Architectural History

in Australia began, not with the formal studies of academic historians, but with contemporary evaluations of the traditions at the disposal of local architects. In his contemporary review Sydney in 1848, the artist Joseph Fowles argued that Sydney had an architectural culture comparable with buildings in London and the great provincial cities of England and Scotland, a claim later repeated by Alexander Sutherland for Melbourne in the 1880s. In the wake of Fowles, Australia's historical and critical imagination fed offshore on the Ecclesiologist, the British Builder, and other European and American sources.

Critical writing in the new building journals of the 1880s infused these broad historical overviews with national sentiment, Gothic Revivalism, and influences from the Arts and Crafts movement. (John Sulman, ‘An Australian Style’ in Australasian Builder (1887)), and (E. Wilson Dobbs, Rise and Growth of Australasian Architecture (1891)), addressed the value of earlier Australian architecture, particularly of the convict era, scrutinised recent tendencies, and urged a distinctively Australian architecture. They saw national identity reflecting natural maturity in culture and sought to identify authentic traditions and genres. They established a model for decades of later architectural history and criticism.

By 1900 the influence of the Gothic Revival and critics such as Ruskin was declining, but the values of the Arts and Crafts movement still dominated criticism. An international tendency toward classical and Renaissance forms in larger buildings was accepted tacitly in architectural debate, and many architects reacted against earlier, highly personal criticism by John Horbury Hunt and his contemporaries by avoiding debate and speculation. This critical silence preserved Australia's 1890s historiography in amber. Old Colonial architecture remained the focus of exploration. James Barnet, Frank Walker, and others proclaimed Greenway the leading Colonial architect, and George Sydney Jones linked early Colonial design to a visibly twentieth-century, flat-roofed, open-planned architecture. Hardy Wilson argued that Colonial Georgian was a touchstone of Australian architecture, and he struggled to revive its forms and link it to Asian architecture in an aesthetic and spiritual unity. By 1925 designs of Greenway, John Verge, Edmund Blackett, William Wardell, and Horbury Hunt were being set for measured drawings in the technical schools and university ateliers. All were discussed in (John Sulman's general history for the Australian Cyclopaedia (1929)), and (John D. Moore reworked this coverage for the London Architectural Review in 1949).

Australians in the 1930s conceived modern architecture as an extension of valid Colonial Georgian principles. (Raymond McGrath, Twentieth Century Houses (1934)), a British text which influenced Australian architects, argued that international Modern architecture was a rebirth of Georgian and Empire taste and of values in Western culture generally. (George Beiers's Houses of Australia: A Survey of Domestic Architecture (1948)) amplified this view. Robin Boyd gradually abandoned his youthful architectural socialism to define modern architecture around values of good taste, visual order, and cultural maturity. His caricatures of Victorian and Federation architecture echo earlier attacks by his novelist uncle, Martin (1923). He followed Sulman's vision of Australian architectural history as a Georgian Eden succeeded by a mechanical sequence of stylistic decline, but forecast a new era as Modern architecture combined distinctiveness and maturity, and brought Australia and international modernism into harmony.

In (Victorian Modern (1947), Australia's Home (1952), and The Australian Ugliness (1960), Boyd) popularised 1890s arguments on evolution and national maturity and introduced new protagonists such as Harry Seidler, Roy Grounds, and Walter Burley Griffin. He developed two of Hardy Wilson's ideas: that the house was the crucial arena of architectural history in Australia, and that suburbia, pictured in beguiling sketches and vignettes, was the realm of inertia. Boyd awed Australian architects with written sound and fury, and is still gospel for many after half a century. (J. M. Freeland's Architecture in Australia (1968)) applied similar views to a general history of Australian public and domestic architecture. He covered more ground but was more partisan than Boyd, privileging, above all, a pure, resolved architecture—buildings beyond the strivings of historical debate and contention.

Freeland's views came under criticism (Boyd's were largely immune) and most architectural history appearing in Australia took Boyd–Freeland constructs as a starting point. Morton Herman's research, independent of Boyd's, concentrated scholarly attention on The Early Australian Architects and Their Work (1954), delineating the Colonial Eden with detailed documentation. (Philip Cox and Clive Lucas in Australian Colonial Architecture (1978)) traversed the same territory, though with more tolerance towards the Regency, and particularly John Verge. Though maintaining the progressive degeneration arguments of Freeland, Boyd, and their predecessors on the later nineteenth century, these younger architects had a clearer sense of Old Colonial's ideological loading. Their analysis of overseas sources was more detailed and specific, and they explored, even if they did not resolve, the spectre of provincialism as a characteristic in Australian Colonial culture. Boyd had seen provincialism as one of the banes of Australian architecture. (James Broadbent's The Golden Decade, with Clive Lucas (1978), and The Australian Colonial House (1997)) gave provincialism a new centrality as a defining, if still somewhat negative, characteristic of Australian architecture. A distant metropolis was increasingly assumed in Australia's architectural histories, both as a source and a yardstick of transgressions. But was this metropolis necessarily as cohesive (or as British) as Australian architect–historians seemed to see it?

