DOUGLAS CAMPUS - AN ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW.
Architecture is not simply buildings, any more than humanity is simply flesh. Buildings are not built, they grow. They grow from an environment, sucking up its materials and shaped by its requirements, moulded round its people and their patterns. If, when grown, they are not right, not attractive, not functional, then something has interfered with that growth. Either the materials were wrong, or the requirements confused, or the people unsure of their patterns.
In hesitant ways, Douglas Campus seeks to establish itself in Townsville.
It attempts to wrap the city round it as an adopted origin. Environments do not work that way. The university cannot escape the fact that it was con- ceived far away and implanted here, arbitrarily emerging from the hazy grey scrub like spare parts for Lavarack Barracks, arbitrarily intruding on the provincial ethos and offending mightily the sanctimonious illiberalism of
the local news sheet by its very presence.
But arbitrary and untimely growth is Townsville's way. Devoid of economic justification, perversely sited in the least attractive part of Australia's east, it exists because of other places. It sucks sustenance from sugar and minerals through its narrow muddy estuary, and compounds its monumental gall by flaunting the garish banner of a tourist town. What is there in Towns-
yule for the world to come and look at? Once there were hyperboles of nature - Castle Hill, Mount Stuart - romantic gestures to remind that human existence is neither necessary nor sufficient. But these have been tamed with aerials, reduced to 00 scale with masts and wires. Townsville's new emblems are the car and the bulldozer. Her children are the hoon and the spec-builder. City of roaring exhausts and falling trees, of grey sterile houses, each on twenty-four perches of grey sterile earth. Raised by the uncontrollable division of cells - sugar, cement, army, copper, university, nickel - from sedentary nodule on the northern railway to drab neurotic cancer of a city.
An inauspicious setting for a university. It begins to explain the tentative and faintly unreal air of Douglas : its derivative and pretentious essence perhdps best captured in the word "campus". The mind cannot glimpse
£aesar's eagles raised here under the stony hills. The word rings alien and hollow among the gum trees. But we have no other word. Such things as campuses did not grow here. We had to steal a name.
With sufficient conscience to preserve the trees, but filled with the pioneer's urge to strip and subjugate the land, the university has compromised with a suburban savannah approach to landscaping. The trees are left and the grass is mowed. The results would be attractive in most parts of the world.
Here the best that can be hoped for is to preserve little green enclaves in more favoured spots. The gravelled areas around Humanities 1 are probably more attractive and efficient than the shaved brown stubble on the shadeless soil.
Lining the ringroad as if for inspection, the buildings exhibit varying mix-, tures of aspiration and expediency. Summing it all up rather cruelly are elegant street lights, the most graceful in Townsville, their cables neatly buried, A blow struck for Australian design. But twenty paces from, and
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quite independent of them, stands a row of clumsy wooden poles, bearing that abomination of our streets, the ovçrhead wire. The effect is that of wearing Italian shoes with football socks. Had the men who planned these disperate elements ever consulted, ever even met? The pathways between the buildings further attest the curious inefficiency of the authoritarian mind. A dozen de facto footways across lawns show where the imposition of arbitrary geometry on human movement has failed.
Humanities 11 - an early ironclad man-of-war with skillion awnings on the gunports. Elegant externally, even with the awkward curves around the bulging entrance. But inside - a cuniculous maze of oblongs. Function has been crammed screaming into the bowels of preconceived form. The copper roof symbolically crowns it all with industry's gratitude, and vigilance.
Beyond the bomb-proof but water-bedevil/ed computer building, Humanities 1 rears on its stilts among the shrubbery like a page from an architecture undergraduate's project.
The un/on complex - homage to the rectangle. Brown fascias, the aluminium industry's most appalling contribution to the architectural cliches of our age, festoon the buildings like bias binding. An ungainly clump of blocks, shoddily constructed. Formless and aimless, it stumbles up the ringroad like boxes discarded outside a supermarket. As a final grotesquerie, be- decked with lamps suggesting the head of a toluene molecule displayed on a pike.
