By Elizabeth Farrelly
The house on the wooded hillside is deeply quiet, though its form is complex and its interior dances with many-angled light. The quietude results (if you will) from spiritual qualities; discipline, centredness and grace. Yet to visit, as I did this week, is to wonder whether modernism was after all our last breath of hope. Because the 1962 Ken Woolley house, a revered Sydney-modern totem, is now surrounded and shouted over by a cacophony of concrete and plate-glass view-guzzlers.
From Whale Beach to Bronte it's the same. Wherever people have money and choice, grace gives way to ostentation. It's like hearing Aung San Suu Kyi interviewed by Alan Jones. One is louder and more listened to, but the other has so much more to say.
Right now this seems more than an aesthetic shift. The passing of the great mid-century prophet Cohen, the rise of the demagogues (Trump, Putin, Farrage), gives the now a moment-in-history feeling, a sense of changing-the-guard. And that gave special resonance to last week's two architecture films on the ABC. One was a monograph, the other a polemic, but both gazed longingly back to a mid-century modern utopia.
The films – Daryl Dellora's Harry Seidler: Modernist and Tim "Rosso" Ross' The Streets of Our Town: Modernism to McMansionism – both depict what you might call 1950s Peak Optimism, as though with enough fibro and laminex we might just pop right back to Lassie-land. But the truth is neither so simple nor so desirable.
Illustration Simon Bosch
I've always been half in love with modernism. Although it was officially over by the time I was even a student, I was hopelessly drawn to its moral core – planning is for everyone, architecture is everybody's business! – and to the bizarre paradox that made its fall to earth at once so dramatic and so heart-rending. For me the noble aspirations, the glorious hubris and the abject pathos made modernism a kind of Lear figure.
Post-modernism was, by comparison, slight; fun for five minutes, then done. In 1986, as a young editor of the London establishment mag The Architectural Review, I opened a special issue thus; "Post-modernism is dead. Some have known from the start that it was no more than a painted corpse...". My thesis, also consciously optimistic, was that a "New Spirit" was emerging from modernism's sepulchre, leading us to a light-filled, polycultural, open-handed future. Haha. I wish.
But the question now is, which of these mindsets do we – should we – inhabit? Doomed optimism? Robotic materialism? Or some strange, hopeful hybrid of the two? Both films, Seidler and Streets, play up modernism's sunny aspect. Tim Ross (no, I cannot call him Rosso) is a self-described mid-century modern tragic who adores big-fin cars, butterfly roofs and spindly legged tables. In his view, that's modernism, and it's back.
Seidler is more serious; an elegy for a world in which the creative archi-genius choreographs engineers, artists, builders and photographers, to reshape our cities, burbs and homes for our benefit.
And certainly, that heady future was one face of modernism. When modernism sang, it sang not of deprivation but of a deep certainty about how truth and beauty sustain each other to give life meaning. Fine modernism makes contemporary ostentation seem sad and lost by comparison.
But there was another, darker modernism, where socialism tipped seamlessly into fascism; where grace and optimism became the tools of big money and social Darwinism took over in an Ayn Rand kind of way (although Rand would never have pronounced it "Bauerhaus" as our Seidler narrator does – twice). The liberation became the cage.
This was modernism's fatal flaw, the concrete jungle dreaming that lurks behind the arras in both films but is recognised by neither. Yet it is this grim modernism to which our governments are still in thrall today. So to ignore it, to suggest that some Madmen-esque revival of modern styles can refill our reservoirs of collective hope is at best daft and at worst dangerous.
Both films are engaging, but both suffer from a lack of critical acuity; a lack of that refreshing, Cohenesque, modernist value, truth. The Ross film seems patronisingly to accept that nothing serious will "work" in what he insists on calling 'Straya and so has a jokey, undergraduate feel, substituting sentiment for scholarship and gags for analysis. Seidler, while more historically acute, is essentially another episode of Seidler-machine hagiography.
Why can't Australia take its own history seriously? I know how blindingly hard it is to get architecture up on Australian TV. But that makes it more important, not less, to set the highest expectations of scholarship and honesty. (The gold standard here being Ken Burns' brilliant 1998 film Frank Lloyd Wright).
Tim Ross' core question is a good one. "How did we go from modernism to McMansions, inferior builds whose dominant feature is their size?" But by series end it remains largely unanswered.
Ross gushes us through some glorious houses – the Gruzmans and Godsells. His core assumption, however – that modernism, modesty and mid-century are inherently Australian, essentially synonymous and reached some egalitarian apotheosis in our suburbs – is manifestly wrong. Modernism, suburbia and social housing were all done earlier, better, elsewhere.
Ironically, then, Ross' closest approach to truth comes from a Brit, Alain de Botton, who sees the McMansion as bling, bespeaking "anxiety that people are not treating each other well".
Architecture's relationship with culture is complex, but to pretend that 1950s suburbia was egalitarian, home-grown and optimistic when in fact it was intensely individualistic, status-driven, unsustainable and misogynistic wont help build a better future.
Ross may be nostalgic for days when "dad tinkered in the shed and mum knitted mustard-coloured jumpers" but there's no way I'm going back there.
Twitter: @emfarrelly
EDITOR'S NOTE: Elizabeth Farrelly appears as an interviewee in the film Harry Seidler: Modernist.