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ULTRA
Positions and Polarities
Beyond Crisis
PROCEEDINGS OF THE SOCIETY OF ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIANS, AUSTRALIA
AND NEW ZEALAND (SAHANZ) VOLUME 38
Convened by The University of Adelaide, School of Architecture and Built Environment, Adelaide,
10-13 November, 2021.
Edited by David Kroll, James Curry and Madeline Nolan.
Published in Adelaide, South Australia, by SAHANZ, 2022.
ISBN: 978-0-646-85443-4
Copyright of this volume belongs to SAHANZ; authors retain the copyright of the content of their individual
papers. All efforts have been undertaken to ensure the authors have secured appropriate permissions to
reproduce the images illustrating individual contributions. Interested parties may contact the editors.
Image: Michaelmore, Roeger & Russell, Chester House, Belair 1966, State Library of South Australia BRG 346/28/6/2.
SAHANZ 2021 Conference Proceedings
TO CITE THIS PAPER | Marianna Charitonidou. “The Reconceptualization of the City’s
Ugliness Between the 1950s and 1970s in the British, Italian, and Australian Milieus.” In
Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 38,
Ultra: Positions and Polarities Beyond Crisis, edited by David Kroll, James Curry and
Madeline Nolan, 2-18. Adelaide: SAHANZ, 2022. Accepted for publication December 1,
2021. DOI: 10.55939/a3981pqn6x
2Ultra: Positions and Polarities Beyond Crisis
Abstract
The paper examines the reorientations of the appreciation of ugliness
within different national contexts in a comparative or relational frame,
juxtaposing the British, Italian, and Australian milieus, and to relate
them to the ways in which the transformation of the urban fabric and
the effect of suburbanization were perceived in the aforementioned
national contexts. Special attention is paid to the production and
dissemination of the ways the city’s uglification was conceptualized
between the 1950s and 1970s. Pivotal for the issues that this paper
addresses are Ian Nairn’s Outrage: On the Disfigurement of Town and
Countryside (1956) Robin Boyd’s Australian Ugliness (1960), and the
way the phenomenon of urban expansion is treated in these books in
comparison with other books from the four national contexts under
study, such as Ludovico Quaroni’s La torre di Babele (1967) and Reyner
Banham’s The New Brutalism: Ethic Or Aesthetic? (1966).
The Reconceptualization of the
City’s Ugliness Between the 1950s
and 1970s in the British, Italian, and
Australian Milieus
Marianna Charitonidou
National Technical University of Athens
Keywords
Subtopia
Featurism
Austerica
Arboraphobia
Outrage
ugliness
Australia
Italy
UK
Architectural Review
Robin Boyd
Ian Nairn
Tendenza
Neorealism
Ludovico Quaroni
Aldo Rossi
Ernesto Nathan Rogers
Gordon Cullen
Reyner Banham
New Brutalism
3SAHANZ 2021 Conference Proceedings
Introduction: Transnationalisation and the Reconceptualization of
the City’s Ugliness
Transnational historical research focuses on how connections function
as central forces for historical processes. The “transnationalization” of
historical discourse is based on the effort to understand the impact of
cross-border relations on the transformation of certain concepts and
ideas in each of the national contexts under study.1 The transnational
approach in social sciences aims to take into consideration the historical
dimension when analysing how international exchanges of ideas
and values evolve. Therefore, in order to better grasp the exchanges
between the three different cultural and socio-economic contexts under
study particular emphasis should be placed on a relational analysis of
the production and dissemination of the ways the city’s uglification was
conceptualized between the 1950s and 1970s. The paper departs from
the conviction that an analysis of Boyd’s conception of ugliness is useful
for better understand the debates on ugliness within the Italian and the
British contexts.
Australian Ugliness and Featurism
The questions addressed in this paper are relevant to the architectural
history of Australia or New Zealand, in the sense that one of its main
case studies will be the case of Gold Coast Architecture. As Andrew
Leach notes, in “The Gold Coast Moment”, Boyd tried to interpret the
“Tiki aesthetic” employing the term ‘Austerica’ in order to describe
the neon signs and a “rainbow of plastic paint’ mere extensions of a
cultural surface that captured, too deep suntans and what one writer
called a ‘climate dictated exposure”.2 Informative for understanding
Boyd’s conception of ugliness are the photographs of Australian
photographer Nigel Buesst that appeared in the 1968 and 1971 editions
of The Australian Ugliness (fig. 1), as well as the photographs taken by
Robin Boyd during the late fifties when he spent some time as visiting
professor at MIT and travelled around the US, and the illustrations he
included in The Australian Ugliness (fig. 2). Macarthur claims that Boyd
agreed with the distinction that Kant drew between aesthetic judgment
and pleasure.3
1. Marianna Charitonidou, “Réinventer la posture
historique: les débats théoriques à propos de
la comparaison et des transferts”, Espaces
et Sociétés, 167 (2016): 137-152. https://doi.
org/10.3917/esp.167.0137.
2. Andrew Leach, “The Gold Coast Moment”,
Architectural Histories, 3(1) (2015). http://doi.
org/10.5334/ah.cd; Leach, “Letter from the Gold
Coast”, AA Files, 70 (2015): 24-27.
3. John Macarthur, “Robin Boyd’s The Australian
Ugliness, ugliness, and liberal education”, RMIT
Design Archives journal, 9(2) (2019): 50-57.
4Ultra: Positions and Polarities Beyond Crisis
Figure 1: Front cover and back cover of Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness (Melbourne:
F.W. Cheshire, 1960).
