Artificial Australia was the title of a series of lectures given by prominent Australian architect, Robin Boyd in 1967 on the Australian Broadcasting Commission.
The Boyer Lectures was a radio series that invited prominent Australians to present the results of their works and thinking on major social, scientific or cultural issues. The series started in 1959 under the title of the ABC Lectures, but in 1961 the ABC decided to rename it as a memorial to the late Sir Richard Boyer, chairman of the ABC, who was the person responsible for the creation of the original series.
Background
Robin Boyd was an influential architect and educator whose design philosophy influenced the development of Australian architectural ideas. He was the "leading Australian propagandist for the International Modern Movement in architecture". He published nine books, with popular and controversial ideas on current tastes in architecture, design, and popular culture.
In the 1967 Boyer lectures on radio, Boyd discusses the state of architecture, design, and the cultural situation in Australia during that same period. Boyd provides an interpretation of Australia's architectural history, comparing local and global developments in an attempt to answer questions about the nature of architecture, design, work, and beauty.
Content
Boyd's lecture series discuses a variety of topic and issues relating to Australia architecture and design as well as the prevailing cultural values of the time, focusing on the theory of ideas in relation to architecture, design and culture.
The title to the series, "Artificial Australia", refers to the everyday background of modern Australian life. It pertains to the design of things such as buildings, appliances, advertisements, cities, and landscapes.
Lecture 1 - Creative Man in a Frontier Society
Boyd begins the series by making a distinction in the kinds of people he thinks exist in Australia - with everyone being mixtures of 'doer' and 'dreamer' - the "practical man of action" and the "creative man of vision".
He uses the term progressive materialists to describe the man of action. That is, Australians "convinced that Australia at this stage of its development should still be concerned virtually exclusively with physical, economic, organizational and political problems"; with "no time for people with ideas" (p. 1)
The "creative man" he states, admits the physical problems but denies "the need for Australia to continue a life overbalanced on the materialist side’, and refuses ‘to believe in an infinite projection of economic security and physical comfort and spectator sports as the goal of living".
It is from this perspective that Boyd claims that the then current Australia was undergoing a social transmutation in which there had begun to exist an articulate intellectual opposition to the established Australian values that had been heretofore more reflective in principles of the man of action than vision (p. 2)
Boyd argues that Australia ought to focus more on the cultivation of ideas, and thus the encouragement of creative people. He uses Sweden and Switzerland and Canada as examples of smaller nations that can still be individual and creative, in spite of the mass-produced culture exported from the U.S. (p. 9).
Lecture 2 - The Architecture of Ideas
In the second lecture Boyd attempts to define the loose term "ideas" in relation to his own field of architecture and design. He does so by first introducing a number of important figures, principles and events in the history of architecture.
The Roman architect Vitruvius authored Vitruvius is the author of De architectura, known as The Ten Books on Architecture, in which he gave his definition for what architecture should be, firmitatis, utilitatis, venustatis – that is, stability, utility, beauty, laying the foundations for Vitruvian theory.
Boyd describes how Vitruvian theory proved useful through nearly 1900 years, through classical, Renaissance, Gothic and other Revivalist styles, until about 115 years ago. The industrial revolution, by introducing a change in the technique in the manufacturing of artificial products allowed, according to Boyd, a thing such as "vulgar design" to come into existence as industry made possible for mass reproduction, while also allowing for revolutionary building techniques (p. 13).
Boyd describes how present design ideas began to take form at that time - in the middle of the nineteenth century. Most importantly, the idea that everything made by man for his own use should be shaped according to its function without making concessions to ornamentation and frills.