MODERN FUNCTIONALISM

AND THE RADICALLY ORDINARY:

TOWARDS A REINTERPRETATION OF
ARCHITECTS EDUCATED
IN THE 1930s AND 1940s

Paul-Alan Johnson

This paper draws in part from interviews being conducted by the

author in a project entitled the Architects of the Middle Third 1 as part
of a larger study re-examining the theory and ideology of Australian
architects from the 30s to the 60s. To date twenty five interviews have
been completed with New South Wales architects whose education and
early practice took place during the 30s and 40s. The interviews cover
both ordinary and celebrated architectural production throughout the
middle third of the 20th century (hence the project's title) and illumi-
nate the ideas that were finding favour, and those that were not, among
these architects. Once completed, the results of the project are likely to
reorientate the professional impact of and contemporaneous attitudes
towards early modernism in Australia.

The middle third of the 20th century in Australia is of interest because

of the significant changes to both architectural ideas and aesthetic
expression that accompanied the Modem Movement emanating from
Europe. It is of interest too because of the increased development and
its impact on urban form that occurred once restrictions on building
were lifted following World War 2. The architecture of this period,
especially at the 'humdnun' end of the spectrum, has been either under-
represented or totally neglected in Australian architectural histories.
Despite its comprehensiveness in many other respects, Max Freeland's
Architecture in Australia devotes only one paragraph to factories, for
instance, towards the end of his chapter on austerity? and does not
include illustrations of industrial buildings at all (save for the ubiqui-
tous wheat silo on p 242).

The Middle Third project, by its own quite serendipitous account, is

already reintegrating the 'ordinary' architect into the archi-historical
record, for the interviews provide ample evidence of a rich array of
architectural works, ideas and personalities existing at the everyday

FABRICATIONS 7, August 1996

Pages 113-128: PAUL-ALAN JOHNSON
level than might be supposed from conventional histories exalting more
elevated levels of architectural endeavour. This is especially the case in
relation to 'ordinary' buildings that accede to the wisdom of the early
modernists, most notably those buildings espousing a modern and effi-
cient 'functionalism'. One possible reason for the imbalance may be
that certain writers have promoted, in effect, an architectural epiphany
of modem functionalism coming out of Victoria during the mid-1930s,
irnmortalised and consolidated later in Robin Boyd's Victorian Modern
of 1947.3 Another reason may be in part the result of the lack of any
countering by equally coherent historiographical writings coming out
of NSW or the other Australian states at that time.

I wish to begin with a few remarks made by the British writer and crit-
ic J M Richards, who achieved some prominence in the 1930s and
whose writings have been cited by at least one of those interviewed for
the Middle Third project as being of consequence to young architects
in Australia. In 1940, Richards wrote in his populist book An Intro-
duction to Modern Architecture that the term 'modern architecture' was
being used
to meansomething more particularthan contemporary architecture. . . the new kind of
architecturethatis growing up this centuryas this century's own contribution to the art
. . . a social art related to the life of the people it serves, not an academic exercise in
applied ornament
He quames this further a paragraph later,
it is a mistake to suppose that, because modem architectsare ~ c u l a r l concerned
y to
relatebuildingsmore closely to the needs they have to serve, they are only interestedin
the practical side of architecture. They know that they are practising an art, and are
therefore concerned with the pursuit of beauty.

The implication from Richards was that, whatever it was, modem

architecture would serve people in a practical yet beautiful way and that
this was the kind of present and future world modern architects were
offering up as their art. Richards expressed any doubts about the 'fore
runners of a new architecture' by using the notion of that universalised
persona, the cynical and cautious 'Man in the Street':
But the Man in the Street only sees in the new architectureanother bewildering addition
to the variety of architectural styles he is already offered: a new style which, he feels,
must have something to it, because it looks clean and efficientand not too pompous
and because he has heard that it is based on an ideacalledfunctionalism(or 'fitness for
purpose') which at least sounds sensible if rather inhuman; but a style he also rather
suspects, simply because he is naturally conservative. He dislikes having something
familiarreplaced by something unfamiliarwithout any evident reason, and he has an
idea that the people who are responsible for the new architectureare cranks, foreigners,

FABRICAnONS 114 PAULALAN JOHNSON

revolutionaries or other kinds of people that he disapproves of
There have been so many misunderstandings about modem architecturethat . . . it
may be as well to mention a few things that it is not. It is not, for one thing, a fashion-
able style of jazz ornament; it is not the custom of building in concrete, or w ~ t hflat
roofs and horizontal window panes;it is not 'functionalism'. It is quite simply, like
all good architecture,the honest product of science and art. It aims at once more relat-
ing methods of building as closely as possible to real needs.