Charitonidou | The Reconceptualization of the City’s Ugliness
5SAHANZ 2021 Conference Proceedings
Figure 2. Robin Boyd, The Australian Ugliness, (Melbourne: F.W. Cheshire, 1960), 174, Roy
Simpson Collection, RMIT Design Archives. Illustration by Robin Boyd, ©2019 Estate of
Robin Boyd, courtesy Robin Boyd Foundation
Of particular interest for this paper is an ensemble of neologisms
that Boyd employed in The Australian Ugliness, such as Featurism,
Austerica, and Arboraphobia. Featurism referred to “the subordination
of the essential whole and the accentuation of selected separate
features”.4 According to John Macarthur, “Featurism is an internationally
observable aesthetical and ethical failing, but one that Boyd claims to
reach an apogee in the Australia of the 1950s”.5 Macarthur, in “Robin
Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness, ugliness, and liberal education”, analyses
Boyd’s critique of popular taste, and compares Boyd’s understanding of
ugliness with that developed in the pages of the Architectural Review.6
Naomi Stead has described The Australian Ugliness as “a kind of
taxonomy of local ugliness”, and as “an account of the social and cultural
elements that this ugliness was intended to hide”.7
4. Robin Boyd, “The Australian Ugliness”, in Chris
Feik, Robert Manne, eds., he Words That Made
Australia: How a nation came to know itself
(Collingwood: Black Inc. Agenda, 2013); Boyd.
Australian Ugliness (Melbourne: Penguin Books,
1963), 23.
5. Macarthur, “Robin Boyd’s The Australian
Ugliness, ugliness, and liberal education”, 51.
6. Ibid.
7. Naomi Stead, “(Not So) Anti-Architecture”,
Places Journal (2017). Accessed 08 Aug 2021.
https://doi.org/10.22269/171017.
6Ultra: Positions and Polarities Beyond Crisis
During the post-war period, a reorientation from the cross-cultural
exchanges between Australia and the UK as far as architectural
discourse is concerned towards the cross-fertilization between Australia
and the United States of America took place. This shift should be taken
into account if we try to describe the specificities of the Australian
ugliness. Boyd was not only influenced by the ideas of “Townscape”
movement and Nairn and Cullen’s “subtopia” and “outrage” but also
from the so-called New Brutalism to which Reyner Banham devoted
his seminal article “The New Brutalism” published in the Architectural
Review in 1955. Boyd was a casual contributor to the Architectural
Review. Banham, in “The New Brutalism”, paid special attention to the
exhibition “Parallel of Life and Art”, held at the Institute for Contemporary
Art (ICA) in London in 1953 and curated by Alison and Peter Smithson,
Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi. Banham described New Brutalist
aesthetics “as being anti-art, or at any rate anti¬-beauty in the classical
aesthetic sense of the word.”8 The tension between New Brutalist anti-
¬art and anti¬-beauty aesthetics and Tendenza’s anti-aesthetic and
anti-elitist stance is insightful for recognizing what was at stake in post-
war debates around the notion of ugliness in relation to the question of
morality in architecture.
In “The Sad End of New Brutalism”, Boyd criticised Banham’s
understanding of New Brutalism. He maintained that his analysis of New
Brutalism, due to his effort to legitimise Alison and Peter Smithson’s
work, neglected the importance of several buildings and architects
that could have been described as New Brutalists. Characteristically,
he remarked: “the only straightforward and consistent rule followed
by Dr. Banham was that New Brutalism was anything the Smithsons
permitted”.9 Despite his critique towards Banham’s conception of
New Brutalism, he was supportive of the ideals of New Brutalism, and
believed that it was among the very few post-war movements that
were revolutionary. This becomes evident in his following words: “The
greatest hope of every evangelical movement like New Brutalism is
that it will lead the world away from seductive aesthetic pleasures to
the pure intelligence of building”.10 The aforementioned article, which
was published in the Architectural Review in 1967, is like a critique
of Banham’s book entitled The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic?
published a year earlier.11
Boyd also remarked that “the New Brutalism was certainly the most
articulate of all the attempts to re-establish the original integrity and
strength of modern architecture that occurred after the soft decade
following the war”.12 Boyd believed that New Brutalism was unoriginal
in the sense that its ideals were not new. He claimed that “unoriginality
is of course the weakness of the argument for New Brutalism as an
independent movement”.13 Boyd remarked regarding the value of
appreciating ugliness or the unbeautiful: “A capacity to appreciate the
unbeautiful is a quality which no Featurist would envy and few would be
interested in cultivating; yet this is the key to depth in appreciation of
architecture...”14
Subtopia and Ugliness within the British Context
An important movement for grasping the conception of ugliness within
8. Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism”, The
Architectural Review, 118(708) (1955): 359.
9. Boyd, “The Sad end of the New Brutalism”,
Architectural Review, 142(45) (1967), 11.
10. Ibid.
11. Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethic or
Aesthetic? (New York: Reinhold Publishing
Corporation, 1966).
12. Boyd, “The Sad end of the New Brutalism”.
13. Ibid.
14. Boyd, The Australian Ugliness, 224.
Charitonidou | The Reconceptualization of the City’s Ugliness
7SAHANZ 2021 Conference Proceedings
the British context during the 1950s is the “Townscape” movement. The
activities of Hubert de Cronin Hastings as editor of the Architectural
Review are of great significance for better understanding the context
within which the ideas of “Townscape” movement emerged. An
ensemble of articles aiming to explain the guiding principles of this
movement appeared in the pages of the Architectural Review starting
in October 1948.15 Gordon Cullen was along with Ian Nairn one of
the main authors of the “Townscape” articles until 1959, when he
stopped collaborating with the Architectural Review.16 Ian Nairn started
collaborating with the Architectural Review later than Gordon Cullen, that
is to say in 1954, and departed in 1969. Macarthur relates Hastings’s
approach in the Architectural Review towards ugliness to liberalism.
