Robin Boyd, Expo ’70 and Defuturing: No Accounting for the Environment

Abstract

This paper offers a critical reading of Robin Boyd's narrative of the Australian nation created for Australia's pavilion at Expo'70. The critique offered is from an environmental perspective, using this example to lead into a broader reflection on Australian design history's 'modernity problem'. We argue that although the examination of Australia as a socio-cultural context for the practice of design continues to engage scholars, the will to profess the existence of progressive Australian design has precluded significant examination of design's regressive effects. The current environmental crisis is, as Arturo Escobar argues, 'a crisis of modernity, to the extent that modernity has failed to enable sustainable worlds.'[1] Design is implicated here for its contribution to environmental degradation, as is design history for accounts that validate designers' development of concepts, processes and products that impose the unsustainable on societies. The latter is pronounced in Australian design history. When modernity and its cultural manifestations are understood as European inventions, admitting limited scope for cultural exchange, claiming historical significance for Australian design inevitably involves the uncritical application of imported principles.[2] The halting attempts to write Australian design history are mostly bound up in proselytizing for the values and benefits of the modern and eulogising designers' efforts to force change in the face of conservative cultural establishments and indifferent publics. Even the most recent treatments continue to be engulfed by discussions of derivativeness, marginality and uniqueness.[3] Elsewhere, however, the culture of 'peripheral' localities is seen to disrupt fundamental suppositions about the modern, challenging the totality and uniformity generally ascribed to it. A key text here is Arjun Appadurai's Modernity at Large (1996).[4] Appadurai accepts modernity as virtually omnipresent, but sees its localised expression creating an assortment of corrupted, discontinuous and mixed forms. In this vein, Tony Fry argues the historical examination of the material, social and cultural effects of Australia's economic development "can and should provide useful and critical transformatory knowledges" in relation to the condition of modernity.[5] Following Fry, this paper explores the proposition that when the perceived unevenness of cultural transmission in modern design is set aside, engaging with Australia as a location for the expression of the modern, highlights unsustainable relations between ecological environments and design values, processes and production. Australia is a vast continent, but its capacity to provide for the style of human habitation pursued by Anglo-Europeans since colonisation is limited. This is especially the case for the burgeoning consumerist lifestyle supported by the activities of many Australian designers from the mid-twentieth century onwards. A critical historical consciousness challenges the purported benefits of design by revealing the eco...