The prose, while not exactly rallying, certainly is an imprint of the

modernist banner, sentiments that most modern British and European
architects had by then been espousing vigorously for the past two
decades. Richards became more hortatory on the next page when he
began decrying the imitators of modem architecture, the 'vulgarizers
who join up with the movement only in order to cash in,' the 'makers
of jazz-modern shop-fronts,' the 'purveyors of smart angular
furniture,' and the 'builders of nasty "modernistic" villas.' These were
the harbingers of evil, these, and the ignorance of the populace at large
who were Richards's readership, were the ones who interfered with the
evolution of the brave new world. These miscreants were in need of
correction and redirection because
. . . this bogus modemism, whether it is the result of the commercial exploitationof
novelty or merely the wish to be in the fashion, obviously does greatham to the cause
of good modem architecture. It brings it into disrepute. And the only way to prevent
the fine ideals of the one fmm being vulgarized into insignificanceby the other is for
people to discriminate betterbetween them. If people understand the point of genuine
modem architectureand appreciatewhatit is trying to do, they will see quickly enough
that the ungenuine - which is oftencalled 'modemisti' - bas no basis beyond itself.
It consists of a few flashy hicks and the use (often the wrong use) of a number of fash-
ionable materials.

Despite his protestations immediately following about 'our own good

taste' being unreliable, the discernment for which Richards called
involved taste and style, just what modern architecture was not
supposed to be about at all. Of course, we know now that this kind of
polemic was all to do with prosecuting a certain reformist aesthetic
agenda, and that not every architect heeded its call. Some might say it
is unnecessary to re-focus on the events of those years if it is merely to
show that the polemic failed to deliver all it promised. But this is what
we will now briefly do, based in the Australian experience of the
decade from 1929 to 1939 especially, for it illuminates the complexities
of personalities and issues that have been surreptitiously sidelined by
historical over-simplification and tidy-mindedness.

FABRICATIONS PAULALAN JOHNSON

The attitudes of Richards's eponymous 'Man in the Street' are just like
those of a number of Australian architects of the 30s, if we are to judge
by those interviewed for the Middle Third, the emphasis for them
being precisely on the stylistic, the functional, and on formal tricks.
One architect described the 'modem' as comprising 'curved comers'
and horizontal windows and 'box type buildings with glass fronts,'
that is, precisely in stylistic terms, not philosophical, while another said
his own style was 'a three-dimensional, functional solution to a problem
. . .' and that '"Form follows Function" . . . sets the basics for good
architecture,' 8 that is, architecture is entirely 'functional' in its basis,
not ideological. A comment by yet another architect, describing his
Beaux-Arts education at the University of Sydney, picks up the instru-
mental aspect of modem design:
I think they thought they had us as students for five years and in those five years they
could only give us culture. We wuld learn the dirty tricks afterwards and I think there
would be some justification for that. I have a general feeling that a student going
through a school of architecturecan't of course be taught all the dirty tricks hut they
should at least be e x p e d to the range.

While these so-called 'dirty tricks' are from the same ethical stable as
the 'flashy tricks' of Richards' 'bogus modernism', they differ marked-
ly in being willingly and inevitably embraced by Australian architects
because it was only sensible to do so, rather than being disdainfully set
aside. A cautionary tale by another architect, relating to his education
at the University of Melbourne in the 30s, demonstrates the ambiva-
lence surrounding both the licence and the dangers modem design
offered:
MC: If we had a subject like a school, [Le~ghtonIrwin] would give a short talk on
schools. One tlung I'll always remember and this was at the ttmeof theearly modem
movement, the Bauhaus movement, was that flat roofs gave you a cerkun freedom
I'm tallung of smaller scale buildmgs and not city office buld~ngsw l c h always had
flat roofs anyway. I'm talhng about houses and schools and so on. We felt a sort of
freedom because you wuld do almost anytlung and put a flat roof on it
I remember Leighton Irwin telling us, 'Yes, you have this freedom but the building
will not be a successful design unless it could have a pitched roof put on it.' Nowa-
days you get very complicated pitched roofs but he was talking about a simple pitched
roof. I think he was trying to stop us from going a bit haywire. . . lo

Freeland describes the early modern architecture of the 30s in Archi-

tecture in Australia as
plainand . . . simpleindividualelements . . . puttogether in an austerely c e ~ b r away
l
. . . a highly directionalarchiteclurefullof violent and positive movement, assertive
forms and spectaculargymnastics. . . mechanical, hard and austere but extraordinarily

FABRICATIONS 116 PAULALANJOHNSON

confident. . . A glib formula which could be applied to any situation . . . A facie
architecture to be sure. l 1

