The Australian Ugliness
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In one of the most provocative and enduring works of Australian cultural criticism, architect and writer Robin Boyd delivers a scathing, witty, and ultimately affectionate indictment of the aesthetic failures that have come to define the Australian built environment. The Australian Ugliness argues that a national obsession with what Boyd terms Featurism — the compulsive decoration and fragmentation of surfaces to disguise a lack of genuine design vision — has produced suburbs, buildings, and public spaces of breathtaking mediocrity. With incisive precision, Boyd chronicles the spread of this cultural affliction from the fibro bungalow to the cluttered commercial strip, painting a portrait of a nation too busy prospering to consider what it actually looks like. Beyond its architectural critique, the work stands as a landmark of Australian intellectual life, illuminating the broader cultural anxieties of a young, affluent society caught between colonial inheritance and an uncertain national identity. Boyd's prose is sharp, funny, and bracingly direct — the work of a man who loved his country enough to be merciless about it. First published in 1960, it remains a foundational text for anyone seeking to understand how Australians have shaped, and misshapen, their world — and whether anything has truly changed since Boyd first levelled his charge.
Author: Robin Boyd
Format: Paperback
Genre: Australian history
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In one of the most provocative and enduring works of Australian cultural criticism, architect and writer Robin Boyd delivers a scathing, witty, and ultimately affectionate indictment of the aesthetic failures that have come to define the Australian built environment. The Australian Ugliness argues that a national obsession with what Boyd terms Featurism — the compulsive decoration and fragmentation of surfaces to disguise a lack of genuine design vision — has produced suburbs, buildings, and public spaces of breathtaking mediocrity. With incisive precision, Boyd chronicles the spread of this cultural affliction from the fibro bungalow to the cluttered commercial strip, painting a portrait of a nation too busy prospering to consider what it actually looks like. Beyond its architectural critique, the work stands as a landmark of Australian intellectual life, illuminating the broader cultural anxieties of a young, affluent society caught between colonial inheritance and an uncertain national identity. Boyd's prose is sharp, funny, and bracingly direct — the work of a man who loved his country enough to be merciless about it. First published in 1960, it remains a foundational text for anyone seeking to understand how Australians have shaped, and misshapen, their world — and whether anything has truly changed since Boyd first levelled his charge.