In Every Dream Home a Heartache: the Great Australian Dream and Its Architecture

The August 2007 issue of the sumptuous Japanese magazine Architecture Urbanism, or AU, covers recent Australian architecture (Ed. This piece originally published at on 16 September 2007.)The selection of projects is fascinating, the presentation sensational, and the architects involved are drawn from the cream of contemporary Australian practice circa 2006: Wendy Lewin and Glenn Murcutt; John Wardle; Sean Godsell; Donovan Hill; Durbach Block; Iredale Pedersen Hook; Stutchbury and Pape; OConnor Houle; Jackson Clements Burrows; Gregory Burgess; Casey Brown; Troppo.

Few of the emerging interesting teams in Australia are covered but thats another story for another publication, another format, I suspect.As a series of projects, of a certain kind, its hard to imagine a higher quality, or perhaps simply more beautiful, range of architecture anywhere.Respected critic, historian and educator Philip Goad has written numerous books on Australian houses, and here contributes a great overview seeing the distributed Australian coastal cities as islands, and thus the coast an archipelago of conurbations.

Comparing to a Japanese cultural understanding of the space between things, he sees the Australian sensibility as that of the isolated object in the infinite landscape. This works at the level of the cities dispersed across Australia but also, zooming in Google Earth-style, at the level of dispersed housing within the terrain. Thus, for the everyday Australian, (the detached house) still remains an inspiration whether as a suburban house, a beach house, or a bush retreat.

Chris Abel writes an accompanying piece, tracing the development of the Australian house from Pacific vernacular fused with English brick, via California bungalow and Seidlers European modernism, to todays distinctive sum of all those elements and also reinforces the relationship between space, landscape and house, in this most urbanised of countries:If the urbanization of Australia is a fact of life, the Great Australian Dream of living in ones own home on ones patch of land, like the Great American Dream it mirrors, is as much, if not more driven by history and mythology as it is by any rational criteria. As the Australian architect and polemical author, Robin Boyd, put it, Australia is the small house. However, unlike his British counterparts, he also understood the outward spread and extreme low density of Australias cities as the manifestation of a deeper, immigrants yearning for space, and the need to find a foothold in a landscape, like North Americas, with no apparent limits.

[Chris Abel]Perhaps this yearning pervades, for almost every project in this edition of AU is residential, and represents a particular Australian take on residential at that. Many of these projects are situated on, or within, the beautiful Australian terrain, isolated in the infinite landscape. There are no urban projects as such in the entire edition.

Some of them are in some of Sydneys outlying bays, but hardly in, say, a tight urban context with complex legal restrictions around use or conservation.But if the detached dwelling embedded within the infinite landscape is what Australians aspire to though Id guess its rarely expressed like that are these then defining Australian works?Robin Boyd, mentioned above, wrote one of the great books on Australian architecture and urbanism, The Australian Ugliness, first published in 1960.

Its a brilliant book. Written in a very different climate to that surrounding the work in AU, and addressing very different issues, its somewhat dated as a result. Yet it still affects, and Boyd is presence in both Goads and Abels essays.

In Ugliness, Boyd described how it was difficult to define his countrys architecture. It was slippery, elusive, not because there is no Australian character in building and display and product design but because it is so confused and so subtle that all but the historian or an intense student are likely to lose patience in the search. But now, leafing through these pages of AU and looking around me in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, it is entirely possible to discern a distinctly Australian contemporary architecture.

Its impossible not to fall for it. An Australian ugliness could not be a more alien concept. You end up dreamily lost somewhere between the red earth and sandstone, and the azure sky and ocean, mentally running your fingers over the spotted gum hardwoods and cedar, sheltering from over-exposure under the canopy of a broad decked verandah, between the crisp shadows of louvred blinds and batons dissipating the sun through giant windows, corrugated galvanised or oxidised steel and polished concrete alternately create permeable exteriors, variations on the skillion roof sweep shallow angles overhead as stilts or cantilevered slabs elevate beneath, these dwellings nestling into soil, rock or lush foliage, as if emerging from them, touching the earth lightly in Murcutts words, with spaces and hollows punctuating, inside and outside at one and the same time But this seems a clichd and limited idea of Australian architecture, just as cliched as red earth and azure sky.