In contradistinction, the general run of young Australian architects,

among whom there were of course some willing to experiment with
modem ideas when they could, were essentially conservative, skeptical
and ambivalent about the new architecture of the preceding decade and
a half. Some indeed were even scornful. Take the way R Lindsay
Little describes and counters the reaction to a project he undertook
during his student days:
We did a p r o p a l for the enhancement of the Sydney Technical Collegeand I did a
design for that in the modern style. It shook the boys and they said, 'Oh . . . dreadful
stuff.' phey] thought Fancy puttingthat in. . . dreadful.' But it was the beginning of
the modern architecturewhich was taking place. . . I loved the Colonial and Georgian
and that type of architecture. . . put] I summed it up at that time: 'Why not try every-
thing you can? l2

These few extracts from the Middle Third interviews merely highhght
the pragmatic reality that faced many architects of the 30s and 40s
generation who aspired, not to greatness, but to providing a solid and
dependable service to their clients. It is to recognise, too, that ordinary
architects of varying ability and talent were now legitimised by the
modem design milieu and thereby gained accessto what rapidly became
a culture of commodification in line with the economic transformation
of the world that was soon to become the great hallmark of twentieth-
century productivity. But they knew, and their clients insisted, that
they were not about changing the world; the best they could hope for
was to be 'radically ordinary'. More of that shortly. I would now like
to review briefly the education of some of these architects.

Le Corbusier's essays from just after the end of World War 1 in

L'Esprit Nouveau - compiled in 1923 into Vers Une Architecture l3
- elaborated upon the novel conditions of the modem world and advo-
cated a new architecture to match. Le Corbusier was critical of the
capability of historical styles to manage the demands of contemporary
materiality, saying, 'Construction has undergone innovations so great
that the old "styles", which still obsess us, can no longer clothe it.'
More particularly, a paragraph later he was so scathing about the ethi-
cal value of historical styles that he virtually willed them away alto-
gether:
The 'styles' no longer exist, they are outside our ken; if they still trouble us, it is as
parasites. If we set our selves against the past, we are forced to the conclusion that the
old architectuml code, with its mass of rules and regulations evolvedduring four thou-

FABRICATIONS PAUL-ALAN JOHNSON

sand years, is no longer of any interest: it no longer wncerns us: all the values have
been revised; there has been a revolution in the conception of what Architecture is. l4

Notwithstanding Le Corbusier's stylistic admonitions and his revolu-

tionary conception of architecture, students during the 30s in Australia
were still being inculcated in the historical styles via Banister Fletcher
and their Mediterranean vernacular equivalents promoted from the
twenties initially by Walter Butler in Melbourne and subsequently by
Rodney Alsop at the University of Melbourne's Architectural Design
Atelier (to 1932), and also by Leslie Wilkinson in Sydney. While the
universities and institutes of technology also taught up-to-date materiali-
ty in the more practical subjects, they did not relate aesthetics and tech-
nics in the comprehensive Corbusian sense at all. The two worlds
informed Tom O'Mahony's education at the Gordon Institute of Tech-
nology, Geelong, during the early thirties,
Classical, Gothic, and Renaissance were the wre of the course there - plus other
studies to pass the then Institute of Architects examinations. Those were the usual
things, professional practice, construction, sanitary science and sciagmphy . . . We
also did perspecme drawing and some design.15
On the one hand the historical styles as the design armature, on the
other the structural and engineering aspects as state of the 'art', precise-
ly the same unreconciled dichotomy about which Le Corbusier was
writing.

All good architecture students, of course, listened to their teachers, be

they in academe or in the workplace, and Australian student architects
were no different. 'I started to realise you had to express yourself in
some way or another and the only way I knew how then was to imitate
my tutors,' says Laurie Malanot. But some, including Laurie, read
differently - they read Le Corbusier and other writers, listened to
their colleagues' tales of travelling around Europe, and reached
forward a little. Of the talks given to the Modem Architecture
Research Society - the Sydney version of the British MARS group, of
which he was a member - Laurie Malanot recalled: 'We did invite
people, usually students from Tech who had been abroad and could
guide us in design and outlook . . .' l6

Of course there were those who rarely read any philosophical or theo-
retical material at all and were merely carried along by the day-to-day
insights their employment and education provided them. The Technical
Colleges in particular showed a way through, but very much in practi-
cal terns. 'I really think the experience we had was very practical . . .
They didn't endeavour to teach us anything in the way of design. . . we

FABRICATTONS 118 PAULALAN JOHNSON

were just aided by the more experienced people we worked with,'
remarks Allan Gamble of life as a student in Western Australia.17 And
so it was elsewhere:
Q: Would you also say your course was very down foearth?
JM: Absolutely, you must remember I was seventeen or eighteen years old and
certainly had no high flown aspirations or knowledge of architecture. There wasn't
any stany eyed business about it at all.
Q: You diAn't have any lecturers who were 'stany eyed'?
JM: In those days Tech Colleges taught the real things of architectureand didn't deal
with the stars and the firmament much - their devotion was to classical models. We
had drawing and we had brickworkand we had all the business of ordering mortarand
bricks and timberand how-a window fitted into a wall. Those days of atchikxtnml
tminingwere mnpletelydifferentfr even the universitiesof those days, I think. It
is my impression it was a more hade oriented course. I never did Philosophy or
Japanese or Psychology and I distrust all that. I thiukit is the kind of thing that has
gone wrong with architechuaI training these daYs.l8

