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: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Tanning and foxing
In one of the most provocative cultural critiques ever written about a nation's built environment, Robin Boyd's The Australian Ugliness delivers a searing indictment of Australia's aesthetic failures — from its cluttered suburban streetscapes to its hollow architectural ambitions. Boyd, one of Australia's most celebrated architects and critics, argues that Australians have cultivated a peculiar national habit he terms featurism — the compulsive adorning of surfaces with decorative trivialities that mask a deeper cultural insecurity, producing cities and suburbs of startling visual incoherence. With surgical precision and biting wit, he chronicles the spread of this aesthetic malaise across the Australian landscape, from the telegraph poles and fibrous concrete of the suburbs to the tawdry commercial strips that scar the nation's towns. First published in 1960, The Australian Ugliness remains a landmark work of Australian cultural criticism, as relevant and unsettling today as it was upon its first appearance. Boyd writes with the authority of a practising architect and the eloquence of a seasoned essayist, blending sharp social observation with a genuine passion for what Australia's built environment could — and should — become. This is a book that does not merely describe a problem; it holds a mirror up to a nation and dares it to look.
Author: Robin Boyd
Format: Hardback
Genre: Australian history
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Tanning and foxing
In one of the most provocative cultural critiques ever written about a nation's built environment, Robin Boyd's The Australian Ugliness delivers a searing indictment of Australia's aesthetic failures — from its cluttered suburban streetscapes to its hollow architectural ambitions. Boyd, one of Australia's most celebrated architects and critics, argues that Australians have cultivated a peculiar national habit he terms featurism — the compulsive adorning of surfaces with decorative trivialities that mask a deeper cultural insecurity, producing cities and suburbs of startling visual incoherence. With surgical precision and biting wit, he chronicles the spread of this aesthetic malaise across the Australian landscape, from the telegraph poles and fibrous concrete of the suburbs to the tawdry commercial strips that scar the nation's towns. First published in 1960, The Australian Ugliness remains a landmark work of Australian cultural criticism, as relevant and unsettling today as it was upon its first appearance. Boyd writes with the authority of a practising architect and the eloquence of a seasoned essayist, blending sharp social observation with a genuine passion for what Australia's built environment could — and should — become. This is a book that does not merely describe a problem; it holds a mirror up to a nation and dares it to look.