Robin Boyd
by Peter Raisbeck and Christine Phillips
Uro Publications, January 2020
Paperback | 8-3/4 x 12 inches | 108 pages | English | ISBN: 9780648435594 | $49.00
PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:
Robin Boyd: Late Works unveils the urban and public architectural projects designed by Robin Boyd, one of Australia’s most iconic mid-century modernists, in the final decade before his untimely death in 1971.
One of the few architects in Australia’s history to have become a household name, Boyd rose to prominence as a public intellectual after the release of his book The Australian Ugliness in 1960, a biting attack on what he saw as the debased quality of Australia’s cities and design culture. Upon its release, the book drew both condemnation and praise in Australia’s media, but in the process gave Boyd a national platform from which to campaign throughout the 1960s for the betterment of Australia’s built environment. Concomitant with his public pronouncements during this time, though, Boyd was hard at work attempting to prosecute his vision of a more coherent and contemporary Australian urban environment and culture. This work took the form of building and planning designs, at sometimes vast scales, that run counter to Boyd’s reputation as an architect of polite modernist private houses.
Robin Boyd: Late Works considers these important but largely forgotten architectural projects alongside his exhibition work, multimedia designs and his writing. Bringing to light material buried deep in the archives of several national institutions, this book documents Boyd’s ambitions and struggles to shape Australia’s understanding of itself as an urban nation during this time. For Boyd, the 1960s was a turbulent decade of architectural practice that, by the time of his death, had come with thwarted ambitions and high personal cost.
Dr Christine Marie Phillips is an architect, academic and researcher passionate about Australian architecture and cultural heritage. Dr Phillips is a Senior Lecturer within the Architecture Program at RMIT’s School of Architecture Program and an alternate member of the Heritage Council of Victoria. Dr Peter Raisbeck is an architect, architectural historian and researcher. He teaches Design Activism, Contemporary Architectural Archives, and Architectural Practice at the Melbourne School of Design.
Robin Boyd: Late Works can be purchased directly from Uro Publications or via Idea Books.
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dDAB COMMENTARY:
As someone who is neither from Australia nor has ever been there, I know very little about architect and writer Robin Boyd -- embarrassingly little about a man called "arguably the most influential architect there has ever been in Australia." Hearing the name makes me immediately think of The Australian Ugliness, the 1960 book he seems to be best known for. I haven't read it, but it's been on my wishlist for a while, ever since I learned about it as a sort of Australian echo of Peter Blake's God's Own Junkyard, Ian Nairn's The American Landscape: A Critical View, and other books around the time that painted less-than-flattering pictures of the modern urban landscape.
In terms of his architecture, it's the Featherston House that I visualize, most likely due to photographs of its audacious interior landscape circulating a couple years ago on the centenary of his birth (Boyd was born in 1919 and died in 1971 at the age of just 52). His design for Neptune's Fishbowl (second spread, below), a fast-food franchise in suburban Melbourne, also looks familiar, though I didn't realize until reading this book that it came from Boyd.
As someone with a dearth of knowledge about Boyd, his books, and his buildings, I wonder if Late Works is maybe not the ideal introduction to him and his work. With a narrow focus on his output -- from 1960, after the publication of The Australian Ugliness, to his death eleven years later, but omitting the houses he built -- the book seems geared to people with some familiarity of the more well-known aspects of Boyd's career.
Across five chapters, Peter Raisbeck and Christine Phillips hone in on Boyd's writings, a few non-residential projects, his designs for two expos in 1967 and 1970, a few urban redevelopment plans, and what the authors call "The Terrific Upheaval" at the end of his all-too-short life. (One of the last things he produced was The Great Great Australian Dream, which was rejected by a publisher upon submission but was published posthumously, in 1972.) The authors, both architects and historians, admit their abundantly illustrated book is "a selected snapshot of what is an enormous archive," referring to the archive at the State Library of Victoria. Nevertheless, it paints a vivid, clear picture of an architect and author, which this architect/author can appreciate.
A term used repeatedly throughout Late Works is "third phase," which sounds like a historian's means of organizing a person's career but actually comes from Boyd's 1965 book, The Puzzle of Architecture, discussed in the first chapter (first spread). In it Boyd traces three phases of modern architecture: functionalism, a break with functionalism, and "the idea of negative form and space." The work presented in Late Works falls into Boyd's own third phase, with designs inspired by the Metabolists and other Japanese architects he appreciated (he wrote a book on Japanese architecture in 1968).
His designs for Expo 67 in Montreal and Expo 70 in Osaka hint at a potential fourth phase, one that didn't happen due to his premature death. His contributions to the earlier Expo ranged from the design of chairs with integrated "stereophonic" speakers to displays such as the virus illustration that is on this book's cover. Three years later in Osaka, the authors contend, "his use of media technologies reached a new zenith." Boyd's immersive "Space Tube" consisted of numerous video displays, but its construction also explored the potentials of prefabrication and plug-ins, an idea very much in line with the Japanese Metabolists. Although clearly moot, I can't help but wonder what Boyd's career would have looked like in the 1970s and beyond, given his Expo experiments. For sure it would have been provocative, pushing the boundaries of architecture Down Under — and beyond.
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