If they languished in matters of design or style though, these students

and the younger architects progressed in matters of construction, to the
point where they saw in technics a ready substitutefor design or stylis-
tic concerns. 'I was much more interested in constmction than design,'
declares Stanlev Brandon. while Ivor Tacon ~roffered:'Mv oninion of
architects, in the main, i s that they are eiiher constmcl?ion' men or
desieners but rarely good at both.'lg A recent interviewee declared
'[MY partner] had a -dif?erent geme but I would sometimes escape. mis]
genre was Cubist, Gropius . . . flat roof and purity. I enjoyed it too,
but I would escape and do ordinary stuff with pitched roofs and case
ment windows.' This view that architects could find sufficient fulfill-
ment i n 'ordinary stuff', especially in the practical-minded and
constructional aspects of their profession, recurs in a number of the
Middle Third interviews. Yet this emphasis hardly features in conven-
tional architectural histories.

Le Corbusier had not only written that 'the conclusion has often been
drawn that architecture is construction . . . [but] that is not a reason for
mixing different things. It is quite true that the architect should have
construction at least as much at his fingers' ends as a thinker his gram-
mar . . .' He had also gone on to say that 'an architect's efforts are
concentrated on it for a large part of his career; but he should not vege
tate there.' One wonders whether the derogatory 'vegetate' has perhaps
convinced many architectural historians and commentators that a
'construction' mentality was not a legitimate preoccupation of architec-

FABRICATIONS PAUL-ALAN JOHNSON

turd history and whether this attitude has led to a preponderance of
narrowly focussed high-style histories. Notwithstanding his prolificacy,
most of those interviewed for the Middle Third admitted to not having
absorbed or been influenced by Le Corbusier's writings,20 and, as
students, of being aware of modem design ideas in only a generalised
way.

Most surprising of all, most of those interviewed have been reluctant to

admit to any external architectural influences at all, apparently for fear
of denying their own design creativity, or of being seen as too easily
swayed, no matter how their design skills might have been awarded or
reported favourably by others. Talk of influences raises what amounts
to a defensive barrier among these practitioners of early modernism.
I suppose somethmg came from ra&ng about and seelng ~llustrahousof work by
Gmp~us,Le Corbus~er,Alvar Aalto, Maxwell Fry, [F R S]Yorke and other arclutects
of that bme
admits one architect dubiousl~.~'
No, they were my ideas. . . I just did it, not copying another. . . I was not influenced
by any trend. I was only influencedby the problemsas I saw them. . . I think1 did
the best I could, though I never followed anybody. . . whatever job I got I did to the
best of my ability,
declares a second defiantly.22 Which prompts the question of just who
were offered up as influences by those prepared to admit them?

Of the twenty four interviewed for the Middle Third, among overseas
architects half professed an interest in 'the Dutchman, Dudok . . . the
brick man,'= especially his Hilversum Town Hall, Frank Lloyd Wright
came a close second, Gropius was mentioned by a quarter, and Aalto by
four. 'For me the great light was Dudok from Holland.' 24 'There was
one favourite of the young architects of our time . . . Dudok of Holland
who was one of our pin-up ar~hitects.'~~ ' m d o k was] very good in the
use of brickwork particularly . . . all in clean and bold massing . . .'26
We reckoned that Dudok's Hilversum Town Hall was the greatest building we had
seen in those days. . . [Although] We sort of followed Le Corbusier but we didn't
really think that much of his work compared to Dudok and Frank Lloyd Wright. . .
there was a lot of brickwork and horizontal lines with both.'
My final design thesis was a bit Dudok-ish, if you know what I mean . . . my design
was in brickwork. Dudok had the capabilitiesto get the proportions rigbt in the brick
panels and the brick elementsof a place. . . Hilversum Town Hall in Holland was one
of the pieces de resistance of architectnre.28