According to Macarthur, Hastings “would accept modernist featurism
alongside meretricious historicism and vernacular mis-appropriations of
style.”17
Mathew Aitchison has claimed that “Townscape’s proponents saw
ugliness, sprawl and blight as symptomatic of the general collapse of
the design professions’ ability to engage with real-world problems.”18
The “Townscape” movement should be understood in relation to the
critiques towards the newly built New Towns and the suburbanization
effect that accompanied their construction. Another aspect that is of
great significance for comprehending the ideology of the “Townscape”
movement is the impact that the generalised use of the car on the
urban and suburban landscapes. Despite the fact that the ideas that are
at the basis of the “Townscape” movement were already present in an
ensemble of articles published in the Architectural Review since 1948,
an important turning point was the issue of December 1949, which
included not only Hastings’s article entitled “Townscape: A Plea for an
English Visual Philosophy”, which was published under the pseudonym
Ivor de Wolfe,19 but also Gordon Cullen’s homonymous article as well.20
An article entitled “Civilia. The End of Sub Urban Man”, authored by
Hastings in 1971 is also of great importance for understanding his
critique of suburbanization.21 Another text that was published during the
seventies in the Architectural Review and is useful for revisiting the ideas
around “outrage” and “subtopia” is Ian Nairn’s “Outrage Twenty Years
After.”22
Another aspect that should also be taken into account when we try
to understand the specificities of the conception of ugliness within
the British context is the Anti-Ugly Action (AUA), which was a group
formed by students at the Royal College of Arts (RCA) in order to protest
against the buildings that they considered ugly (fig. 4). As Gavin Stamp
remarks in his book entitled Anti-Ugly: Excursions in English Architecture
and Design, “[i]n December 1958, […] Anti-Ugly Action demonstrated
outside two new buildings they found offensive: Caltex House in the
Old Brompton Road and Agriculture House (the monumental Neo-
Georgian headquarters of the Farmers’ Union, since demolished) in
Knightsbridge.”23According to Timothy Hyde, the critique of ugliness of
the Anti-Ugly Action “was an unabashedly aesthetic critique rather than
a moral or material one.”24 However, Ken Baynes, who was the Chairman
of Anti-Ugly Action, have related the approach of the Anti-Ugly Action
to the ideas of the Independent Group25 of which Alison and Peter
Smithson were members along with Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham,
Colin St John Wilson, Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, John McHale
15. Gordon Cullen, “Hazards”, Architectural
Review, 103 (1948): 99-105; Cullen, “Lees and
wheels”, Architectural Review, 104 (1948): 77-
80; Erdem Erten, “Thomas Sharp’s collaboration
with H. de C. Hastings: the formulation of
townscape as urban design pedagogy”,
Planning Perspectives, 24 (2009): 29-49.
16. Mira Engler, Cut and Paste Urban
Landscape: The Work of Gordon Cullen
(London; New York: Routledge, 2016).
17. Macarthur, “Robin Boyd’s The Australian
Ugliness, ugliness, and liberal education”, 56.
18. Mathew Aitchison, “Ugliness and Outrage:
The Australian Townscape”, in Alexandra Brown,
Andrew Leach, eds., Proceedings of the Society
of Architectural Historians, Australia and New
Zealand: 30, Open (Gold Coast, Qld: SAHANZ,
2013), 415.
19. Ivor de Wolfe, “Townscape: A Plea for an
English Visual Philosophy”, Architectural Review,
106 (1949): 354-362; Mathew Aitchison,
“Who’s Afraid of Ivor De Wolfe”, AA Files, 62
(2011): 34-39; Aitchison, “Townscape: scope,
scale and extent”, The Journal of Architecture,
17(5) (2012): 621-642; Macarthur, Aitchison,
“Oxford Versus the Bath Road: Empiricism
and Romanticism in the Architectural
Review’s Picturesque Revival”, The Journal of
Architecture, 17(1) (2012): 51–68
20. Cullen, “Townscape Casebook”,
Architectural Review, 106 (1949): 363-374.
21. de Wolfe [Hastings], “Civilia. The End of Sub
Urban Man”, Architectural Review, 149 (892)
(1971): 326–408.
22. Ian Nairn, “Outrage Twenty Years After”,
Architectural Review, 158 (1975): 328-337.
23. Gavin Stamp, Anti-Ugly: Excursions in
English Architecture and Design (London:
Quarto Publishing Group, 2013), 8.
24. Timothy Hyde, Ugliness and Judgment:
On Architecture in the Public Eye (Princeton;
Oxford: Princeton Architectural Press, 2019), 64.
25. Stamp, “Anti-Ugly Action: An Episode in
the History of British Modernism”, AA Files, 70
(2015), 80.
8Ultra: Positions and Polarities Beyond Crisis
and Eduardo Paolozzi. As Hyde reminds us, in Ugliness and Judgment:
On Architecture in the Public Eye, “Ian Nairn […] addressed the embers
of Anti-Ugly Action in a lecture just after the group was founded.”26
During the fifties, within different contexts other terms also emerged to
describe the new features of urban and suburban landscapes related
to the phenomenon of suburbanization and the generalised use of the
car. Such a term within the British context was “subtopia” used by Ian
Nairn, in Outrage: On the Disfigurement of Town and Countryside, which
collected several articles written for the Architectural Review during
the early fifties and was published in 1956.27 Nairn defined “subtopia”
as “the annihilation of the site, the steamrollering of all individuality of
place to one uniform and mediocre pattern”, as well as “the legalization
of the urge to dump on a national scale.”28 As Mathew Aitchison remarks,
in “The Boyd Ultimatum”, “[t]oday, many of the developments Nairn
observed are commonplace but in the mid 1950s they were distinct
enough to be grouped under one Nairn term, ‘subtopia’.29
Of great significance for the dissemination of Nairn’s ideas were the
illustrations by Gordon Cullen (fig. 3), which have many similarities
with Boyd’s own illustrations in The Australian Ugliness. Particularly
informative regarding Nairn’s understanding of “subtopia” and “outrage”
are the episodes of “Nairn Across Britain”, which were released by BBC
the same year as Reyner Banham’s film “Reyner Banham Loves Los
Angeles”, that is to say in 1972.
Figure 3: Gordon Cullen’s illustrations enlivened the ‘Outrage’ special issue of June 1955.
26. Stamp, “Anti-Ugly Action: An Episode in
the History of British Modernism”, AA Files, 70
(2015), 65.
