As is well known, Robin Boyd came from a distinguished family. Arthur Boyd, the most famous of a number of notable painters and potters, was a cousin; the novelist Martin Boyd an uncle. The latter’s novels (eclipsed now) once enjoyed a considerable following, both here and abroad. They were often concerned with tracing the dilemma of upper-class Australians who never felt quite at home either in England or Australia. So Robin Boyd’s background and instincts were notably patrician, while his focus – after exposure to America and meetings with celebrated architects – was much more local.

‘Austerica’ is what Boyd saw when he returned. The aspiration was to American modernity, but a two-year lag in transmission was customary and seemed just about right. Boyd dismissed Surfers Paradise as ‘a poor man’s Miami’. More ubiquitous was a soulless suburbia, nicely characterised here by Naomi Stead as ‘a beige purgatory’. No wonder: Boyd pointed to the contempt in which indigenous vegetation was held, there being an almost universal desire to eradicate it domestically – ‘a psychopathic pioneering attitude to the landscape’, he termed it. In its place was the triumphalism of ‘featurism’, the singling out of particular aspects of a building to make a greater impact. At the same time, there was a preference for veneer, for obscuring honest materials. Much was only skin-deep. ‘This is a country,’ wrote Boyd tellingly, ‘of many colourful, patterned, plastic veneers, of brick-veneer villas, and the White Australia Policy.’

Australians seemed to have a timidity about fully living here, something which good design and appropriate architecture could help to change. Boyd was not implacably anti-suburban as such: for some years he ran The Age Small Homes Service. There his aim was a very modernist one: providing Australians with a simple, direct way of building ‘true to structure and form without ornament’, displaying ‘modest, well-designed spaces free of visual and conceptual clutter’.

How do the judgements of the 1960 text stand up today? To determine this, the four editors – Naomi Stead, Tom Lee, Ewan McEoin, and Megan Patty – have dished up a sumptuous banquet of postmodernity. Each chapter starts with a quote from Boyd (often illustrated by Oslo Davis) and is separated from the others by a succession of contemporary photographs by David Wadelton, showing how the targets of Boyd’s concerns have gone on reproducing themselves. The book, the editors explain, ‘seeks to provide new perspectives on an old idea, and the multiplicity and heterogeneity of its voices, its point of view, is intentionally in contrast with the original’. ‘Monumental’, they declare it; ‘hard to assimilate’.

After The Australian Ugliness is very much of our time – the opening piece is by an Indigenous woman, Alison Page. A dozen other women are among the contributors, with seven men (one openly gay). They are drawn largely from universities, though not broadly, and public galleries. There seem to be no practising architects, but there are a number of writers and artists. Their respective approaches vary enormously, from the erudition of Harriet Edquist and the fluency of Peter McNeil (writing about Boyd and fashion), to an artist’s manifesto, and a not particularly illuminating email conversation which seems to be about resisting reading Boyd.

Generally, the perspectives they bring are sharp and informative. In many respects, Robin Boyd’s book is obsolete. Indeed, the word ‘ugly’ itself has largely been absent from professional planning literature for the past half century. Meanwhile, Eugenia Lim explains that she wants her work as an artist to ‘reflect back a vision of this country that is cacophonous, plural and intersectional – the ugly and the beautiful in coexistence, without hierarchy’. This is a world away from Boyd’s conception of an ordered world, epitomised in the Black Dolphin Motel he designed for Merimbula. That double-storey building, in its eagerness to avoid the vulgar, is a marriage of frontier-colonial and modernism: the clientele would probably have preferred something more glitzy.    

There have been many changes since Boyd wrote. The overhanging wires he railed against are these days (in new suburbs) often placed underground, and there has been a greater appreciation of indigenous flora (partly with the rise of landscape gardening). But housing estates increasingly look the same, as larger dwellings have come to occupy nearly all of their suburban block. Meanwhile, cars have taken over the streets where children once played. (In 1971, fifty-seven per cent of children in New South Wales walked to school; that figure has been more than halved since.) And Boyd’s diagnosis of ‘arborophobia’ (hatred of indigenous trees) can seem tepid compared with the flattening of the landscape that now regularly occurs around supermarkets and the like to provide parking spaces. As Boyd remarked, ‘there is nothing stagnant about ugliness’.

The point made throughout the collection is that ‘ugliness’ is not simply an aesthetic question. In fairness, nor was it for Boyd: good design, instead of being seen as surplus to requirements, should be regarded as enabling, subtly shaping people’s lives for the better. But today the broader issues are far more urgent, and the contributors frequently point to them. Architecturally, there is the appalling shoddiness apparent now in the construction of many residential towers, while questions of public housing and the runaway housing market become ever more pressing, given growing economic inequality and social polarisation. Then there are more fundamental challenges. Australia is due for a reset, if our institutions are to fully respond to the multicultural society we have become. But climate change is first on the list, not only because of its overwhelming importance. Increasingly, it will call for imaginative architectural responses.