What impressed them about the work of Dudok, and of Gropius when

FABRICATIONS 120 PAULALAN JOHNSON

he was mentioned, was 'the clean lines, and the modem architecture was
so tidy and clean and neat . . . and all so simple.'29 There were, howev-
er, a few doubters. 'As a young man I examined all this sort of thing
but I don't remember being overly impressed. It seemed to be artifi-
cially modem to me.' 30
I llked pudok's] work. . . [but] the style was not the style I had been thinking it was
. . . it was not finished properly. Over there they seemed to put up with things we
wouldn't condone for one minute. For instance, with tiles, there would be leaks in the
ridge and leaks around chimneys. . . It was not the lookof the thing it was the func-
tion. 31
Laurie Malanot also remembers:
I recall Syd Ancher who studied Dudok's buildings quite a hit saying that they looked
beautiful fmm the street level but when you got on top, he said, the roofs were false
and sloped the wrong way. If you considered a building structurally with the design
he got his effect by doing the wrong thing. But mind you, we were then students talk-
ing and we might not have been quite right in our outlook. But at these meetings,
when you would heara chap who had been abroad and had seen it, you couldn't argue
32

And among Australian architects, it was Syd Ancher who impressed the
NSW architects the most, a third deferring to him. 'The simplicity and
sensitivity of his work impressed me. He was a very dedicated archi-
tect.' 33 'I reckon Sydney Ancher was about the best but of course there
were others . . .' 34 'I remember the houses he designed. They were
outstanding . . . very plain but neat and tidy and I was very impressed
with his work.' 35 The only other Australian modernist receiving sigmf-
icant mention was the Melbourne architect Arthur Stephenson and his
f m s , Stephenson and Meldrum and Stephenson and Turner.

The general tenor of comments in the interviews against influences and

for self-reliance suggest that the greater bulk of Australian architects of
the 30s generation were not willing to unreservedly declare their hand
for modem architecture and its attendant ideas, let alone its principal
advocates. If this is interpreted as a negative reaction, it appears these
architects were not primarily against those ideas per se so much as
against their side effects; for modem design, while offering a straight-
forward regimen within which many ordinary architects could work,
also appears to have disernpowered them in equal measure, in that the
exemplars that Le Corbusier and other European 'names' provided
simply demanded much that budget and circumstance prevented them
from delivering. This leads me to a brief consideration of everyday
practice in the 30s and 40s.

FABRICATIONS PAULALAN JOHNSON

Overseas and Australian influences were either substantially modified
or greatly diminished by circumstances, or were redirected via a self-
imposed emphasis on individual capability that resolutely sought solu-
tions from among the exigencies of the task. Mainly these concerned
money. Take the response of R Lindsay Little - of the generation of
Australian 30s modernists, but not having travelled overseas until the
late 1950s, well into the period of revisionist modernism - when asked
if he saw any work overseas he thought appropriate for Australia:
RLL: Yes, in America. . . Frank Lloyd Wright's work. They were beautiful houses
and beautifully finished and twice the sizeof the things we used to build. The problem
was that we didn't have the money in Australia. Pwple wouldn't put up the money to
do that type of work. They would treat you as a burglar if you suggested something
like that and think you were just taking them down.
Q: Do you think clients here were much more basic in what they wanted?
W: Yes. . . yet people would study the magavnes wth these h n g s tn them They
would come and say they wanted sometlnng llke that and when we asked about money
they would only have half what they would need and they couldn't accept that. . .
Q: Did you see FrankUoyd Wright's GuggenheimMuseum?
W: I saw it but I wasn't interested. I think you get a bit choosy when you see so
much. I can't remember names but there were some public buildings which impressed
me and I would have loved to have built something like them in Sydney. Only the big
architectswere ever asked to build like that in Sydney. I would have been langhedat.
36

Indeed, for many of his contemporaries it was the same. . . great ideas,
but no clients with money or daring enough to explore them. For some
years now I have argued, informally, two things. Firstly, that
Australia, unlike North America, was settled after the money ran out,
so to speak, and consequently never generated the sponsors or mentors,
either as individuals or institutions, to encourage either art or architec-
ture to flourish as experimental and expressionistic enterprises. There
fore Australian giants of architecture, either as names or as works, just
never evolved to the extent that they did overseas. Secondly, that the
philosophy of modernism in architecture, once removed from its Eurc-
pean socio-cultural roots and particularly after the 'names' emigrated
from Europe before and during the Second World War, was interpret-
ed in stylistic terms by architects everywhere. In Australia this was
virtually the casefrom its inception. It seems strange that the people in
a country so imbued with the egalitarian ideal could not have sustained
a far more socially substantiated modernism.

