed to be artifi-cially modem to me.' 30I llked pudok's] work. . . [but] the style was not the style I had been thinking it was. . . t was not finished properly. Over there they seemed to put up with things wewouldn't condone for one minute. For instance, with tiles, there would be leaks in theridge and leaks around chimneys. . . It was not the lookof the thing it was the func-tion. 31Laurie Malanot also remembers:I recall Syd Ancher who studied Dudok's buildings quite a hit saying that they lookedbeautiful fmm the street level but when you got on top, he said, the roofs were falseand sloped the wrong way. If you considered a building structurally with the designhe got his effect by doing the wrong thing. But mind you, we were then students talk-ing and we might not have been quite right in our outlook. But a t these meetings,when you would heara chap who had been abroad and had seen it, you couldn't argue32And among Australian architects, it was Syd Ancher who impressed theNSW architects the most, a third deferring to him. 'The simplicity andsensitivity of his work impressed me. He was a very dedicated archi-tect.' 33 'I reckon Sydney Ancher was about the best but of course therewere others . . .' 34 'I remember the houses he designed. They wereoutstanding . . . very plain but neat and tidy and I was very impressedwith his work.' 35 The only other Australian modernist receiving sigmf-icant mention was the Melbourne architect Arthur Stephenson and hisf m s , Stephenson and Meldrum and Stephenson and Turner.The general tenor of comments in the interviews against influences andfor self-reliance suggest that the greater bulk of Australian architects ofthe 30s generation were not willing to unreservedly declare their handfor modem architecture and its attendant ideas, let alone its principaladvocates. If this is interpreted as a negative reaction, i t appears thesearchitects were not primarily against those ideas per se so much asagainst their side effects; for modem design, while offering a straight-forward regimen within which many ordinary architects could work,also appears to have disernpowered them in equal measure, in that theexemplars that Le Corbusier and other European 'names' providedsimply demanded much that budget and circumstance prevented themfrom delivering. This leads me to a brief consideration of everydaypractice in the 30s and 40s.

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Overseas and Australian influences were either substantially modifiedor greatly diminished by circumstances, or were redirected via a self-imposed emphasis on individual capability that resolutely sought solu-tions from among the exigencies of the task. Mainly these concernedmoney. Take the response of R Lindsay Little - of the generation ofAustralian 30s modernists, but not having travelled overseas until thelate 1950s, well into the period of revisionist modernism - when askedif he saw any work overseas he thought appropriate for Australia:RLL: Yes, in America. . . FrankLloyd Wright's work. They were beautiful housesand beautifully finished and twice the sizeof the things we used to build. The problemwas that we didn't have the money in Australia. Pwple wouldn't put up the money todo that type of work. They would treat you as a burglar if you suggested somethinglike that and think you were just taking them down.Q: Do you think clients here were much more basic in what hey wanted?W: Yes. . . yet people would study the magavnes wth these h n g s n them Theywould come and say they wanted sometlnng llke that and when we asked about moneythey would only have half what they would need and they couldn't accept that. .Q: Did you see FrankUoyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum?W: I saw it but I wasn't interested. I think you get a bit choosy when you see somuch. I can't remember names but there were some public buildings which impressedme and I would have loved to have built something like them in Sydney. Only the bigarchitectswere ever asked to build like that in Sydney. I would have been langhedat.36

Indeed, for many of his contemporaries it was the same. . . great ideas,but no clients with money or daring enough to explore them. For someyears now I have argued, informally, two things. Firstly, thatAustralia, unlike North America, was settled after the money ran out,so to speak, and consequently never generated the sponsors or mentors,either as individuals or institutions, to encourage either art or architec-ture to flourish as experimental and expressionistic enterprises. Therefore Australian giants of architecture, either as names or as works, justnever evolved to the extent that they did overseas. Secondly, that thephilosophy of modernism in architecture, once removed from its Eurc-pean socio-cultural roots and particularly after the 'names' emigratedfrom Europe before and during the Second World War, was interpret-ed in stylistic terms by architects everywhere. In Australia this wasvirtually the casefrom its inception. It seems strange that the people ina country so imbued with the egalitarian ideal could not have sustaineda far more socially substantiated modernism.I now feel able to make a tentative claim for placing the practical-

