international conference on the research of modern architecture
30 august - 1 september 2002 jyväskylä, finland
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DOUG EVANS Senior lecturer, School of Architecture and Design RMIT University email doug.evans @ rmit.edu.au CENTRE AND PERIPHERY: MELBOURNE REGIONALISM AND ITS GLOBAL CONTEXT IN THE 1950’S AND 1960’S In contemporary philosophical discourse, modernity is inextricably linked with change, movement and the expression of universal values. It is regarded as antithetical to tradition, ‘dwelling’ in the Heideggerian sense and the expression of the culturally specific. In the discourse of modernity cultural specificity is associated with a yearning for a return to simpler and well understood origins. Heynen describes this oppositional relationship succinctly “…Different approaches – the existential with Heidegger, the ethical with Adorno and the sociological with Berger, Berger and Kellner – all conclude that modernity and dwelling are diametrically opposed to each other…” In the visual arts modernism has been dominantly associated with the expression of universal values via abstraction and the suppression of the culturally specific. In architecture any regionalist inflection has been seen as opposed to modernity and modernism, and regarded within the dominant discourse with suspicion and/or outright hostility. However this view of modernity is fundamentally linked to the history of the Northern Hemisphere centres within which it emerged. Progress, and therefore what is modern for a given society cannot be automatically associated with the rejection of cultural specificity. In the post-colonial world of the mid-twentieth century, which of course also included Australia, the investigation of the culturally specific was a step towards the definition of a cultural identity independent of the coloniser. As such it represents progress and is absolutely modern in intent. The assertion of the culturally specific is however only a first step towards cultural emancipation. Australian cultural producers at mid-century knew that while the source of their inspiration was to be found at home, ultimate validation of their worth was to be obtained in the cultural heartlands of the northern hemisphere. This identity crisis resulted in a supplicant relationship between periphery and centre. The validation of the centre could only be obtained by deferring to its values, irrespective of their relevance at the periphery. During the decade following world war two there occurred in the discourse of western architecture generally, a regionalist revision of the dominant modernist paradigm. In northern Europe and on the west-coast of the United States previously unnoticed regionalist architectural tendencies were suddenly imported, albeit briefly, to the heart of the global discourse. Regionalist Architecture - The view from the Cultural Centre In 1947 the influential New York critic and author Lewis Mumford devoted a short passage in one of his ‘Skyline’ columns to the virtues of the then current Bay Region style of William Wurster and others. Mumford recognized that architectural regionalism and architectural modernism were not necessarily opposed. He described this mode of architecture as a “…native and humane form of modernism … and … far more truly an international style than the international style of the 1930’s because it permits regional variations…” He suggested that “… the change that is now going on in both Europe and America means only that modern architecture is past its adolescent period, with its quixotic purities, its awkward self-consciousness, its assertive dogmatism. …” His brief article prompted a public symposium at the Museum of Modern Art on the evening of February 11 1948 entitled ‘What is happening to Modern Architecture?’ Predictably, Mumford’s sentiments were unpopular with the various mandarins of high modern culture who assembled to debate this issue. These included the Museum’s director Alfred Barr Junior, Henry Russell Hitchcock, Philip Johnson, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer and Mumford himself as moderator. Generally the participants misunderstood Mumford’s re-definition of architectural regionalism, identified it with opposition to modernism and attacked it vigorously. The two major protagonists of this woody regionalist [mainly domestic] architecture William Wurster and Pietro Belluschi were as anxious to distance themselves from the east-coast, European-led, modernist architectural establishment and its architecture as they were to discredit the west-coast work. Wurster and Belluschi regarded the east-coast modernism as excessively theoretical and unnecessarily reductivist. Wurster showed his dislike of high modernism when he stated that “… It was sensible to base the design on the kind of life people wanted, and not on the basis of theoretical modernism…” He liked to be compared to Aalto who he admired and he continually championed Frank Lloyd-Wright. Neither of these two traits was likely to endear him to the east-coast high modernists. Belluschi argued that true architectural modernity was grounded in the specifics of locality, society and emotional response rather than stylistic gestures. He maintained that the east-coast high modernists had missed the point; “…true architecture includes a spiritual experience…architects of the ultra-modern school denied this spiritual, creative aspect, and made extreme simplification an ‘end in itself’’ rather than as it was intended to be, a clarification from the fogs of a sentimental past…” Frank Lloyd-Wright, who had some ideas in common with the Bay Region architects, expressed similar attitudes “…Whether people are fully conscious of this or not, they actually derive countenance and sustenance from the ‘atmosphere’ of the things they live in or with. They are rooted in them just as a plant is in the soil…” The west-coast regionalists saw their work as both modern and a direct reflection of the cultural matrix, which had nourished it. They saw no reason to appease the eastern priests of high modernism feeling that they, not the eastern establishment represented the cultural core. The east-coast gatekeepers of the discourse dealt with Wright, whose contribution could not be ignored, by classifying him as pre-modern, a pre-cursor, but they punished the west-coast proponents of regional modernism by ignoring them and the