Home in the imagination - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 2: Dreams of Land
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Mark Wakely
HAVING SPENT MY EARLY YEARS WITH MY PUBLICAN PARENTS in a pub – a place which, because it wasn't a house like my friends lived in, never seemed quite home – my teenage years were spent with my parents and their lions in their Federation house. I had successfully pleaded with my parents to buy the old house in what was euphemistically described as a "historic" inner-city suburb, then gathering favour with yuppies, in preference to the modern box on sticks they liked in a new suburb.
The years I spent in that house helped shape my first sense of what I believed was good residential taste. It was a relatively modest example of the Federation style but coming home to that graceful brick home each day after school, walking the length of the intricately tiled path, saluting the lions on their pedestals, stepping up on to the veranda with its ornate timber fretwork and opening the heavy panelled timber and glass door I felt quietly assured that my family had finally arrived. According to Maisy and Ian
Stapleton, a domestic duo who have written about Australian house styles, "the Federation villa stood for middle-class values and family comfort". It certainly made me feel smug. A few blocks away my friend's timber and tin house, surely no more than 20 years old, faced the street blankly, not a lion to save itself. So it happened that a haughty teenager, harbouring lofty social aspirations, adopted a rigid (and naive) set of architectural values that took years to shake off. My list went like this:
- Old is good. It doesn't have to be genuinely old providing it looks old. (Make note to show Mum half-timbered, mock-Tudor house near school.)
- Ornamentation makes you look rich providing you don't overdo it. (I love my lions, but one day I'll live in a house that has gargoyles.)
- Brick houses cost the most and so must beat timber houses. Timber houses beat fibrocement houses. (Dad says only shearers sleep in houses made ofgalvanised iron.)
- Tiled roofs beat tin roofs. Pitched roofs with gables beat flat roofs. (If for no other reason this is because they hold out the promise of one day being able to do a roof conversion in the style of some place called Cape Cod.)
- Big houses are the best houses. (This, of course, is a given.)
These judgements remain a popular shopping list for homemakers today. They still have a stranglehold on suburbia. They lead nowhere new; if new is where you want to go.
Visiting an exhibition village of display houses, a fashion-conscious couple, both of whom might be reluctant to step out wearing anything obviously "last season", will still be drawn towards the house that has exterior features with "old-world charm". For instance, in Australia the Federation-style house has enjoyed renewed popularity in recent years. If you can't buy the real thing, you fabricate history, build "in the style of". You can visit a "restoration centre" and stock up on Federation accessories. Just add a few leadlight windows and, along the top of the veranda, some timber fretwork (perhaps in the pattern of the rising sun). Oh, and two lions, and hey presto, you have a brand-new Federation house. The impact of this nostalgia on new housing has left architects frustrated. I've heard one refer to the spread of the neo-Federation style as a virus.
What drives this yearning to recapture the past, an unwillingness to let it go and move on? Why do so many of us prefer to dream of yesterday rather than tomorrow?
At the housing display village, a young woman and her fiancé, all financed-up, have taken a shine to a house that paradoxically markets itself as "Federation to look at but futuristic to live in". Different values are being applied to the inside and the outside of the house. While it's a selling point that all the mod cons are embraced in the house's interior space (certainly so in the kitchen and bathroom), many homemakers are reluctant to embrace the new when it comes to the exterior.
Old English, colonial revival, neoclassical, all repackage the past for present consumption. Ask what the appeal is and you'll often hear people speak of these styles having "character". But I've never fully understood what that means. Is architectural character, like wisdom and wrinkles, something achieved with age or with the look of age? In recreating a "traditional" house, even when the tradition is not one's own, is the homemaker throwing up a defensive wall against the encroaching complexity of a world that is changing too fast for comfort?
Melbourne scholar Kim Dovey has written about how our lives are framed within the rooms, buildings, streets and cities we inhabit, and he's studied the design of popular display homes in Australia and the west coast of America. He believes the way they're marketed, often with Eurocentric or heritage names, suggests "the ideal home is found in other places and other times". There is a kind of mix-and-match approach to marrying the interior and exterior. Many floor plans of these houses allow you to select an era for the house exterior. Given that "nostalgia" was originally a medical term for melancholic homesickness, Dovey observes: "If the popular housing market is a guide, nostalgia is a pervasive spirit of our age which reflects a kind of ‘dis-ease' with modern life."
LET NOSTALGIA RUN ITS COURSE AND YOU END UP with streets of yesteryear, and even whole towns of the stuff. The new Queensland beachside development Town of Seaside, 90 minutes north of Brisbane, is an Australian example of the American town-planning movement known as New Urbanism, a revival of traditional neighbourhood design. There's a Seaside in Florida as well and the striking similarity is no accident because Seaside Down Under is based on its American counterpart. Both wind back the clock. Their wooden houses recall the style of vernacular clapboard beach bungalows of the 1940s and 1950s. They come in assorted summer colours (pastel blues and pinks and lemons) with porches fronting the street and white picket fences. Although the houses differ in design there is a sameness about them because the architects adhere to strict guidelines that make for a homogeneous, pedestrian-orientated, planned community. It's the type of place where you're encouraged to walk to the grocery store, stopping to chat with neighbours on the way, and to take strolls after your evening meal without the slightest fear of being mugged. If you've seen Peter Weir's film The Truman Show then you've more or less been there, since the protagonist Truman Burbank's home town of Seahaven is modelled on Seaside, Florida.
What's being sold is a picture-perfect dream of a utopian township, wholly inhabited by civic-minded, law-abiding citizens. No matter that the architecture might be foreign to many Australians. If it's not part of your personal bank of remembered experiences, perhaps it has entered your imagination through movies or television. It's a family kind of place and even Grandma is welcome. What generations of Australians have referred to as a granny flat is located above the garage in some of the Seaside houses. In a collision of architecture and popular culture, the agent showing me around referred to the little studio as a Fonzie flat. Given the impact of American television on Australian life, I didn't need to be told that it was a reference to the American sitcom Happy Days, set in an idealised 1950s, where the cool drop-out Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli sets up his pad in an apartment above a garage belonging to the Cunningham family.
Town of Seaside in Queensland is a little piece of idyllic seaside America transported. For that matter, Seaside could be shipped to any seaside location in the world. It could become the global fast-food version of a neighbourhood, as instantly recognisable and comforting as stumbling on the golden arches of McDonald's in a strange country. Critics of these developments will say they're contrived, too cute and charming, that they divorce homemakers from reality and do not encourage residents to engage with the wider community. Exactly the appeal, perhaps.
When it comes to building their own homes, many people mistrust anything too unusual. They distinguish sharply between the buildings they work in and those they live in, the public and the private. Perhaps the city has left us shell-shocked. While many might be nonchalant about, or at least resigned to, working in glass towers or concrete cubes, they don't want to go home to concrete bunkers or goldfish bowls. Risk-taking architectural statements are about the city; in the suburbs they want surety. ♦