Thanks Robin Boyd - a stimulating read! And thanks to my godmother Gretchen Alexander who gave me this book, fresh of the press, in 1960. It's taken me 62 years to get round to reading this brave and withering analysis of the Australian National psyche and well worth the wait. Essential reading if you feel the need to understand, and not just laugh at Australia's ridiculous barbarities. Boyd's insights (though anchored in the 1950s) are as relevant today as in they were in 1960 when the book was published. I suspect he would be horrified at how Australia has 'matured'.

Featurism, is described by Boyd as a form of aesthetic chattering; a subordination of the essential whole by accentuating separate features. But Featurism goes deeper than the built environment (veneer and camouflage) and reveals itself in Government policies (White Australia Policy) as well as in a mishmash of ideologies adopted as arbitrary distractions competing for attention by people who desperately want to be noticed.

Many sensitive Australians are uncomfortably aware of the rootless nature of their artificial environment. Nevertheless Featurism is frequently perpetrated as much by the artistic section of the community as by the commercialisers, as mush by sentimentalists as by the crass and uncaring. P.34

Following an extensive (sometimes dated) analysis, Boyd shifts gear into possible solutions. Here, with the benefit of hindsight, I found his faith in modernism and his optimism about industrialised construction somewhat inconsistent. This is mainly because my view of architecture and its impossibilities was shaped by Christopher Alexander and his emphasis on the connectedness of living buildings i.e. buildings that we recognise as being alive. Connectedness includes the importance of context and surrounds. Boyd’s faith stems from what he calls scientific building where somehow perfection of space enclosure is achieved by building technologies.

At last buildings can be erected without a trace of an architect’s individuality or evidence of any sort of emotion. p. 136

Yet he then refers to Frank Lloyd Wright’s assertion that a building without poetry has no right to exist. He proposes two kinds of buildings: good universal (machined shelter) and good particular (by the artist architect). That many of Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings were unfit for purpose doesn’t seem to exclude them from being ‘good’. Part 3 extends the angst about the relevance of architecture and architects as Boyd searches for an objective system of making beauty. I was particularly interested in his references the work of Talbot Hamlin, Architecture – an Art for All Men, as he had clearly influenced Christopher Alexander’s 15 properties of living centres. Ultimately Boyd rejects golden dimensions and ideas of beauty in favour of pertinence by which he means definite form that reflects specific solutions to the problems at hand.

The universal visual art: the art of shaping the human environment, is an intellectual, ethical, and emotional exercise as well as a mean of expression. It involves the strange sort of possessive love with which people have always regarded their shelters. The Australian ugliness begins with fear of reality, denial of the need for the everyday environment to reflect the heart of the human problem, satisfaction with veneer and cosmetic effects. It ends in betrayal of the element of love and a chill near the root of national self-respect. p.251

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