Australian Architecture: The Misty Metropolis

Since the nineteenth century a physically distant Metropolis has been invoked to determine the validity of Australian architectural projects and their ideas, and the assumption is this Metropolis sends out resolved principles to a provincial culture. This view assumes that actual immigration to Australia equals cultural erasure. It assumes Australia’s architectural culture is infantile or child-like and must accept a continual and necessarily painful education- the pedagogical focus-to animate local architecture. It is frequently asserted that architects whose capacities do not seem adequately recognised in Australia would always fare better in this Metropolis. The Metropolis proves, on closer inspection, to be nebulous and varied in location. Its constituent countries and cultures, usually associated with “age” and cultural power, have warred with each other constantly, and have consistently driven architects from its perceived membership. Its principles are frequently changing and often thoroughly inconsistent, and half its ‘member’ cultures are out of cultural action at any given moment. This is papered over by a minatory orthodoxy in criticism and rhetoric, which works well in Australia because it serves local needs and worries at several levels, and because Australian architectural culture projects values and characteristics onto this metropolis from an assumed geographical distance.