I now feel able to make a tentative claim for placing the practical-

FABRICATIONS 122 PAUGALAN JOHNSON

minded architect and the myriad pragmatic and mundane buildings
produced in everyday architectural practice squarely into an historical
and theoretical frame, especially in light of the succinct summary by
TV commentator Diane Powell, in her Out West: Perceptions of
Sydney's Western Suburbs, of certain notions put forward by French
historian and ethnologist Michel de Certeau:
The practice of people taking what they want from the vanious resources and facilities
around them - 'making good' - is, according to Michel de Certeau, a series of
'minuscule' tactics, means by which ordinary people unselfconsciously resist and
manipulate the powerful mechanisms of discipline which penetrate all aspects of
modem life. The Neapolitans call it l'urfe di arrangimri, those everyday practices we
all engage in to arrange things from within an often limited range of options at our
disposal into fonns to suit ourselves: differentuses of 1anguage;the use of privateand
public space (the decoration of houses, ways of occupying urban space and shopping
centres); the uses to which consumer g o d s are put (how we play music, m r d and
watch videos); bow rituals are adapted (the way we personalise dress codes); the
redrawing of relationships (blendingfamilies). We all engage in an 'art of cooking';
selecting, putting together, and adapting the variety of resources at hand to create new
foms to suit ourse~ves?~

In The Practice of Everyday Life 38 Michel de Certeau argues that,

within the frame of economic production and institutionalized and
socialized practices that dominate everyday life, we are not passive
'consumers' so much as active 'tacticians'. We adopt certain individual-
ized practices or 'ways of doing' that reconstitute our spaces of individ-
ual production and thereby resist this systemic domination. This resis-
tance is the means by which we seek out and maintain our creativity in
the everyday world. 'These practices bring into play a "popular" ratio,
a way of thinking invested in a way of acting, an art of combination
which cannot be dissociated from an art of using'39. This adaptive
'making do' or bricolage is the core of a set of tactics, a 'tactic' being 'a
calculus which cannot count on a "proper" (a spatial or institutionalized
localization), nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visi-
ble totality.' De Certeau elaborates:
The place of a tactic belongs to the other. A tactic insinuates itself into the other's
place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it
at a distance. . . Because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time - it is
always on the watch for opportunitiesthat must be seized 'on the wing'. Whatever it
wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to tum them into
'opportunities'. The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to
them. This is achieved in propitious moments. . .a

This constant manipulation of events is as good a description as any of

the creativity at work in everyday architectural practice, indeed of a

FABRICATIONS 123 PAUL-ALAN JOHNSON

'working-against' that constitutes creative opportunism within the ordi-
nary. Even the seemingly innocuous or passive is transformed by de
Certeau. For instance, the view that reading 'seems to constitute the
maximal development of the passivity assumed to characterize the
consumer, who is conceived of as a voyeur,' for de Certeau reading
has on the contrary all the characteristics of a silent production:the drift across the
page, the metamorphosis of the text effected by the wandering eyes of the reader, the
improvisation and expectation of meanings inferred from a few words . . . r h e reader]
insinuates into anotherperson's text the ruses of pleasure and appropriation:he poach-
es on it, is transported into it, pluralizes himself in it . . . 41
This activity of reading, whether in its most distracted form of 'browsi-
ng' or in its most interested form of voyeurism, is so much a part of
design culture that de Certeau's 'silent production', 'metamorphosis',
'improvisation', and the idea of poaching, all of a sudden become viable
and potent constructs as the procedures of architects and designers.

By arraying these particular extracts, I am suggesting that architects

educated during the early modem period in Australia were not in a
position to replicate the ideas of their European counterparts, let alone
the originators of early modernist discourse, so much as in the position
of bricoleurs, artful fabricators. Most of thesearchitects were just like
de Certeau's 'ordinary man' or 'wmmon hero' to whom his book was
dedicated. They were capable people, 'ordinary' architects in a profes-
sion with a mere sprinkling of 'extraordinary' architects, who tried to
make good under prevailing and sometimes extremely difficult wndi-
tions.

What opportunities for creativity were there, and are there still, in such
everyday circumstances? My offering is that, insteadof proselytising
an evangelical modernist agenda as the European ideologues would have
it, a n 'ordinary' Australian architect, by virtue of education and
circumstances, would only, or wuld only, reinterpret this agenda into
one that was 'radical' within limited means. I use 'radical' in its etym-
logical sense of 'root' or 'fundamental', whereby the return to funda-
mental principles was seen as injecting a quality of clarity and purity
into their designings, rather than in its sense of advocating 'radical
reform' from some advanced or extreme political view. There is a
sense, though, in which I am suggesting that these architects, in being
'radically ordinary', attempted also to be politically persuasive, to be as
advanced and as demanding in their inventiveness as they wuld in the
face of the customary, the regular, and the conservative demands asso-
ciated with their everyday professional circumstances. The following
quotations touch on some aspects of these circumstances:

FABWATIONS 124 PAUL-ALAN JOHNSON

TO: I just felt I'd like to takea job from first principles myself and see what I cameup
with. I didn't want to be influenced. . . I was a bit conceited I guess. I thought, 'I
can solve this and I don't really need to look up magazines about it'
Q: What did you consider firstprinciples in those days?
TO: Probably planning and making sure the thing worked and that it was an agreeable
building for the client to use and agreeable to look at in its environment I didn't have
any deepseated philosophies if you'd call it that. . . 42
Q: Do you think there is an element of 'she'll be right' complacency in M a l i a n
architectme?
LK. Are they complacent? I think some people are perfectionlstsand some are
compelled to be more. pragmatic due to exigencies of cost and time . . . Architectswith
a ~eutonic .backgroundt&d to be perfectionists. Hany Seidler has that perfectionism
in his detailing and I admire him for his enthusiasm. What I have learnt is that the
business of architmturein Sydney means the architect is in the hands of the client. The
architectis reluctant to say 'that's vulgar' or 'I'm not going to have anyrhmg to do with
that' and walk out. . . But architects have to survive and in the end they must tly to
satisfy the client's inclinationsand prejumces. I wouldn't like to say that people in
Sydney tend to be philistines but (laughs) they do like to see a lot for their money. 43
I enjoyed bigger scale work and not humdrum factories. That reminds me of the
senice stations. At one stage, there must have been a recession or something, I know
that work got very scarce, but through someone I knew connectedwith Ampol, I got
service stations to do. They became stereotyped to just a standard design which you
adapted to a site and that I didn't enjoy either, but it was work you had to do just to
keep going. 44

The fact that Diane Powell addresses the stigma still attaching to people
living in the western suburbs is pertinent here because it is in inverse
proportion to the elitist preoccupations that beset those architectural
histories which emphasise only the great architects and the great works,
the exceptional rather than the norm. Ordinary architects producing
revisionist works rate only a derogatory mention, if they rate at all.
Ordinary architects producing 'radical' or principled works within
limited means get similar treatment. For such architects to be omitted
from conventional architectural histories, or derogated within them for
attitudes that are not theirs to answer, is to perpetuate the idea of the
autonomous individual and to limit history to one particular mode, one
that is not a sufficient history for Australian architects as a whole.

The central focus of de Certeau is on the everyday life and practices of

ordinary people, yet it mirrors what I perceive to be the everyday life
and practices by ordinary architects educated and working during the
middle third of the twentieth century in Australia. Adaptation to the

FABRICATIONS PAULALAN JOHNSON

resources at hand within a limited range of options is certainly one of
the principal emphases beginning to emerge from the Middle Third
interviews, as the following extract shows:
. . . when I got back [after travelling] and into my own practice I never felt any great
leaning towards Tectonand Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. It would seem to me that
they photographed better than they really were . . . You asked whether I was influ-
enced by them and I suppose really I'd have to say no, because I never produced any
work like them. My work I suppose was more reactionary. The wmmissions I got to
start with were low budget and if you departed from well-known construction -
remember afterthe war materialswere scarce - you often wuldn't even get a builder
to tender. My view was that if you stuck to traditional methods of wnstruction such as
brick and timber floors and tile roofs you wuld at least get it built. 45

Certainly a traditional historical emphasis in education has been the case

for every generation of architects, not just for the modem. But it was
of special significance for young graduates of the 30s and 40s because
not a few chose thereafter to reiterate mainly traditional themes, espe-
cially i n domestic work, as the most direct path to economic longevity
in their practices.46 To attain anything more than a pared-back modem
stylistic idiom arising out of a 'making do', and thereby a 'making
good' under restricted contemporary circumstances, was something for
which their formal education gave them little or no preparation. They
were thrown on to their own resourcefulness and inventiveness based in
sound planning, a primary materiality, and the rudiments of minimalist
composition. But for the fact that many at 'Tech' were indentured, and
therefore seeing the real world on a day-to-day basis, there was no
leavening of the historical design emphasis in their education that could
satisfy the contemporary demands being made of them. Ivor Tacon
makes the point in relation to his own education:
Q: On what did your kcmersplace most emphasis?
IT: It was difficult for us because we were approaching the Depression and money
was a very scarce commodity. What the lecturers told us was that when we came to
design we were to design regardless of cost. In the back of our minds all the time,
unfortunately, was what it would cost It was embeddedin us and so design was a bit
of a problem for a g o d many of us who were very practical. At a later stage in life
that stood us in very good stead but in the student days it was a bit of a drawback.
Those who were practical could not let their flights of fancy go because we were all the
time thinking of what it would wst. "

Perhaps the sentiment of the ordinary architect in everyday practice

hying to be radical as he or she dared is best summed up by the respon-
se Leonard Walker gave to the question: Having been so definite about
wanting to be an architect all those years ago, did you ever regret it?

