How differently would we view Australia’s postwar architecture and urban design without Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness? Such is the significance of this classic 1960 text that it has shaped debates about our cities – their planning, development and buildings – for half a century. Whether the book has helped to improve them is questionable – they probably would not be much different today, Boyd or no Boyd – but what a context and framework he gives us for analysing and discussing them. With the dramatic changes in society and tastes in fifty years, what does Boyd offer the contemporary reader?

Clearly, Boyd’s work has not had the effect he would have liked on urban planning and design and public taste. Witness the mini-Versailles that now colonise Toorak and Vaucluse, or the McMansions of the outer suburbs, where greedy developers satisfy our desires for ever bigger, showier and more energy-inefficient houses to cater for our every need, imagined or real. This style of architecture, and the suburbs of rooftops, are just the things Boyd abhorred. One thing has changed: in Boyd’s time Americans held the prize for building the largest new houses; now that honour belongs to Australians. What makes The Australian Ugliness so relevant today, rather than just being a period piece or an eloquent, vainglorious plea, is that Boyd’s arguments for improving urban design and architecture, and his devastating critique of our cities and suburbs, remain as potent as ever. ‘The suburb is Australia’s greatest achievement (not “proudest” achievement; there is little or no collective pride in the suburb, only a huge collection of individual prides)’ rings as true in 2010 as it did in 1960.