27. Nairn, Outrage: On the Disfigurement
of Town and Countryside, special issue of
the 1955 Architectural Review (London: The
Architectural Press, 1956); it brought together
articles published in the Architectural Review,
117 (702) (1955): 364-460.
28. Nairn cited in Steve Parnell, “Ian Nairn: the
pioneer of Outrage”, The Architectural Review,
27 May 2014. Accessible online: https://www.
architectural-review.com/essays/outrage/ian-
nairn-the-pioneer-of-outrage
29. Aitchison, “The Boyd Ultimatum”, AA Files,
66 (2013), 61.
Charitonidou | The Reconceptualization of the City’s Ugliness
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Figure 4: AUA manifesto, March 1959
The Conception of Architecture and City’s Ugliness within the Post-
war Italian Context
Pivotal for understanding the conception of ugliness within the Italian
context are the debates around Tendenza and Neorealist architecture.
Taking as main actors Ernesto Nathan Rogers and Aldo Rossi, for the
former, and Ludovico Quaroni, for the latter, my aim here is to clarify their
respective positions regarding the relation of post-war (sub)urbanization
to city’s uglification. Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Quaroni and Rossi shaped
10Ultra: Positions and Polarities Beyond Crisis
discourses based on the idea that architects are responsible for society.
Both Tendenza and Neorealist architecture intended to reformulate
the ways one judges architecture through new models corresponding
to post-war urban expansion, establishing criteria that aim to take into
consideration the struggle for social reconstruction. Within this context,
continuity was seen as antidote to modernism’s crisis.
The term “tendenza” was originally employed by Ernesto Nathan Rogers
in “Elogio della tendenza”, in 1946.30 Rogers also referred to “tendenza”,
in “Ortodossia dell’eterodossia” (1957) and in Esperienza dell’architettura
(1958). He drew a distinction between the concepts of “tendenza”,
style and coherence, defining “tendenza” as “an act of modesty that
integrates the activity of each individual in the culture of their own
epoch, inviting them to consider their selves before anything else as
parts of society”.31 Rogers’s temporally-driven aesthetic model, which
lied on the concept of continuity and the idea of “sensing history”, is the
result of his encounter with Enzo Paci’s phenomenological approach.
Rogers believed that a balance between utility and beauty should be
found, while Paci considered that architects should not conceive society
as “theorized or ideologized or structured beforehand according to
the perspectives of a given sociology”. Instead, they should “make
alive and real social relationship of […] [their] country, with its needs
and miseries, with its illusions and hard sense of reality, of the limits
and conditions of life.”32 Paci was convinced that, to achieve such an
engaged view, it is indispensable to “see the things the way they are”. In
his Diario Fenomenologico, he defined as phenomenon “what appears,
what we see as we see it and we can faithfully describe, without judging
it before we can see it precisely as it is.”33 Rogers’ view in “The Image:
The Architect’s Inalienable Vision”34 drew on Paci’s phenomenological
approach.
Neorealist attitude should be understood within the context of the
process of city creation in a new Italy after the WWII damages. As
Maristella Casciato underlines, “[i]t was in the south that the new national
architectural language of Neorealism found its concrete expression.”35
The contrast between south and north Italy is important for grasping
the differences between Neorealist and Tendenza architecture. The
context par excellence of Neorealist architecture is Rome, while the
milieu par excellence of Tendenza is Milan. For instance, “[m]ilanese
architectural culture had maintained a sense of the continuity of the
modern movement and the rationalist European experience.”36 This can
explain Rogers’ choice to give Casabella, which he directed since 1953,
the subtitle “continuità”.
BBPR’s Torre Velasca is a thought-provoking case study for reflecting
on Tendenza’s aesthetic theory (fig. 5, fig. 6). Given that it provoked
several reactions and has been often characterized as ugly, its
examination could illuminate Tendenza’s stance towards ugliness. A
common preoccupation of Tendenza and Team 10 was the concern
for architecture’s moral dimension. Despite the affinities between
Team 10 and Ernesto Nathan Rogers’ aesthetic views, which have
been highlighted by Luca Molinari,37 Peter Smithson and Jaap Bakema
criticized sharply BBPR’s Torre Velasca, when it was presented at
the 1959 CIAM conference in Otterlo. Smithson argued that it was
aesthetically and ethically wrong and “a bad model to give because
30. Ernesto Nathan Rogers, “Elogio della
tendenza”, Domus, 216 (1946), 47.
31. Rogers, “Ortodossia dell’eterodossia”,
Casabella Continuità, 216 (1957), 4; Rogers,
Esperienza dell’architettura (Turin: Einaudi,
1958), 90.
32. Enzo Paci, “L’architettura e il mondo della
vita”, Casabella Continuità, 217 (1957): 53-55.
33. Paci, Diario fenomenologico [1931] (Milano:
Il Saggiatore, 1961).
34. Rogers, “The Image: The Architect’s
Inalienable Vision”, in György Kepes, ed.Sign,
Image, Symbol, (New York: George Braziller,
1966), 242–51.
35. Casciato, “Neorealism in Italian Architecture”,
in Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Réjean Legault,
eds., Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation
in Postwar Architectural Culture (Cambridge,
Mass: The MIT Press; Montreal: CCA, 2001), 31.
36. Ibid., 29.
37. Luca Molinari, “Constructing New
Continuities in a Post-War World: the
relationship between Jaap Bakema and
Ernesto Nathan Rogers”, in Carlo Togliani, ed.,
Un palazzo in forma di parole. Scritti in onore di
Paolo Carpeggiani (Milan: Franco Angeli 2016),
487-495.