regionalist revision of mainstream modernism that they represented fairly quickly sank without trace in the global discourse of architecture. Regionalist Architecture – The View from the Cultural Periphery. However, in Scandinavia and Australia around 1950 others participants in the field had drawn similar conclusions to Mumford and adopted positions sympathetic to the regional modernism of the United States’ west-coast and Frank Lloyd-Wright. In Scandinavia the exhibition ‘America Builds’ had been shown in Sweden during the war and in 1945 it came to Denmark. The exhibition re-awakened interest in Frank Lloyd-Wright forty years after he had designed the Prairie Houses. Young Danish architects travelled to the U. S. A. and brought back, amongst other things the influence of FLW’s Usonian Houses and the Bay Region. Arguably the dual emphasis on the importance of ‘place’ and natural materials coupled with the stylistic modesty of the Bay Region architects appealed to well-established historical tendencies exemplified by the pre-war Danish interest in the architecture of the German architect Heinrich Tessenow. In Australia, particularly in and around Melbourne, a vigorous school of regional-modernist architecture emerged during the decades of the 1930’s and 1940’s and Robin Boyd became albeit temporarily its most eloquent and persuasive spokesman. Born into a distinguished artistic family Boyd, who was both a talented architect and a charismatic and prolific writer, emerged as a powerful spokesman for regional modernism at this time. I can only briefly name the factors that combined to make architectural regionalism so powerfully interesting to Melbourne architects from the 1940’s to the 1960’s. Firstly I should note the existence since the early years of the twentieth century, of several important rural communities which included some of Australia’s most significant artists and intellectuals around Melbourne’s north - eastern fringe. The artistic output of these communities centred strongly on the character and virtues of the Australian landscape and its presumed relationship to the Australian cultural identity. Next, mention should be made of Boyd’s mentor and later business partner, the influential senior architect Roy Grounds who championed the regional modernist cause briefly in the 1940’s. Grounds travelled and worked in Hollywood as a set designer prior to World War two, and had been impressed by William Wurster and the Bay Region architects. Last but not least was the pre-war arrival of two important European immigrant architects, the German Frederick Romberg and the Austrian Fritz Janeba both of who were open to the regionalist impulses they encountered in Australia. Grounds, Romberg, Boyd and Janeba were all strongly connected to these rural fringe artistic communities. Within a few months of the publication of Mumford’s ‘Skyline’ article Robin Boyd published his first influential architectural tract ‘Victorian Modern’. In one well-known passage he described what he saw as an emerging regionalist school of domestic architecture in the Melbourne suburbs at the end of the 1940’s. “… A long low house spreads over the lot. It is made up of wings of single room width. The living room has a row of French windows facing north; the double light bedroom windows face east. An open fire in the living room with a stubby chimney exposed on an outside wall provides all the winter warmth. The roof is gabled and pitched as low as the selected material will allow, and the rafters are extended in one place as a pergola. The entrance door nestles in an angle of the wings; the living room in one, the bedrooms in the other with the entrance and services in the junction. … Thus the Victorian house has developed with something inherited from a century of Victorian living something borrowed from the more sophisticated experience of California and a great deal learnt from the world-wide modern movement…” Even without the last sentence the parallels with the domestic architecture of Belluschi, Wurster and their colleagues are obvious. Unlike Wurster and Belluschi, Boyd consciously grounded his concept of an emerging ‘type’ equally in local precedent and international-modernist precursors. The Melbourne architects of the period understood the international parallels to their interest in regional modernism. In October 1948, for example Robin Boyd reviewed a visiting exhibition of contemporary architecture from the west - coast of the United States entitled ‘America Today’ for The Age newspaper. Under the title ‘California and Victoria Architectural Twins’ he suggested that “…California – and Victoria, in a less spectacular, but no less genuine, way - has produced in the last twenty years a mode of building that is sufficiently apart from general international architecture to be classed a distinctive type…” Some four years later in ‘Port Phillip Idiom : Recent Houses in the Melbourne Region’ written for the Architectural Review, Boyd again noted the international parallels for Melbourne domestic architecture “… the immediate international sympathies are with California for broad and open planning, [but Melbourne’s unpleasant wind limits outdoor living] and Scandinavia [for lightness and for the free use of traditional materials]. …” Although influential, the Bay Region was not the only international influence on Melbourne’s regional modernist architecture. Frank Lloyd Wright, in particular his pre-war Usonian Houses also powerfully influenced Melbourne architecture, particularly its domestic architecture during the 1950’s and 1960’s. For two decades after Boyd abandoned regional modernism in the mid-1950’s a group of Melbourne architects produced a string of FLW – Bay Region inspired domestic and small-scale-institutional designs, sometimes of considerable quality. Even later from around 1965 to 1975 the influence of those inheritors of the Bay Region tradition Joseph Esherick and Charles Moore could be clearly felt in Melbourne domestic architecture. Regionalism; a Modern project Boyd’s writings in the early 1950’s showed that, as with Mumford, Belluschi, Wurster and the other west-coast American regionalists, and in apparent opposition to his later acquaintance Walter Gropius, he regarded regionalism at this time as a thoroughly modern project. His biographer Geoffrey Serle notes that Boyd’s modernism was marked by a strange concern with Australia . In ‘Victorian Modern’ Boyd seemed equally positive about the various versions of the new European modernism which emerged in Melbourne during the 1930’s and 1940’s and the regionalist architecture which emerged almost simultaneously. There is evidence that he regarded both as equally ‘modern’. The architecture that Boyd and the other Melbourne regional modernists championed at this time was an attempt to simultaneously define the character of a culturally emerging Australian society whose forms were still to be clarified and positively connect this project to global modernism. In this the parallels with the cultural project of the contemporary Melbourne figurative painters are noteworthy. Shift in Perspective at the Periphery Boyd understood that the shift in cultural perspective as one moved from the centre to the periphery was potentially accompanied by shifts in the meaning of the artefacts and ideas encountered and that the insights resulting from this effect were creatively to be valued. Writing of Australian architecture in the early 1950’s he commented: “… this kind of isolated society, less affected than most by close contact with either the West or East, by the old world or the new, is just the place where one might expect non-traditional inventive architectural expression to develop. But for better or worse this recently planted cutting of Western civilisation has grown up remarkably unaffected by the strange south - eastern soil. Isolation may free the atmosphere of the more disturbing and inconsequential cross-currents but it also induces inbreeding of design…” This sort of comforting re-assurance that down-under despite our isolation and strange habits, we were still all dutifully if clumsily following the paths laid out for us at the cultural centre was doubtless well received in London. The concern to connect architectural tendencies in Melbourne with those occurring in the Northern Hemisphere centres while simultaneously deferring to the superiority of responses at the centre was a repeating characteristic of Boyd’s writing at the time. In ‘Victorian Modern’ [1947] as I have already noted, he referred to the influence on what he claimed to be an emerging Victorian Type of “…the more sophisticated experience of California….” In ‘California and Victoria Architectural Twins’ [1948] he described Victorian domestic architecture as “… less spectacular, but no less genuine…” than that of California. This characteristic of Boyd’s writing reflected his personality as the moderator and peacemaker. However Boyd was also giving expression to the identity crisis experienced by all cultural producers active at the cultural periphery, which at the time certainly included Australia. The awareness of existing in one place but being essentially ‘of’ another which Boyd’s writing implies was common in Australia at this time. The contrast between Boyd’s position and that of Wurster and Belluschi could not be clearer. Boyd, at the cultural periphery, desiring the validation of the cultural centre deferred to its values and presumed superiority. His north-American counterparts, confident of their place at the centre of their world simply asserted the superiority of their position. An important third position in respect of the relationship between cultural periphery and cultural centre was reflected by ‘The Antipodean Manifesto’, penned by Bernard Smith in 1958 primarily for the catalogue of a proposed Exhibition of [mostly] Melbourne figurative painters at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. The manifesto asserted the modernity of the exhibitors’ work and the necessity of figuration in painting. It emphasised the primary role of figurative painting in the necessary definition of the nature of a society and located this investigation of the culturally specific in its global context. The London exhibition, towards which the Antipodean Manifesto was primarily directed, never occurred, although a later exhibition occurred involving all of the same painters in the same gallery organized by the same gallery owner did. Significantly this was with a different explanatory essay by the emerging young art critic Robert Hughes. This is worth examining. Gallery owner Bryan Robertson distanced himself from the first show primarily because of the suggestion in the Manifesto that at the periphery the task of modern cultural producers could be so forcefully identified with the definition of the culturally specific and the use of the figurative. This apparent failure to conform to two of the most fundamental tenets of the mainstream modernist cultural discourse seems to have been more than Robertson could cope with. However under the cover of Hughes’ somewhat different explanation of the art, these artists became acceptable. Hughes achieved this by presenting Australian art as naïve exotica developed in ignorance of the European tradition. This was nonsense but the presentation of Australian art as naïve adorable exotica made it acceptable to its London audience. Thus, as Smith wrote, the chance was lost to mount a critique of modernism generated out of the unique conditions operating at the cultural periphery. Despite the arguments of respected philosophers, the assertion of the culturally specific is not automatically anti-modern. Smith, Boyd and the west-coast regionalists all saw the regionalist impulse as fundamentally modern, an alternative modernism. Both Mumford and Bernard Smith clearly saw that regional modernism held valuable lessons for the mainstream modernism of the cultural centre. Both Boyd and Smith recognized that for the culturally peripheral, ultimate validation must be sought at the cultural centre. However while Boyd deferred to the values of the centre Smith simply asserted the values that his artists represent irrespective of [but not independent from] the values of the centre. Although both were anxious to demonstrate the positive links between cultural production at the periphery and at the centre Smith was explicit about the positive potential of a critique of the centre mounted from the periphery. Finally though the fate of the Bay Region architecture in the global discourse of architecture [it was either ignored or discredited] and the sanitization of the message of the Antipodean Manifesto reminds us that the cultural discourse of the centre rules and the periphery ignores this at its peril. « CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS |
