Robin Boyd: Spatial Continuity

Mauro Baracco, Louise Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317062073
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

Australian architect Robin Boyd (1919–1971) advocated tirelessly for the voice of Australian architects so that there could be an architecture that might speak to Australian conditions and sensibilities.His legacy continues in the work of contemporary Australian architects yet also prompts a way forward for architecture particularly in relationship to the landscapes they inhabit through a quality of continuous space found in his work where the buildings are spatially reliant and sympathetic to the places they occupy.

A selection of 22 projects are documented comprehensively in this book for the first time. This slice through Boyd's body of work reveals a gifted, complex and contemporary thinker.

Part I
Robin Boyd

Spatial continuity

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1
Robin Boyd: Spatial continuity

Tim Winton observes that

two centuries after… (the Aboriginal people’s) way of living was disrupted forever, Australia is still a place where there is more landscape than culture. Our island resists the levels of containment and permanent physical presence that prevail on most other continents. It probably always will.¹

This is something that Robin Boyd, in spite of the dilemma this poses to his profession, seems to have deeply understood. Many of his buildings are an attempt to come at or sort of dance around this dilemma. A pioneer of this approach, he convincingly demonstrated a trajectory of how we might build in such a place and shifted architecture in Australia away from the discrete object towards buildings that knit with their physical place. We often think of his buildings as hats.² The ground plane carries through, sometimes literally, and the roof, or hat, compresses the vast space and sky.

The vast space and sky are what we are concentrating on when we use the word ‘landscape’ and apply this notion to some specific conditions of Australia. The more comprehensive term ‘open space’ is also – and to some degree even more – appropriate in order to express openness as a spatial condition that through Boyd’s design approach is closely integrated, so it is argued in this book, to built forms and volumes. The term ‘open landscape’ (more than ‘natural landscape’) is also a further connotation that can be used to describe the condition of outdoor space – often extensive and related to urban and suburban situations – which is in continuity with the indoor and built space of Boyd’s projects. The vast space and sky are present in these works as integrated spatial elements, registered against the usually unaltered ground plane, technically and conventionally outside of the inside, and yet subliminally, cogently merged in a continuum with the indoor space. Sometimes the surrounding landscape is more relevantly part of the continuum; sometimes, when exaggeratedly overwhelming, there is less of it. Its integrated presence is however always part of Boyd’s designed space; it is something that especially in Australia cannot be separated from people’s psyche and their built environment.

The use of the term landscape as described earlier seems ironic, being not of the land itself; but in the landscapes of Australia, which vary considerably, the vast space and sky is the consistent quality and perhaps what, to use Winton’s term, is most resistant to containment. The suburban landscapes of many of the buildings shown here, most of which would have been cheek by jowl with remnant bushland, had and still have this quality. The term landscape conjures an overall aesthetic, a visual quality. While this is true of its use here, it’s more than that. It’s also a sense of spatial quality, which is hard to pin down in terms of specific physical features. It is also used to mean the natural ecosystem of some of the places. This last definition is given more weight when we consider Boyd’s lineage a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Robin Boyd: Spatial continuity
• PART II Robin Boyd: Selected works
• Bibliography
• Index