Biography provided an ideal framework for an interpretation in which a few heroic individuals struggled against conservative opponents and Australian apathy. Promising studies of Walter Burley Griffin by James Birrell (1964) and Donald Johnson (1977) dwelt more on Griffin's perceived tribulations than on his architecture. Their subject emerges as an oddly correct exemplar of overseas practice, distinctive only in being American rather than British. Joern Utzon and the Sydney Opera House yield similarly frustrating stories, in which Utzon's architecture, and his neglected urbanism, are buried under a welter of tall-poppy lamentations, neither refutable nor provable. Retrospectives by and about Harry Seidler claim for their hero a mantle of metropolitan authenticity (Europe via the USA and Brazil) and reassert the dynamic of architect–visionary fighting a cultural reaction and inertia found, apparently, only in suburban Australia. In these accounts Europe and USA become utopias of uninterrupted and universally accepted classicism, refinement, modernism, and maturity. They mostly omit architectural comparisons with such disreputable, but once potent, influences as Third Reich reactions, Beaux-arts classicism, British dislike of the foreign, and Italian critical insecurity, and they pass over any career difficulties their heroes had in Europe or the USA. The Griffin biographies never mention that Wright and Sullivan were on skid row in America, and that the Chicago and Prairie Schools had collapsed.

This view presented Australia's architectural future as either a mature immersion in resolved overseas forms or a complete renunciation of foreign inheritance. The logical outcome of the latter was the critical ascendancy of Glenn Murcutt, who combined an endearing use of untutored-looking materials, a detailed rethink of homestead pavilion and verandah, and architectural allusions to Hardy Wilson, Aboriginal bark shelters, tents, supposedly guileless machine forms, and the long houses of New Guinea and the Malay–Indonesian tradition. As subject and springboard Murcutt has dominated Philip Drew's viewpoint on Australian architecture and general culture since the publication of (Drew's Leaves of Iron (1985)). Murcutt is seen overseas as what the metropolis wants Australian architecture to be. Ideologically, he is at the centre of Australia's historical mainstream. Jennifer Taylor's account of broad directions in Sydney, An Australian Identity (1972), and her more general Australian Architecture Since 1960 (1986, 1995) maintain the tradition of viewing the house as the arena of change, particularly in her development of Boyd's observations on the Sydney School as a coherent and innovative movement. But she notes its difficulties in shifting to any urban level and adopts a more pluralistic approach to stylistic influences.

Meanwhile, there has been a rise in history that challenges the dominant narrative of Australian architecture. The heritage movement stimulated a new appreciation of styles previously regarded as barren, and fostered the emergence of a new generation of architect–historians with a strong interest in conservation, such as David Saunders, George Tibbits, and Miles Lewis, and of humanities-trained historians, such as Joan and James Kerr. (Lewis's Victorian Primitive (1977) and Victorian Churches (1989)) prompted a more open-minded scrutiny of Victorian architecture and a challenge to the moral and pedagogical primacy of the Colonial Georgian and Regency. Bernard Smith (in his critique of (Freeland in HS, 1969), and The Architectural Character of Glebe, Sydney (1973)) led a historical revaluation of the Federation period. Peter Cuffley, another non-architect, examined the ‘forbidden’ realm of average suburban architecture in his volumes on Australian houses of the 1920s and 1930s (1991), and the 1940s and 1950s (1993). Social historians have largely made the running in charting the postwar vernacular, as for example in (Graeme Davison et al. (eds), The Cream Brick Frontier (1995)). The planning historian Robert Freestone reinterpreted the Australian influence of the Garden City in Model Communities (1989). The Griffin retrospectives of 1988, where Marion Mahony's role was reassessed by Australians, exhibited some of the newer directions of Australian architectural history represented in the work of Philip Goad, Conrad Hamann, Harriet Edquist, Winsome Callister, and Peter and Helen Proudfoot. The range of work emerging through heritage practice and legislation now forces architects to face historical issues from all periods in Australian design and hence, increasingly, to revise the now-besieged standard histories of Australian architecture.