FABRICATIONS PAULALAN JOHNSON

'Never. I think I was a sound architect - I don't know if I was a very
good architect, but I was a sound architect . . .' 48

Notes

1. The Architects of the Middle Third project was triaUed for one year in 1991 via a
UNSW Faculty of Architecture (now the Faculty of The Built Environment)
Research Grant, and is half way through a three-year cycle of funding under
an ARC Small Grant. So far 30 interviews in the series have been completed.
See Paul-Alan Johnson and Susan Lorne-Johnson, eds,Architects of the
Middle Third:Interviews with New South Wales architects who commenced
practice in the 1930s and 1940s (M), Vols 1 (1992), 2 (1995) and 3
(1996, in MS), Kensington, NSW: School of Architecture, The University of
New South Wales.
2. J Maxwell Freeland, Architectwe in Ausi7alia:A History. Ringwwd, Vic:
Penguin Books, 1972, pp 273,276. The pamgraph begins at the bottom
of p 273 and continues at the top of p 275, there are two illustration pages
between.
3. Robin Boyd, Victorian Modern, Melbourne: Architectuml Students' Society of the
Royal Victorian Institute of Architects, 1947.
4. J M Richards, An Introduction to Modem Architecture, Harmondsworth,
England: Penguin, 1940, pp 9-10.
5. Ibid, p 10.
6. Ibid,p11.
7. Stanley C Brandon, AMT, vol 2, pp 5-6, 17.
8. G Charles Cullis-Hill, ibid, pp 72,73.
9. Peter F'riestley, AMT, vol 1, 1992, p 127.
10. Max Collard, M, vol 2, pp 34-35.
11. Freeland, op cit, p 253.
12. R Lindsay Little, AMT, vol2, pp 79-80.
13. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, English trans by Frederick Etchells,
1927. Extracts here taken from the 13th edition. 1931. facsimile.
Dover, 1986.
14. Ibid, p 288.
15. Tom O'Mahony, AMT, vol 1, p 102.
16. Lorenzo Malanot, ibid, p 73.
17. Allan Gamble, AMT, vol 3, MS.
18. John Merewether, ibid.
19. IvorTacon, AMT, vol2, p 119.
20. Onlv 15% of those interviewed mentioned Le Corbusier at all. let alone the
writings of other notables.
Brian Mowbray, AMT, vol2, p 93.
Leslie Monis, AMT, vol3, MS.
B N CLitchfield,
~ M,vol 1, p 60
Laurence Raper, ibid, p 137.
Max Collard, AMT, vol 2, p 32.
Brian Mowbray, ibid, pp 98.99.
Felix W Tavener, ibid, p 128.

FABRICATIONS PAUL-ALAN JOHNSON

 28. Charles Weatherbum. ibid. D 152
29. Felix W Tavener, ibid, p 1%.
30. G Charles Cullis-Hill. ibid. D 73.
31. R Lindsay Little, ibid; p 88.'
32. Lorenzo Malanot. AMT. vol 1.,D 75.
33. Lawrence A K&, ibid; p 44.
.
34. Sydney H Bridekirk, AMT, vol2, pp 29-30.
35. R Lindsay Little, ibid, p 81.
36. Ibid. nu 88. 89.
37. ~ o w k i c~ i & e Out
, West: Perceptions of Sydney's Western Suburbs,
St Leonards.~.NSW: Allen- & Unwin.
~~~~
~~ - 1993. D 155.
38. Dc Certeau, Mchcl, The I'rocrice of tvrjdayL&, trm by Steven Rendall,
1974.,Califomla. Un~versin,of
~

2 --
Califorma Press., 1984.
39. Ibid, p xv.
40. Ibid, p xix.
41. Ibid, p xxi.
42. Tom O'Mahony, AMT, vol 1, p 102.
43. Lawrence A Knox, ibid, p 44.
44. Max Collard, AMT, vol2, p 41.
45. Tom O'Mahony, AMT, vol 1, p 101.
46. One w e l l - h w n architect who practiced mostly in a d i t i o n a l idiom for his
domestic work yet ventured into the modem for institutional and commercial
work was Sydney architect John R Brogan, educated at Sydney Technical
College during the twenties. His 101Australian Homes (1935) of traditional
designs was immediately popular and influential yet, with E B Filzgerald, he
won the Adelaide Boys' High School competition of 1940 with a Dudok-
inspired modem scheme. For Brogan's life and works see Ama K Brogan,
JohnR B ~ o g m : ACareer in Practice, unpublished BArch dissertation, School
of Architecture, The University of NSW, 1994.
47. Ivor Tacon, AMT, vol2, p 110.
48. Leonard G Walker, AMT, vol 1, p 158.
DESIGN OF CANTILEVER VERANDAHS (CITY OF MELBOURNE)

CANTILEVER
VERANDAH
- CONSTRUCTION

Illustrationfrom Ramsay's Architectural Catalogue,

1st ed, Melbourne, September 1931, p115

I
FABRICATIONS PAUL-ALAN JOHNSON