There is as much variation in the architecture here as there is variation between Australias snowy mountains, tropical wetlands, interior desert and sophisticated coastal cities. Yet its the alluring Australian Dream-Home architecture featured here in AU.I snap out of this glorious sun-drenched dream when I recall an old copy of The Architectural Review from 1970 (No.

884 October 1970, picked up for a fiver at Margaret Howell). That issue featured an Australian Newsletter by its legendary editor J.M.

Richards (see bottom of article for the full scanned pages). Despite best intentions, the article is suffused with a snobbish demeanor and insularity that would probably have driven any self-respecting Australian architect mad, cultural cringe or not.And yet, by only seeing Australia refracted through his own cultural context of European modernism and at least admitting it Richards accidentally stumbles upon the future for an Australian architecture not featured in AU.

In his Australian Newsletter, there are far more urban projects, which mostly comprise high-density building for multiple inhabitants public swimming pools, apartment blocks, art galleries, town halls. Theres only one detached dwelling in there, alongside two small housing estates. In a sense, this actually makes his little newsletter a far more progressive document than this latest edition of AU.

Its impossible not to deal with the context, though, both of the publication and the situation. The Architectural Review of those days was on a mission, campaigning against the creeping suburbanisation it saw at home and abroad, and Richards gave Australia both barrels:The Australian suburb must be criticised severely for what it is: the product of a land sub-division system that imposes identically sized plots on all development: of social prejudice that makes property-owning the ambition of every individual, demands a separate identity for every dwelling and causes cheap synthetic materials and flimsy brickwork to be regarded as preferable to timber because of the latters association with early building projects that have degenerated into slums; and reliance on speculative developments without strict enough control of land-use.His roots were showing note the emphasis on planning, control but there was a truth there, written more deeply about by Boyd in Ugliness.

In that light, the architecture in AU is a thorough excoriation of that perceived lack of building quality, 40 years on. But there is little else in AU that indicates a subsequent attempt to deal with the flawed urban form Richards wrote about. And while differing editorial sensibilities between The Architectural Review and AU also have to be taken into account, the latters focus on Australian Dream-Homes suddenly seems anachronistic.

Back in 1970, Richards could not be sure about the shape of cities to come, particularly in this other land:In Australian conditions, and in the age of the motorcar, it may well represent the basis of the city life of the future, and it may be we who, in condemning the suburb, are clinging to out-dated ideas of urbanism. Well, yes and no. That pattern of motorcar-driven urbanism did continue into JM Richardss future, becoming the de facto pattern of Australian urban development.

But equally, most urbanists continue to see that as negative, as is made clear in Chris Abels piece in AU. In that piece, we see that dream-home car model is now the out-dated idea. Abel ends by suggesting that climate change is drawing that Great Australian Dream of detached dwellings to a close the end game in the long struggle to come to terms with the Australian landscape just as its architecture reaches this near-perfect state of maturity:The problem lies neither in individual projects nor in their designers, but in the detached dwelling type itself, and in the energy intensive infrastructure required to support the low-density settlement patterns it generates.

After over two centuries of mostly reckless development, the habitable land and natural resources of Australia, which were always far more limited than the size of the country suggests, have been stretched to the point of exhaustion, with worse to come A sustainable strategy for development must include substantial increases in the density of the urban population, supported by a major shift from private to public transportation strategies which directly challenge the Great Australian Dream so eloquently expressed in these houses.Still, its inconceivable, and would be ill-considered, to suggest that the Australian Dream-Home architecture represented here will diminish. As Goad notes, the detached single-family house in Australia has been, and for the most part, continues to be the major laboratory of architectural experiment and innovation.

This kind of building needs to exist; and no doubt there is demand. It represents a pinnacle of craft, and these projects have been carefully curated to embody the very best of this form of architecture. Goad also makes clear that theyre emblematic of a particular kind of architecture, ending his essay with a subtle critique of big architecture, as well as the more indulgent end of discourse around a digital architecture.

He argues that in Australia, there is much virtue in slowness and the small, because they also have implications for a greater vision of the world. He draws on a phenomenological foundation here, reinforcing the importance of conjoining body, place and making, accommodating human scale and the creation and challenge of place. I wouldnt argue with this one iota, personally, but I would like to see some ideas for how this can manifest itself in higher density building too, and in typologies other than the detached dwelling.

