Events

Acutely aware of a lack of discourse at a professional and public level, Melbourne-based architect and critic Robin Boyd made the construction and dissemination of Australian modernism a career-long preoccupation. His life, 1919 to 1971, overlaps with the emergence and formation of modern architecture in the Antipodes and, arguably, its dissolution. But he had a readership that was local and global. Through the international architectural press, he engaged in debates on decoration, shape architecture, New Brutalism, and the architecture of world expositions. He wrote the first book on Japanese architect Kenzo Tange and followed it with another on contemporary Japanese architecture. Boyd was also a talented architect, and the intent of his buildings and exhibition designs frequently intersected with his writing.

Within the context of his recently co-edited volume, Australia Modern: architecture, design and landscape architecture 1925-1975 (2019) and his current research for the forthcoming monograph, Robin Boyd: Australian architect, international critic, Philip Goad highlights the fraught quest of an architect who wrote but did not teach, whose prolific production reflected, on the one hand, an anxiety of the perceptive observer at the periphery, and on the other, consolidated his position in Australia, rare for an architect and never experienced since, as a public intellectual.