Robin Boyd: Late Works recovers a largely forgotten chapter of one of Australia's most consequential architectural careers — the urban, public, and exhibition projects Boyd pursued through the 1960s, far beyond the modernist houses that made his name.
About This Book
Robin Boyd is remembered as an architect of refined mid-century modernist houses and as the polemicist behind The Australian Ugliness (1960). But that reputation obscures a parallel and far more ambitious body of work. Through the final decade of his life, Boyd was designing at urban and civic scales — planning schemes, exhibition environments, multimedia projects — all in pursuit of a more coherent Australian built culture. Robin Boyd: Late Works draws on archival material held across several national institutions to document these projects: their ambitions, their reception, and the thwarted aspirations that defined Boyd's last years of practice. Essential reading for anyone serious about Australian architectural history and mid-century modernism.
Key Features
- 108 pages of archival documentation, project analysis, and exhibition and planning material drawn from national institutional collections
- Authors: Peter Raisbeck and Christine Phillips
- Published by Uro Publications, 2019
What You'll Discover
- How Boyd's public intellectual platform — built on the controversy of The Australian Ugliness — shaped and complicated his architectural ambitions through the 1960s
- The urban and civic-scale projects that run counter to Boyd's reputation as a domestic architect, including planning designs of considerable scope
- Boyd's engagement with exhibition design and multimedia work as instruments of cultural argument, not simply professional practice
- The personal and professional costs of Boyd's campaign to reshape Australia's understanding of itself as an urban nation — ambitions largely unrealised at the time of his death in 1971
About the Author
Dr Christine Marie Phillips is a Senior Lecturer in the Architecture Program at RMIT's School of Architecture and an alternate member of the Heritage Council of Victoria, with research focused on Australian architecture and cultural heritage. Dr Peter Raisbeck is an architect, architectural historian, and researcher at the Melbourne School of Design, where he teaches Design Activism, Contemporary Architectural Archives, and Architectural Practice; his published work examines architectural practice, emerging technologies, design activism, and the architectural histories of the 1960s, and includes Architecture as a Global System (2019).
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 108
- Dimensions: 222 x 303 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780648435594
- Publisher: Uro Publications
- Publication Date: 2019
Perfect For: Architects and architectural historians with an interest in Australian modernism, academics and students researching mid-century built culture, Boyd scholars, and anyone whose understanding of Boyd extends beyond the domestic canon.