Bigness is over-exposed in the architectural press, and Goad is right to resist it in favour of dwellings with a genuinely human scale and a depth of meaningful experience derived as a result. Yet there is still something in Richards little Newsletter and his coverage of the municipal and the civic, missing from the seductive lustre of AU. Ironically, Abels words suggest that weve ended up with similar conditions to that which led earlier European architects and urbanists to shape the European city in the 20th century a drive towards high density living, with shared public space and high quality public transportation.

Not through the lack of space that defines Europe, but through lack of resource. The Australian landscape still has no apparent limits in terms of dimension; its still effectively infinite, in terms of physical scale. Yet other limits are now all too obvious and very real, even to the naked eye, as the Snowy Mountain reservoirs become dusty, cracked craters and the Murray River needs our assistance just in order to limp through to the ocean.

The usable landscape is actually far from infinite. Boyd wrote The Australian ugliness begins with fear of reality, and to hide from this new reality would be an ugly act indeed. So if the A in AU is as well represented, albeit within the perfect iterations of the small house that Boyd suggested defined Australia in 1952, the U has gone missing.

Drawing from recent history again, we find another trail gone dead in a quite brilliant speech by Gough Whitlam, written just before he became Prime Minster in 1972. I urge anyone interested in developing cities to read it. There is little there that isnt relevant now, yet its written, spoken, in the language of the time, as with Richards.

Messages emerge as high-handed Government Responsibility for Cities and the inflections would certainly be articulated differently now but probably also without Whitlams considerable verve, insight and elegant phrasing. But in seeing cities as the solution, Whitlam was laying bare the issues that still face developed nations. The required restructuring of the economy can be nothing short of a restructuring of the society.

And to restructure the society, we have to begin at the heart of society the cities which we must rebuild, the new cities we must build, if the cities and the society are not to be destroyed. But destroyed they both will be, by drift and by default, if Australia pursues for the next quarter-century the course of wasteful neglect of the past quarter-century. We have the chance once more to be pioneers and revolutionaries.

New cities can be the new frontiers, and we can, like the best of revolutionaries from the Gracchi on, strive to replenish and restore the society by uniting the city and the country. [Gough Whitlam, 1972]Planning the new cities, as Whitlam and Richards both saw it, wasnt quite the solution . But ignoring urbanism altogether, as this issue of AU all but does, denies the possibility of cities as the solution.

And in Australia, cities are where almost everyone actually lives.A Great Australian Dream that could, in Goads words, offer a vision of the world would be to derive a broader Architecture and Urbanism that responds to its new environment. These AU Dream-Homes do that, in a sense, but rarely in a scalable fashion.

They offer beautiful local solutions to particular physical nooks, whilst conveying a sense of how to build with great beauty and purpose on the small scale. But there is little here save for Iredale Pedersen Hooks Walmajarri Community Centre, OConnor Houles Heide Museum of Modern Art, and Gregory Burgess Architects Twelve Apostles Visitor Centre that has, say, a broader municipal purpose or aligns more than a few people in the same shared space. That would not only address the moral and economic benefits of cities that Whitlam hoped for, but also illustrate a sustainable way of living in a country particularly challenged by that.

The dream could be to find an urban architecture for Australia, upon networks of public transportation, civic institutions and shared space, that also retains the precision, craft and conjoining of body, place and making we see in AU. A new city, using Whitlams terms, that derives its buildings from a synthesis of this 2007 Japanese magazine and that 1970 Australian Newsletter. If, as Tim Flannery says, Australia is a harbinger of what is going to happen in other places in the world, then the architecture that emerges from this combination of skill and invention, ancient landscape and new environment, could be a harbinger for much of the rest of the worlds architecture too.

Find scans of the Australian Newsletter pages from 1970s Architectural Review in this Flickr set. Magazine enthusiasts might like to know that the article text was printed on matt paper, and the 4 pages of projects, as well as the opening shot of the Metropolitan Water, Sewerage and Drainage Board building, are on gloss. The striking cover image is a close-up of the keyboard of one of Olivettis most recent typewriters (not yet available in England), the Lettera 36, designed by Ettore Sottsass with Hans von Klier as collaborator.

Keys and casing, in silvery white black letters, are two-dye moulded plastic. The photographer was Jean-Pierre Maurer. This signposted a lengthy special feature on the physical and psychological elements which make up the office environment.

The issue also had a photo-led article on Folk Art in Ulster and a short, bitter-sweet piece on 1830s Australian Club building, Sydney, then being redeveloped out of existence. This piece originally published at on 16 September 2007