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minded architect and the myriad pragmatic and mundane buildingsproduced in everyday architectural practice squarely into an historicaland theoretical frame, especially in light of the succinct summary byTV commentator Diane Powell, in her Out West: Perceptions ofSydney's Western Suburbs, of certain notions put forward by Frenchhistorian and ethnologist Michel de Certeau:The practice of people taking what they want from the vanious resources and facilitiesaround them - 'making good' - s, according to Michel de Certeau, a series of'minuscule' tactics, means by which ordinary people unselfconsciously resist andmanipulate the powerful mechanisms of discipline which penetrate all aspects ofmodem life. The Neapolitans call it l'urfe di arrangimri, those everyday practices weall engage in to arrange things from within an often limited range of options at ourdisposal into fonns to suit ourselves: differentuses of 1anguage;the use of privateandpublic space (the decoration of houses, ways of occupying urban space and shoppingcentres); the uses to which consumer g o d s are put (how we play music, m r d ndwatch videos); bow rituals are adapted (the way we personalise dress codes); theredrawing of relationships (blending families). We all engage in an 'art of cooking';selecting, putting together, and adapting the variety of resources at hand to create newfo ms to suit ourse~ ves?~In The Practice of Everyday Life 38 Michel de Certeau argues that,within the frame of economic production and institutionalized andsocialized practices that dominate everyday life, we are not passive'consumers' so much as active 'tacticians'. We adopt certain individual-ized practices or 'ways of doing' that reconstitute our spaces of individ-ual production and thereby resist this systemic domination. This resis-tance is the means by which we seek out and maintain our creativity inthe everyday world. 'These practices bring into play a "popular" ratio,a way of thinking invested in a way of acting, an art of combinationwhich cannot be dissociated from an art of using'39. This adaptive'making do' or bricolage is the core of a set of tactics, a 'tactic' being 'acalculus which cannot count on a "proper" (a spatial or institutionalizedlocalization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visi-ble totality.' De Certeau elaborates:The place of a tactic belongs to the other. A tactic insinuates itself into the other'splace, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep itat a distance. . . Because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time- t isalways on the watch for opportunitiesthat must be seized 'on the wing'. Whatever itwins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order totum hem into'opportunities'. The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien tothem. This is achieved in propitious moments. ..aThis constant manipulation of events is as good a description as any ofthe creativity at work in everyday architectural practice, indeed of a

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'working-against' that constitutes creative opportunism within the ordi-nary. Even the seemingly innocuous or passive is transformed by deCerteau. For instance, the view that reading 'seems to constitute themaximal development of the passivity assumed to characterize theconsumer, who is conceived of as a voyeur,' for de Certeau readinghas on the contrary all the characteristics of a silent production: the drift across thepage, th e metamorphosis of the text effected by the wandering ey es of the reader, theimprovisation and expectation of m eanings inferred from a few words . . . r h e reader]insinuates into another person's text the ruses of pleasure and appropriation: he poach-es on it, i s transported into it, pluralizes himself in it . . 41This activity of reading, whether in its most distracted form of 'browsi-ng' or in its most interested form of voyeurism, is so much a part ofdesign culture that de Certeau's 'silent production', 'metamorphosis','improvisation', and the idea of poaching, all of a sudden become viableand potent constructs as the procedures of architects and designers.By arraying these particular extracts, I am suggesting that architectseducated during the early modem period in Australia were not in aposition to replicate the ideas of their European counterparts, let alonethe originators of early modernist discourse, so much as in the positionof bricoleurs, artful fabricators. Most of thesearchitects were just likede Certeau's 'ordinary man' or 'wmmon hero' to whom his book wasdedicated. They were capable people, 'ordinary' architects in a profes-sion with a mere sprinkling of 'extraordinary' architects, who tried tomake good under prevailing and sometimes extremely difficult wndi-tions.What opportunities for creativity were there, and are there still, in sucheveryday circumstances? My offering is that, insteadof proselytisingan evangelical modernist agenda as the European ideologues would haveit, an 'ordinary' Australian architect, by virtue of education andcircumstances, would only, or wuld only, reinterpret this agenda intoone that was 'radical' within limited means. I use 'radical' in its etym-logical sense of 'root' or 'fundamental', whereby the return to funda-mental principles was seen as injecting a quality of clarity and purityinto their designings, rather than in its sense of advocating 'radicalreform' from some advanced or extreme political view. There is asense, though, in which I am suggesting that these architects, in being'radically ordinary', attempted also to be politically persuasive, to be asadvanced and as demanding in their inventiveness as they wuld in theface of the customary, the regular, and the conservative demands asso-ciated with their everyday professional circumstances. The followingquotations touch on some aspects of these circumstances:

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TO: I just felt I'd like to takea job from first principles myself and see what I cameupwith. I didn't want to be influenced. . . I was a bit conceitedI guess. I thought, 'Ican solve this and I don't really need to look up magazines about i t 'Q : W hat did you consider firstprinciples in those days?TO: Probably planning and making sure the thing worked and that it was an agreeablebuilding for the client to use and agreeable to look at in its environment I didn't haveany deepseated philosophies if you'd call it that. . 42Q: Do you think there is a n element of 'she'll be right' complacency in M a l i a narchitectme?LK. Are they complacent? I think some people are perfectionlstsand some arecompelledto be more. pragmatic due to exigencies of cost and time . . . Architectswitha ~eut onicbackground t&d to be perfectionists. Hany Seidler has that perfectionismin his detailing and I admire him for his enthusiasm. What I have learnt is that thebusiness of architmturein Sydney means the architect is in the hands of the client. Thearchitectis reluctant to say 'that's vulgar' or 'I'm not going to have anyrhmgtodo withthat' and walk out. . . But architects have to survive and in the end they must tly tosatisfy the client's inclinationsand prejumces. I wouldn't like to say that people inSydney tend to be philistines but (laughs) they do like to see a lot for their money. 43I enjoyed bigger scale work and not humdrum factories. That reminds me of thesenice stations. At one stage, there must have been a recession or something, I knowthat work got very scarce, but through someone I knew connectedwith Ampol, I gotservice stations to do. They became stereotyped to just a standard design which youadapted to a site and that I didn't enjoy either, but it was work you had to do just tokeep going. 44The fact that Diane Powell addresses the stigma still attaching to peopleliving in the western suburbs is pertinent here because it is in inverseproportion to the elitist preoccupations that beset those architecturalhistories which emphasise only the great architects and the great works,the exceptional rather than the norm. Ordinary architects producingrevisionist works rate only a derogatory mention, if they rate at all.Ordinary architects producing 'radical' or principled works withinlimited means get similar treatment. For such architects to be omittedfrom conventional architectural histories, or derogated within them forattitudes that are not theirs to answer, is to perpetuate the idea of theautonomous individual and to limit history to one particular mode, onethat is not a sufficient history for Australian architects as a whole.The central focus of de Certeau is on the everyday life and practices ofordinary people, yet it mirrors what I perceive to be the everyday lifeand practices by ordinary architects educated and working during themiddle third of the twentieth century in Australia. Adaptation to the

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resources at hand within a limited range of options is certainly one ofthe principal emphases beginning to emerge from the Middle Thirdinterviews, as the following extract shows:. . . when I got back [after travelling] and into my own practice I never felt any greatleaning towards Tectonand Gropius andMies van der Rohe. It would seem to me thatthey photographed better than they really were . . . You asked whether I was influ-enced by them and I suppose really I'd have to say no, because I never produced anywork like them. My work I suppose was more reactionary. The wmmissions I got tostart with were low budget and if you departed from well-known construction-remember afterthe war materialswere scarce- ou often wuldn't even get a builderto tender. My view was that if you stuck to traditional methods of wnstruction such asbrick and timber floors and tile roofs you wuld at least get it built.45Certainly a traditional historical emphasis in education has been the casefor every generation of architects, not just for the modem. But it wasof special significance for young graduates of the 30s and 40s becausenot a few chose thereafter to reiterate mainly traditional themes, espe-cially i n domestic work, as the most direct path to economic longevityin their practices.46 To attain anything more than a pared-back modemstylistic idiom arising out of a 'making do', and thereby a 'makinggood' under restricted contemporary circumstances, was something forwhich their formal education gave them little or no preparation. Theywere thrown on to their own resourcefulness and inventiveness based insound planning, a primary materiality, and the rudiments of minimalistcomposition. But for the fact that many at 'Tech' were indentured, andtherefore seeing the real world on a day-to-day basis, there was noleavening of the historical design emphasis in their education that couldsatisfy the contemporary demands being made of them. Ivor Taconmakes the point in relation to his own education:Q: Onwhat didyour kcmersplace most emphasis?IT: I t was difficult for us because we were approaching the Depression and moneywas a very scarce commodity. What the lecturers told us was that when we came todesign we were to design regardless of cost. In the back of our minds all the time,unfortunately, was what it would cost It was embeddedin us and so design was a bitof a problem for a g o d many of us who were very practical. At a later stage in lifethat stood us in very good stead but in the student days it was a bit of a drawback.Those who were practical could not let their flights of fancy go because we were all thetime thinking of what it would wst."Perhaps the sentiment of the ordinary architect in everyday practicehying to be radical as he or she dared is best summed up by the respon-se Leonard Walker gave to the question: Having been so definite aboutwanting to be an architectall those years ago, did you ever regret it?