Charitonidou | The Reconceptualization of the City’s Ugliness
11 SAHANZ 2021 Conference Proceedings
there are things that can be so easily distorted and become not
only ethically wrong but aesthetically wrong.”38 He described it as a
model with dangerous consequences and blamed Rogers for not
being aware of his position in the society. Before this controversy,
Torre Velasca had received an equally negative critique in France, in
L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, where it was regarded as an effect of the
Italian appreciation for “ugliness, baroque inflammation, exaggeration,
false originality, the strange, and the bizarre.”39 Casabella responded to
the ironic title “Casabella . . . casus belli?” of L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui,
which attacked BBPR’s aesthetics, publishing a text with the equally
caustic title “Si vis pacem demain . . . para bellum . . . aujourd’hui.”40
Figure 5: BBPR’s Torre Velasca featured on the cover of the issue 232 of Casabella
Continuità, published in October 1959
38. Peter Smithson cited in Oscar Newman,
New Frontiers in Architecture: CIAM ‘59 in
Otterlo (New York: Universe Books, 1961),
94-97.
39. “Casabella . . . casus belli ?”, L’Architecture
d’aujourd’hui, 77 (1958), 55.
40. “Si vis pacem demain . . . para bellum . . .
aujourd’hui”, Casabella Continuità, 220 (1958),
53.
12Ultra: Positions and Polarities Beyond Crisis
The double stance of embodying cultural values without literally imitating
past forms is emblematic of BBPR’s posture. Rogers underlined that
the significance of Torre Velasca’s design strategy lied “in its intent
to epitomize, culturally speaking – while avoiding repetition of the
expressive language used in any of its buildings – the atmosphere of the
city of Milan, its ineffable yet perceptible character.”41 This endeavour
to transcribe through architectural composition a given culture’s
characteristics without imitating an existing visual language brings to
mind Neorealist approach, which also aimed to invent an architectural
language, based on cultural points of reference. A difference between
Tendenza and Neorealist architecture is that the latter, in contrast with
the former, developed an architectural language based on a set of
mimetic devices. Neorealism’s paradox lies in its double vocation to
imitate and re-invent cultural identity’s points of reference.
Tendenza and Neorealist architecture shared their interest in the
intensification of architects’ responsibility, the reestablishment of the
relationship between reality and utopia and the critique of modernist
homogenised and impersonal functionalism. Rogers invited architects
to understand their “responsibilities towards tradition”,42 shaping an
aesthetic view based on the understanding of tradition as “life-world”.
The notion of responsibility was also central for Quaroni. He believed
that cities had become “too anonymous, too ugly, too inefficient”,
because architects did not try to change this situation, and left “political
friends […] [and] city planning cousins”43 to decide about their future.
For him, city’s ugliness was a result of losing the sense of architects’
responsibility for city’s transformation.
Both Quaroni and Rogers aimed to reinvent the relationship between
utopia and reality. Quaroni’s approach is characterized by the belief in
the potential of imaginary reality to revitalize urban design. In La torre di
Babele, he expressed his belief “in the creative value of utopia – of an
imaginary reality […] which […] holds the seeds for revitalizing a process
Figure 6: Torre Velasca (1950-1958) by Ludovico Belgiojoso, Enrico Peressutti and
Ernesto Nathan Rogers (BBPR) in Milano
41. Rogers, Esperienza dell’architettura [1958],
ed. Luca Molinari (Milan: Skira, 1997).
42. Rogers, “Le responsabilità verso la
tradizione”, Casabella Continuità, 202 (1954):
1-3.
43.Ludovico Quaroni, “Il ratto della città”, Spazio
e Società, 8 (1979), 28.
Charitonidou | The Reconceptualization of the City’s Ugliness
13 SAHANZ 2021 Conference Proceedings
like urban planning that has lost its capacity for energetic response.”44
Quaroni’s conception of utopia’s creative force as imaginary reality,
capable of revitalizing urban planning processes, brings to mind Rogers’
understanding of “utopia of reality” as “teleological charge that projects
the present into the possible future”. Rogers underscored utopia’s
capacity “to transform reality in its deepest essence, in the moral
and political, as well as in the didactic and pedagogical fields.”45 The
existential aspects of his perception of architecture’s “experience” draw
on Paci’s phenomenological perspective, who associated the problem
of “The Heart of the City”, the 1951 CIAM’s topic, to the necessity of a
“synthesis of permanence and emergence.”46
In La torre di Babele, Quaroni argued that “the modern city is really
ugly”, claiming that the lesson of historic cities, which was neglected
in modern cities, is the well-integrated synthesis of functional,
technological and aesthetic aspects. For him, the quality of architectural
and urban artefacts depends on the extent to which the synthesis
of these aspects is based on “an immediate, direct, good-natured
relationship”. Quaroni focused on the tension between historic and
modern city, assimilating historic city to beautiful city and modern
city to ugly city. He associated historic city’s beauty with its “clear
design […] [and] structure.” For him, modern city was ugly because it
was chaotic. La torre di Babele opens with the following phrases: “The
architect tends by its nature, and by professional deformation, to the
total control of the city, as if it were a single building. But the mythical
Tower of Babel, you know, never came to fruition.”47 Quaroni adopted
Henry Miller’s definition of confusion as “an order that you do not
understand”48 to explain the non-possibility of modern city’s control
with the non-capacity of architects to understand the order of post-war
cities and their transformation and expansion. He related the inability to
comprehend the order of contemporary city’s urban fabric to his belief
that modern city is ugly. As Rossi mentions, in his introduction to La
torre di Babele, “Quaroni’s theory […] revolves around the significance of
the city and of architecture, and the fundamental question: what does
it mean for us architects if the modern city is ugly?” Rossi claimed that
Quaroni failed to recognise modern city’s potential beauty, because he
blamed modern architecture itself instead of speculation and ignorance.
Rossi, instead, considered that modern city’s ugliness is the result of “an
absurd mechanism which operates on several different levels.”49
Quaroni’s aesthetic approach could be explained drawing a distinction
between architects’ disinterested view vis-à-vis beautiful architectural
and urban artefacts and architects’ engaged view vis-à-vis ugly
architectural and urban artefacts. The spectator of beautiful objects
is disinterested, in contrast with that of ugly objects. When a viewer is
confronted with ugly objects a desire to intervene emerges. The subject
cannot be disinterested any more. Such an interpretation can help us
explain post-war Italian architects’ engagement vis-à-vis the re-invention
of conceptual tools seeking to reshape the ugly aspects of urban and
suburban formations. The belief that the problem of urban expansion
should be part of architects’ task became a common demand of
different post-war Italian approaches. The spectator became engaged
vis-à-vis post-war Italian cities’ reality.
