Robin Boyd and Peter Corrigan: archival traces. Harriet Edquist
As an architecture student at the University of Melbourne in the 1960s, Peter Corrigan kept an eye on Robin Boyd. Small but telling traces of the connection between the two architects can be found in the Edmond and Corrigan Archive, shelved only a few metres away from the Frederick Romberg and Robin Boyd collection, in the RMIT Design Archives. They set up a conversation.
Three documents Corrigan preserved from the 1960s suggest that he considered Boyd’s opinion of value to his career. Firstly, there is the edition of Smudges Corrigan edited in November 1961. As Geoffrey Serle notes, the origins of Smudges “are lost in elderly men’s memories” but it was founded by Boyd and Roy Simpson who co-edited the first issue; Boyd was thereafter sole editor for three years and today is probably the architect most commonly associated with the pamphlet.1 That Corrigan assumed the editorship indicates that even as a student he was moving towards a conception of architecture that went beyond building, towards the idea of the architect as a performer, as a public figure, like Boyd. At the same time however, as Patrick McCaughey recalls in his 2003 memoir, Corrigan’s meeting with Boyd as a critic in his second-year design studio in 1962 did not go well. Boyd, moving through the students’ work ‘briskly and without sentimentality’, stopped in front of Corrigan’s, noted that it demonstrated a ‘real architectural idea’ but if built could do with improvement. This faint criticism proved too much for Corrigan, a ‘full-scale row’ erupted and he had to be ‘physically restrained from carrying it further’.2 He apologised to the Boyds the following day.3 In 1965 as he was planning to undertake post-graduate study in the United States, Corrigan gathered together a batch of references from his lecturers at Melbourne University. He also approached Boyd for a reference, and Boyd wrote, with good humour and no doubt vivid memories, that while he had few contacts with Corrigan, he had followed his career with interest, noting his extra-curricular activities, his nonconformism and ‘strong streak of originality which if properly cultivated could lead to great things’.4 Two years later, from Yale, Corrigan sent Boyd a copy of Robert Venturi’s ground-breaking book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966). In his responding letter Boyd acknowledged his interest in Venturi’s book but not in Venturi’s architecture which was included at the back of the book. How wrong this view turned out to be. In his Introduction to the 1977 second edition of Complexity and Contradiction which contained a sustained comparison between Venturi and Le Corbusier, Vincent Scully noted:
. . .Venturi’s ideas have so far stirred bitterest resentment among the more academic-minded of the Bauhaus generation - with its utter lack or irony, its spinsterish disdain for the popular culture but shaky grasp on any other, its incapacity to deal with monumental scale, its lip service to technology, and its preoccupation with a rather prissily puristic aesthetic.5 The generational battle lines were drawn. Boyd died in 1971 but the gulf between him and the younger generation was already emergent in that 1967 letter. In his Foreword to the 1985 edition of Australia’s Home, Corrigan tempered his admiration of Boyd with questions about his conception of suburbia. He wrote: the ambivalence towards suburbia evident in this book is no longer shared by a new generation of architects and artists. . . The point now is to accept Boyd’s suburbia as a site for dealing with questions of human existence. These Australian homes are not aesthetic calamities; they can and do nourish an imaginative world and constitute a region for the spirit.6 Back again in 2010 to comment on the republication of The Australian Ugliness, Corrigan’s observations were not so benign. As a student he recalled, he had disliked the book for its ‘shrill tone’ and ‘life denying drumbeat of negativity’. Now he believed: “featurism” is not an issue (if it ever was) it is assumed. We accept that, today the found condition usually has some validity, some authority. What is there now is for the most part, there for a reason. No longer can we bully the city or the suburbs into our own desires. The present condition teaches us where the pressure points are. And they are usually not aesthetic. And he concluded his talk by noting that the appearance of Australian cities is ‘neither ugly nor beautiful, but it is simply a window onto our world. Through this window we observe the evidence of lives. This is Australia. It is ours’.7
1
Geoffrey Serle, Robin Boyd. A Life, 48.
2
Patrick McCaughey, Bright shapes and true names: a memoir (Melbourne: Text Publishing 2003): 55.
3
Maggie Edmond alerted me to this account in McCaughey’s book.
4
Robin Boyd, reference for Peter Corrigan, 22 November 1965, RMIT Design Archives, Edmond and Corrigan Archive.
5
Vincent Scully, ‘Introduction’, in Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art second edition 1977, reprinted 1985): 11.
6
Peter Corrigan, Foreword to Australia’s Home, typescript notes July 1985, RMIT Design Archives, Edmond and Corrigan Archive ©2019 Maggie Edmond.
7
Peter Corrigan, typescript notes 26 October 2010 for talk at 290 Walsh Street South Yarra, RMIT Design Archives, Edmond and Corrigan Archive ©2019 Maggie Edmond.
Opposite Robin Boyd, ‘To Whom It May Concern’, Reference for Peter Corrigan, 22 November 1965, RMIT Design Archives, Edmond and Corrigan Collection, © 2019 Estate of Robin Boyd, courtesy Robin Boyd Foundation. © 2019 Maggie Edmond
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rmit design archives journal Vol 9 Nº 2 (2019)
