BOYD, ROBIN

BOYD, ROBIN – Australia’s Home

Insects influenced the shape of the Australian house. Some, like the white ant and lthe Lyctus borer, worked quietly and invisibly until a little shower of yellow dust or a sudden collapse indicated their presence. Others, like the mosquito and housefly, were less dangerous and more objectionable. The former type influenced structure in minor ways; the latter affected planning to a major degree.

BOYD, ROBIN - Australia's Home

BOYD, ROBIN – Artificial Australia

When most objects are truly functional, this technological age, which is just beginning, will be truly civilised. When all objects in this country are truly functional, Australia will be as beautiful in its own way as classical Greece.

BOYD, ROBIN - Artificial Australia

BOYD, ROBIN – Australia’s Home

Yet the small house, probably more than anything else that man has done, has made the face of Australia and to an extent the faces of Australians. Australia is the small house. Ownership of one in a fenced allotment is as inevitable and unquestionable a goal of the average Australian as marriage.

BOYD, ROBIN - Australia's Home

BOYD, ROBIN

We need better architecture and planning: more imaginatively exciting, more involving, more our own.

BOYD, ROBIN

BOYD, ROBIN – Australia’s Home

Adelaide was the first city in Australia, if not in the world, to provide for the health and recreation of all its citizens.

BOYD, ROBIN - Australia's Home

BOYD, ROBIN – Artificial Australia

Solemn Australians think that an interest in design is a superficial and trivial interest. This is actually an improvement, they used to think it effeminate and vaguely immoral.

BOYD, ROBIN - Artificial Australia

BOYD, ROBIN – Australia’s Home

The Australian town-dweller spent a century in the acquisition of his toy: an emasculated garden, a five-roomed cottage of his very own, different from its neighbours by a minor contortion of window or porch – its difference significant to no one but himself. He skimped and saved for it, and fought two World Wars with it figuring prominently in the back of his mind. Whenever an Australian boy spoke to an Australian girl of marriage, he meant, and she understood him to mean, a life in a five-roomed home.

BOYD, ROBIN - Australia's Home

BOYD, ROBIN – on attitudes to creativity, Artificial Australia

Australia’s is a special kind of philistinism, an immovable materialism which puts art and ideas of any kind deliberately and firmly to one side to let the serious business of living proceed without distraction.

BOYD, ROBIN - on attitudes to creativity, Artificial Australia