In contrast with Karl Rosenkranz’s thesis that ugliness is the active
44. Quaroni, La Torre di Babele (Padova: Marsilio
Editore, 1967).
45. Rogers, “Utopia della realtà”, Casabella-
Continuità, 259 (1962), 1; Rogers, Utopia della
realtà (Bari: Laterza, 1965).
46. Rogers, Esperienza dell’architettura (Turin:
Einaudi, 1958); Paci, Esistenza ed immagine
(Milano: Tarantola, 1947); EPaci, “Il cuore della
città”, Casabella Continuità, 202 (1954), vii.
47. Quaroni, La Torre di Babele.
48. Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn [1939]
(London: Penguin, 2015), 176.
49. Rossi, “Introduzione”, in Quaroni, La Torre di
Babele.
14Ultra: Positions and Polarities Beyond Crisis
negation of beauty,50 Mark Cousins maintains that the ugly cannot be
thought of as the opposite of the beautiful and defines ugly “as a matter
of place” and the ugly object as “an object which is experienced both
as being there and as something that should not be there.”51 This sense
of not belonging to one’s place could be related to Gilles Deleuze’s
interpretation of Neorealism as a profound stage of confusion that had
led to the loss of feeling of belief in this world. Deleuze’s understanding
of confusion could be compared to Quaroni’s conception of post-war
Italian city’s confusion. Even if Deleuze is affirmative, while Quaroni
is negative towards confusion, both share the conviction that such a
confusion makes necessary the invention of new modes of relating
creative processes with reality. Tafuri described Quaroni’s compositional
method as “poetic of non-fabulation.”52 This distinction between poetic
of fabulation and poetic of non-fabulation could help us grasp the
perceptual mechanisms of Quaroni’s design process.
Neorealist approach constitutes an endeavour to conceive ugliness
as a path to the real putting forward the reality of post-war Italian
city. Neorealism’s intention to recuperate the immediacy of reality
instrumentalized and aestheticized urban ugliness. Such a point of
view vis-à-vis the connection between ugliness and reality is apparent
in post-war Italian Neorealist Cinema, as in Roberto Rossellini’s Roma
città aperta (1945) and Vittorio de Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (1948).
André Bazin, a major theorist of Neorealism in cinema, highlighted the
opposition between “aesthetic refinement and a certain crudeness,
a certain instant effectiveness of a realism which is satisfied just to
present reality.”53 He related this conflict between aesthetic refinement
and crudeness to the enlightening power of reality. This crudeness to
which he refers could be associated with ugliness. The attachment
of neorealism to the aesthetic of ugliness has been also highlighted
by Bruno Reichlin, who shed light on the relation of neorealism to “the
propensity for an aesthetic of the ugly.”54
The endeavour of transforming ugly features of the urban landscape into
architectural instruments of social and moral engagement was at the
heart of Neorealist approach. In the context of post-war Italy, architects
often aimed to transform ugly elements into devices of reflection about
how one’s aesthetic criteria interferes with the meaning they give to
reality. Tiburtino district, designed by Ludovico Quaroni and Mario Ridolfi,
is often interpreted as a Neorealist expression in architecture. In this
case, Quaroni and Ridolfi conceived the construction of social housing
in a suburban neighbourhood of post-war Rome as a way to contribute
to citizens’ moral engagement towards life. This transformation of the
norms according to which a city is judged as beautiful or ugly was
paralleled with a shift from aesthetic criteria to politic, ethic, moral, social
and civic criteria. The moral implications of aesthetic evaluation are
apparent in Aristotle’s Poetics, where “aischros” (ugly) has moral as well
as aesthetic implications.55 Characteristic of this moral engagement
linked to Tiburtino district’s spirit is Tafuri’s description of it as a
“manifesto of a state of mind, of an impelling need to communicate, to
build a reality together with society and not simply for society.”56
In terms of formal expression, neorealist architecture is characterized
by a shift from a pre-established concept of compositional unity to
one obtained by means of superposition and expressed through
50. Karl Rosenkranz, Aesthetics of Ugliness:
A Critical Edition [1853], trans. Andrei Pop
and Mechtild Widrich (London; New York:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).
51. Mark Cousins, “The Ugly”, AA Files, 28
(1994): 61-64.
52. Manfredo Tafuri, “Les ‘muses inquiétantes’
ou le destin d’une génération de ‘Maîtres’”,
L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, 181 (1975), 17.
53. André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume II,
ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1971), 25.
54. Bruno Reichlin, “Figures of Neorealism
in Italian Architecture (part 1)”, Grey Room, 5
(2001), 83.
55. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. John Baxter and
Patrick Atherton, trans. George Whalley
(Montreal; Kingston; London; Buffalo: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1997), 62.
56. Tafuri, Ludovico Quaroni e lo sviluppo
dell’architettura moderna in Italia (Milan:
Comunità, 1964), 94.
Charitonidou | The Reconceptualization of the City’s Ugliness
15 SAHANZ 2021 Conference Proceedings
the aggregation of successive elements and the obsessive
fragmentation of walls and fences, as in the case of Tiburtino district’s
(fig. 7). Furthermore, it is characterized by the elaboration of formal
discontinuities and the rediscovery of streets’ value. It is also based
on the surgical examination of the singularities of the visible world and
everyday life. Quaroni wrote, in 1954, regarding Rome’s character: “The
baroque spirit is the spirit of Rome. It is a spontaneous generation,
a creature of the site: autochthonous. It uses, even in the order of
architecture, the vital disorder of the life of Rome.”57 This remark is
penetrating for grasping Tiburtino district’s intention to capture Rome’s
vitality (fig. 8). Quaroni’s appraisal of Rome’s vital disorder is indicatory
of Neorealism’s transformation of city’s ugly features into architectural
instruments of social and moral engagement. The aesthetic project of
Neorealist architecture lies in the double vocation to render architectural
composition mundane and renounce the artificiality of the new. Quaroni
wrote in 1957 regarding Tiburtino district’s vitality and aestheticization
of ugliness: “There was life, in any case, in the neighborhood. Beautiful
or ugly, it lived as best it could.”58 The vitality is more important than
anything else, for him, and, for this reason, he replaced the antagonism
beautiful/ugly by that of vital/non-vital.