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'Never. I think I was a sound architect - don't know if I was a verygood architect, but I was a sound architect . . .' 48

Notes

1. The Architects of the Middle Third project was triaUed for one year in 1991 via aUNSW Faculty of Architecture (nowtheFaculty of The Built Environment)Research Grant, and is half way through a three-year cycle of funding underan ARC Small Grant. So far 30 interviews in the series have been completed.See Paul-Alan Johnson and Susan Lorne-Johnson,eds,Architects of theMiddle Third: Interviews with New South Wales architects who commencedpractice in the 1930sand 1940s(M),ols 1 (1992), 2 (1995) and 3(1996, in MS), Kensington, NSW: School of Architecture, The University ofNew South Wales.2. J Maxwell Freeland, Architectwe inAusi7alia:AHistory.Ringwwd, Vic:Penguin Books, 1972, pp 273,276. The pamgraph begins at the bottomof p 273 and continuesat the top of p 275, there are two illustration pagesbetween.3. Robin Boyd, VictorianModern, Melbourne: Architectuml Students' Society of theRoyal Victorian Institute of Architects, 1947.4. J M Richards,An IntroductiontoModem Architecture, Harmondsworth,England: Penguin, 1940,pp 9-10.5. Ibid, p 10.6. Ibid,p11.

7. Stanley C Brandon, AMT, vol 2, pp 5-6,17.8. G Charles Cullis-Hill, ibid, pp 72,73.9. Peter F'riestley,AMT, vol 1, 1992, p 127.10. Max Collard,M, ol 2, pp 34-35.11. Freeland, op cit, p 253.12. R Lindsay Little, AMT, vol2, pp 79-80.13.Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, English transby Frederick Etchells,1927. Extracts here taken from the 13th edition. 1931. facsimile.Dover, 1986.14. Ibid, p 288.15. Tom O'Mahony, AMT, vol 1, p 102.16. Lorenzo Malanot, ibid, p 73.17. Allan Gamble,AMT, vol 3, MS.18. John Merewether, ibid.19. IvorTacon,AMT, vol2, p 119.20.Onlv 15% of those interviewed mentioned LeCorbusier at all. let alone thewritings of other notables.Brian Mowbray,AMT, vol2, p 93.Leslie Monis,AMT, ol3, MS.B N C ~itchfield,M, ol 1, p 60Laurence Raper , ibid, p 137.

MaxCollard,AMT, vol 2, p 32.Brian Mowbray, ibid, pp 98.99.FelixW Tavener, ibid, p 128.

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28. Charles Weatherbum. ibid. D 15229. Felix W Tavener, ibid, p 1%.30. G Charles Cullis-Hill. ibid. D 73.31. R Lindsay Little, ibid; p 88.'32. Lorenzo Malanot. AMT. vol 1. D 75.,.33. Lawrence A K&, ibid; p 44.34. Sydney H Bridekirk, AMT, vol2, pp 29-30.35. R Lindsay Little, ibid, p 81.36. Ibid. nu 88. 89.37. ~ow kic i & e , ut W est: Perceptions of Sydney's W estern Suburbs,St Leonards. NSW: Allen & Unwin. 1993. D 155.~~~ ~. - ~~ -38. Dc Certeau, Mchcl, The I'rocrice of t v r j d a y L & , trm by Steven Rendall,1974. Califomla. Un~versin, f Califorma Press. 1984.~ 2 - - ,39. Ibid, p xv.40 . Ibid, p xix.41. Ibid, p xxi.42. Tom O'Mahony,AMT, vol 1, p 102.43. Lawrence A Knox, ibid, p 44.44. Max Collard,AMT, vol2, p 41.45. Tom O'Mahony, AMT, vol 1, p 101.46. One w el l -hw n architect who practiced mostly in a d i t iona l idiom for hisdomestic work yet ventured into the modem for institutional and commercialwork was Sydney architect John R Brogan, educatedat Sydney TechnicalCollege during the twenties. His 101Australian Homes (1935) of traditionaldesigns was immediately popular and influential yet, withE B Filzgerald, hewon the Adelaide Boys' High School competition of 1940 with a Dudok-inspired modem scheme. For Brogan's life and works see AmaK Brogan,JohnR B ~ o g m : A areer in Practice, unpublished BArch dissertation, Schoolof Architecture, The University of NSW, 1994.47. Ivor Tacon,AMT, vol2, p 110.48 . Leonard G Walker,AMT, vol 1, p 158.

DESIGN OF CANTILEVER VERANDAHS (CITY OF MELBOURNE)

CANTILEVERVERANDAH

- CONSTRUCTION

Illustrationfrom Ramsay's Architectural Catalogue,1st ed, Melbourne, September 1931,p115

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