{"product_id":"2026200015048-secondhand-the-australian-ugliness","title":"The Australian Ugliness","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eCondition remarks:\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBook: Good\u003cbr\u003eJacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage\u003cbr\u003ePages: Tanning and foxing\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 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.\n\nFirst 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49203185287387,"sku":"2026200015048-SECONDHAND","price":25.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/0126e81c-3871-455d-8a9c-9b6f47ffe172.png?v=1788145152","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/2026200015048-secondhand-the-australian-ugliness","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}