Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
ItemThe modern house in Melbourne, 1945-1975( 1992)This dissertation reveals the method by which architects in Melbourne have designed the single family house in the period 1945 - 1975 and thus extends Robin Boyd's attempt in 1947 to describe a regional architectural manner for the state of Victoria. Critical to the study is an initial outline of a local tradition of condoned eclecticism in 1930s domestic architecture and the presence of an evolving housing stock that was mixed rather than predominantly that of the single family house. Modernism in 1930s Melbourne architecture is found to be part of a compositional tradition rather than emerging from ideological imperatives. Robin Boyd’s idea of a so-called Victorian Type is also found to be part of this compositional tradition. The study then examines the suppressive effect of World War 2 on this tradition and its eventual re-emergence during the ensuing three decades. The circumstances which encouraged the adoption of the language of modern architecture and its subsequent effects are examined via prevailing architectural themes. These include: the post-war Victorian Type; structural experiment; geometry; the influence of the East Coast Bauhaus and Frank Lloyd Wright; the continuing idiosyncratic assimilation and reformulation process (albeit under the guise of the Modern Movement) which described the modern house in Melbourne of the 1950s and 1960s; the renewed interest in texture, exposed materials and compartmented planning in the 1960s; and the eventual re-emergence of artifice in the composition of space, form and detail and a renewed variety and intricacy in choice of texture and materials. The three decades are shown to reveal a complex tradition in Melbourne domestic architecture concealed by the moral, aesthetic and industrial imperatives of the Modern Movement, the effects of World War 2 and subsequent shortages of materials and labour. This tradition is found to be an assimilation and reformulation of local and overseas sources into a distinctly regional domestic architecture based on Arts and Crafts ideals of honesty of structure and texture and has been perpetuated by the continued idealization of the single family detached house. Appendices relate to each chapter and describe: the use of period styles in the 1930s; the changing notion of house as commodity via the speculative house builder and the public housing authority; the machine made-house and the handmade house as circumstantial choices after World War 2; pre-war dreams of a modern Melbourne house as read through the architectural competition, and the changing image of the exhibition house in the 1950s. Four papers also examine the development of post-war domestic architecture in the United States (1945-1960) and Great Britain (1952-1969). The methodology of this dissertation has involved documentation, description and analysis. The study is inclusive and its framework has been deliberately broad to depict the era's previously undiscussed complexity and hence enable a more accurate portrayal of the period than previous selective histories have allowed.