Figure 7: Tiburtino District, general plan (1949)
57. Quaroni cited in Tafuri, Ludovico Quaroni e lo
sviluppo dell’architettura moderna in Italia, 190.
58. Quaroni, “Il paese dei barocchi”, Casabella
continuita, 215 (1957), 24.
16Ultra: Positions and Polarities Beyond Crisis
Figure 8: Via Luigi Cesaza, Tiburtino District, by Ludovico Quaroni and Mario Ridolfi
According to Kant, aesthetic judgments are judgments made about
beauty. Kant focuses on the subject’s experience of the feeling of
pleasure or displeasure and conceives beauty, not as a property of
objects, but as related to the subject’s feeling of pleasure. He notes:
“Fine art shows its superiority precisely in this, that it describes
things beautifully that in nature we would dislike or find ugly.”59 Kant’s
conception of beauty as related to the subject’s feeling of pleasure
brings to mind Aldo Rossi’s remark that architecture’s “capacity to
be transmitted and to give pleasure” is part of technics, that is to say
architecture’s “means and principles.”60 Zevi’s distinction between
beautiful and ugly architecture is based on the idea that “[b]eautiful
architecture [is] […] architecture in which the interior space attracts us,
elevates us and dominates us spiritually […] [while] ugly architecture
would be that in which the interior space disgusts and repels us.”61
Rossi noted, in 1977, in the introduction of the Portuguese edition of
Architettura della città: “Topography, typology, and history come to be
measures of the mutations of reality, together defining a system of
architecture wherein gratuitous invention is impossible. Thus, they are
opposed theoretically to the disorder of contemporary architecture.”62
Rossi understood typology as an instrument for measuring reality and
resisting to contemporary architecture’s disorder. His conception of
typology as antidote to disorder and means to evaluate the real explain
why Rossi believed that the “choice of typology at the beginning of the
design process” was the means to avoid ugliness. He maintained that a
“lot of architecture is ugly because it cannot be traced to a clear choice;
without one, it is left deprived of meaning.”63 For Rossi, “the individuality
of the urban artifact was the moment of decision in which typological
principles were applied to the real city.”64 Rossi asserted in 1974: “If
the modern city is ugly, as Quaroni says, it means that the models of
reference have gradually worn out […] rationalism that arose from the
Haussmannian solutions has been lost; the capitalist modern city has,
in its instability, the inability to give itself a face.”65 If we juxtapose the
above thesis with Rossi’s assertion a year before, in the catalogue of
the XV Triennale di Milano “Architettura razionale”, where he declared
that “there is no longer any ideological shield for ugly architecture”,66 we
would be confronted with the paradox of Rossi’s declaration of the non-
effectiveness of the very notion of rational architecture, just a year after
59. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment
[1790] (Indianapolis; Cambridge: Hackett
Publishing Company, 1987), 180.
60. Rossi, The Architecture of the City [1966],
trans. Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman
(Cambridge, Massachussetts: The MIT Press,
1982), 127.
61. Bruno Zevi, Architecture as Space: How to
Look at Architecture [1948] (New York: Horizon
Press, 1957).
62. Rossi, Arquitetura da Cidade [1966] (Lisbon:
Edições Cosmos, 1977).
63. Rossi cited in Terry Kirk, The Architecture
of Modern Italy, Volume II: Visions of
Utopia, 1900-Present (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2005).
64. Pier Vittorio Aureli, “Rossi’s concept of
the locus as a political category of the city”,
OverHolland, 8 (2009), 59.
65. Rossi, L’Analisi urbana e la progettazione
architettonica: contributi al dibattito e al lavoro
di gruppo nell’anno accademico 1968/69
(Milano: clup, 1974), 61.
66. Rossi, “Introduzione”, in Architettura
razionale (Milan: Angeli 1973), 13.
Charitonidou | The Reconceptualization of the City’s Ugliness
17 SAHANZ 2021 Conference Proceedings
his choice of this title for the XV Triennale di Milano.
For Rossi, ugly architecture is the architecture that is not characterized
by a clearly defined individuality and has not emerged through a clear
typological choice. Pivotal for understanding what Rossi understood
as clearly defined individuality is the notion of “locus”, which should not
be assimilated to the notion of context, and concerns the “relationship
between a certain specific location and the buildings that are in it [and]
is at once singular and universal.”67 For Rossi, the city as the “locus of
the collective memory” and the defining parameters of an architectural
artefact are “the autonomous principles according to which it is
founded and transmitted.”68 What is at the centre of his conception of
architectural artefacts is his double understanding of them as individual
and social works. His view towards common architecture is not negative,
since Rossi’s research […] [is] “focused on the whole city, and not just on
authored architecture.”69 Rossi’s interest in non-authored architecture is
pivotal for understanding how his view appropriates in an affirmative way
characteristics that in a different context could be treated as ugly.
