Whatever happened to the wasteland?(Society)

ONE END of the Melbourne suburb of Carlton is dominated by 1950s Housing Commission blocks of flats, stark, box-like structures twenty storeys high, with their design pattern infinitely repeated. At the other end of the suburb is the new Melbourne Museum. Like the recently completed Federation Square buildings, it's a complete contrast, using new combinations of materials and colours in its striving to be eccentric--every right angle is interrogated, every potential perspective disturbed, every expectation subverted. Why this drastic change from uniformity to diversity over fifty years?

In Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, Peter Watson documents humanity's overriding fear of moving towards a robot-like existence--we would all be cogs in some machine beyond our control. Government planners knew what was good for us--nobody asked for the old homes of Carlton to be pulled down and leviathan flats erected in their place. We feared inhabiting an urban industrial wasteland, and being coerced into dull, daily, mechanised routines. In Pete Seeger's song we all lived in identical, tacky little box houses, and went to and returned from work at the same time each day. John Brack's painting Collins Street 5 p.m. depicted the anonymous masses as zombies. Fellini's early films revealed depressing windy streetscapes in new housing estates on the outskirts of postwar Rome. Jacques Tati satirised mindless routines at work and home in his films. The primal image of the modern urban wasteland was the ghostly figures haunting the smoggy London streetscapes of Eliot's poem.

From their different perspectives Vance Packard and Herbert Marcuse claimed we were deprived of real choice--modern Western societies subtly controlled their populations through regimentation, advertising and conformist ideologies, so that we unconsciously obeyed the behests of our masters. This long-standing fear was given visual form in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. The anticipated nightmare world of anti-utopia was made infamous by the novels Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, and by their predecessors such as Zamyatin's novel We, and the ant-heap society of Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground.

The dominant imagery of modernism was bleak and anti-bourgeois--the planners and the state had taken over, leaving no room for individual manoeuvre or initiative. This fear was taken very seriously in the 1930s and the 1950s. Yet the remarkable thing is that this pessimistic view, much prophesied by artists and social commentators, hasn't come about.

It underestimated human resilience, and our ability to take sensible steps to avoid what was being so confidently predicted. In that sense it was a self-denying prophecy--the constant expression of the fear was the greatest impediment to its realisation. In Western societies not conformity but variety and relaxed living are now in fashion. People soon became disillusioned with the more hard-edged forms of modernism, and aghast at the overweening urge to control demonstrated by totalitarian regimes from the thirties to the fifties. We are today repelled when we see on television the last remnants of this mass conformity--lines of goose-stepping North Korean soldiers, or the endless serried ranks of Chinese gymnastic displays.

Recovery from the Second World War took some years, but by the early 1960s a reaction to all the gloom and doom set in. The much-maligned sixties made non-conformity a vogue. The change was most clearly seen in architecture, design and urban planning. Skyscrapers now have various external features to prevent them looking like stark, utilitarian boxes. Interior design emphasises lightness, comfort and eclecticism; it is unfussy and open to nature. Glass is now more evident than concrete. Postmodern architecture consciously exhibits a collage of features to overcome starkness and predictability. New materials (like plastics and aluminium) and new colour combinations improved living and work spaces, giving them a human dimension. By the 1980s people were sick of chemicalised foods, and a vogue for real bread, real beer and organic products grew up. The move back to nature and environmental values questioned living in a totally man-made world.

THE OLD-FASHIONED factory--dirty, dark and with totally ...