Rossi’s aesthetic view towards ugliness in Architettura della città and A
Scientific Autobiography are distinct. In the approach, he developed in
Architettura della città, he identified of ugly architecture with architecture
that does not derive from a clear choice of typology and understood
disorder as necessarily negative. He adopted as criterion for judging if
architecture is ugly or not the extent to which form-making was based
on clear choices of typologies. Progressively, his approach incorporated
an elective affirmation vis-à-vis disorder. In contrast with his disapproval
of disorder in Architettura della città, in A Scientific Autobiography,
Rossi is more positive towards disorder. He drew a distinction between
arbitrary and non-arbitrary disorder, aiming to understand the space of
encounter between order and disorder: “I felt that the disorder of things,
if limited and somehow honest might best correspond to our state of
mind. But I detested the arbitrary disorder that is an indifference to order,
a kind of moral absurdness, complacent well-being forgetfulness.”70
In “The Analogous City”, Rossi referred to the importance of the
dialectics of the concrete and underscored the “capacity of the
imagination born from the concrete.”71 Kant’s claim that “ugliness
is constituted by the free imagination being unrestrained by the
understanding’s need for order”72 could be associated with Rossi’s
interest in this kind of disorder described above. Rossi’s belief in
the creative force of the concrete could be associated with Kant’s
conviction that “ugliness pushes the freedom of the imagination to a
high degree.”73 Both positions interpret ugliness as a powerful source
of creativity. Kant’s connection of free imagination with ugliness and
Rossi’s belief in the capacity of the concrete to activate imagination are
useful for understanding ugliness’ imaginative potential.
When confronted with Torre Velasca, we are in face of a paradoxical
parallel effect of estrangement and familiarization, which lies on the
tension between “continuità” and “preesistenze ambientali” and can
be explained through Paci’s view of the relationship between past
and present: “It is while questioning the past (but not by becoming
the past) that I understand the present and the interest of the present
for its own transformation.”74 Similarly, what is at stake in Aldo Rossi’s
67. Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 103.
68. Ibid., 130, 127.
69. Aureli, “The Common and the Production
of Architecture: Early hypotheses”, in David
Chipperfield, Kieran Long, Shumi Bose, eds.,
Common Ground: A Critical Reader (Venice:
Marsilio Editori, 2012).
70. Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography, trans.
Lawrence Venuti (Cambridge, Mass.; London:
The MIT Press, 1981), 83.
70. Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography, trans.
Lawrence Venuti (Cambridge, Mass.; London:
The MIT Press, 1981), 83.
71. Rossi, “The Analogous City”, Lotus
International, 13 (1976), 6.
72. Mojca Kuplen, “The Aesthetic of Ugliness:
A Kantian Perspective”, Proceedings of the
European Society for Aesthetics, 5 (2013), 275.
73. Ibid.
74. Paci, The Function of the Sciences and the
Meaning of Man [1963] (Evaston: Northwestern
University Press, 1972), 24.
18Ultra: Positions and Polarities Beyond Crisis
concept of analogy is a process of de-familiarization, which provokes
an intensification of semantic ambiguity. Quaroni’s replacement
of beautiful/ugly by vital/non-vital shows that his concepts of the
“città meravigliosa” and the “qualità diffusa” cannot be understood
without untying their existential load, which as in Ernesto Nathan
Rogers and Aldo Rossi’s case, moralizes ugliness. This appropriation of
estrangement and de-familiarization and their existential implications
justify Neorealism and Tendenza’s aestheticization of post-war Italian
cities’ ugliness.
At the Crossroads the British, Italian, and Australian Conception of
Ugliness
The exchanges between Italy and the UK played an important role for
the evolution of the debates around the architecture and city’s ugliness.
Another case that is enlightening regarding the debates between the
Italian and British architectural theorists is the controversy between
Reyner Banham, who was enthusiastically defending Alison and Peter
Smithson’s aesthetic view, in 1959, and Ernesto Nathan Rogers’s
approach. More specifically, Banham attacked Rogers’s approach
using the label “Neoliberty.”75 Regarding the exchanges between the
Australian and the Italian milieu, an important figure was Romaldo
Giurgola, who migrated from Italy to Australia.76 In parallel, Aldo Rossi’s
proposal for a tower in Melbourne in 1979 is a case that could serve for
exploring if there is any common ground between Australian Featurism,
as Boyd understood it, and Rossi’s understanding of typology and the
analogous city.
Helpful for comparing Boyd’s Featurism with the Townscape movement
is Macarthur’s remark claiming that “Hastings would accept modernist
featurism alongside meretricious historicism and vernacular mis-
appropriations of style, on the grounds that buildings of very varied
architectural quality could be composed by an architectural eye at an
urban level.”77 In parallel, useful for understanding Boyd’s conception
of ugliness and New Brutalism is the fact that New Brutalist ethic
functioned as an antidote against architecture and city’s ugliness.78
Of great importance for better grasping the cross-cultural exchanges
between Australia and the UK regarding the concept of ugliness
in architecture and urban design is Boyd’s article entitled “The Sad
End of New Brutalism”, and After The Australian Ugliness.79 Boyd, in
The Australian Ugliness, refers to New Brutalism to Ian Nairn’s work.
In parallel, he authored several articles for the Architectural Review
between 1951 and 1970. Boyd remarks in The Australian Ugliness: “The
solution then is to recognise that there is an appropriate time and place
for both the technology of space-enclosure and the architecture of
expression, and to work to eliminate the neuter type: neither scientific
nor artistic.”80 On the one hand, the Townscape movement related
ugliness to the difficulty to distinguish urban features of the town and
those of the countryside. On the other hand, Boyd related ugliness to
the lack of capacity to eliminate what he called “the neuter type”.
75. Banham, “Neoliberty: The Italian Retreat
from Modern Architecture”, Architectural
Review, 125(747) (1959): 231–235.
76. Romaldo Giurgola, “Reflections on Buildings
and the City: The Realism of the Partial Vision”,
Perspecta, 9/10 (1965): 107-130.
77.Macarthur, “Robin Boyd’s The Australian
Ugliness, ugliness, and liberal education”, 56.
78. Boyd, “The Sad end of the New Brutalism”.
79. Naomi Stead, Tom Lee, Ewan McEoin,
Megan Patty eds., After The Australian Ugliness
(Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria and
Thames and Hudson, 2021).
80. Boyd, The Australian Ugliness (Melbourne:
F.W. Cheshire, 1960), 118.
Charitonidou | The Reconceptualization of the City’s Ugliness