Rich warm brickwork, balconies and tiles give University Hall a Meditteran - ean romance not at odds with the ferroconcrete helixes of its stairs. But the grey paintpd glob of bathroom in the middle of each wing is an incongrous in'rusion. Only the continuous roofline thtrieves this bisection. The an- cillary building, with its precast channelled roof, seeks to echo the library, but here the piers and beams are smooth and precise. The curves are lessorganic, the spaces gaping, the balcony excessive, the whole spidery.
The colleges, unfortunately, are predictable, pedestrian structures, date- able to within a year or two by later critics familiar with the foibles and mannerisms of today's architects. A pity, because these more than any other buildings on the campus ought to express externally the workings of an internal organism. The most lyrical is Saint Marks, rearing its well- proportioned oblong form and blank end wall on piers above the falling ground to the ringroad. But the whole is robbed of its Corbusierian elevation by the chapel which props up the building's higher end. The effect is that of a sports car on blocks.
Saint Raphaels has tried hardest to escape the tyranny of rows of cubic/es, with some success. The building is far warmer and more human than the corn flakes packet Saint Pauls. John Flynn utilizes that mast erstroke of tropical architecture, the verandah, and is effectively sited on its sculpted land. But the colleges are not distinguished buildings. They employ a pale, exhausted orange brick, and combine it cavalierly with tile, grey con- crete, paintwork and the ubiquitous brown or white fascia. The designers seem to have despaired of completing the building graciously. The heavy fascia is a line ruled in exasperation : an admission of defeat.
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Biological Sciences is a complex but coherent group of diverse forms, sculpturally satisfying but unpretentious. It crouches, peering alertly east with its great square head. Its concrete radiates a subtle organic warmth and hue. A pleasant, emphatic building. The Chemistry building, alas, is another jumble of grey rectangles, not quite relieved by one of Nervi's staircases thrust rather arbitrarily into each side. An attempt to Impose significance and form in the three great pylons on each end has resulted only in prissiness.
The Engineering building, unsure whether it is a single structure or a group of buildings, rambles, hesitates and freezes an ungainly gaggle of rooms.
It pauses here and there with a flourish to raise its medieval watchtower over the trees, to thrust its soaring cantilever Out in one of the few dramatic moments of the campus. But imposed on an earthbound, straggling building,
the gesture is empty : tons of concrete showing off a trick they couldn't be bothered with elsewhere.
Engineering's introspective offspring broods among the trees across the road. Further Off, Vet Science hides in whitewashed rustic isolation, a cluster of farm buildings linked with the university only through that un- gainly umbilicus, the aluminium fascia.
The library is, with Biological Sciences, closest to complete success.
A great grey mortarboard of a building, anticipating greater growth. Its bare reinforcing rods point accusingly at the Chemistry building. Here the depth of fascia is proportionate to the hovering, expansive roof. The buildina has that enfolding feeling that comes from rounded corners and secretive entrance ways, and inside its rough crustacean forms are womb-like and comforting. The swooping concrete curves below the roof are less than happy, lacking the satisfying feel of a true catenary. The problem of fitting a curve to a straight line is there too, on an overwhelming scale, and this is not assisted by projecting the transition into three dimensions - wrapping it around the corner of the building. But the library is a good building, spacious and light, yet snug and secure. Externally it may suffer from marriage with its mirror image. Certainly it will cede some presence, and settle into a more stable maturity lamong the trees.
The campus is not well designed. In a sense it is not designed at all.
It suffers from the shallow arbitrary materialism that characterizes the city it pretends it grew from. It is not sure why it is here, and so it is not sure what it should look like. There exist a number of structures; constituting a group in no sense but the physical, lacking the coherent human will to become an environment. It has been shaped by individual wills that ignore or seek to thwart each other as often as they reinforce and build. The campus reflects this division. There are good pieces of design, but it is a sorry thing that one must speak of pieces. For every stroke of efficiency and grace there will be found a department bulging from its offices or a pathway where nobody walks. The first assumption implicit in any act of construction is that the product will be preferable to what it replaces.
Parts of Douglas Campus might have been left as bush without detriment to function or appearance. As the material expression of an ethos, the campus demonstrates embarrassingly our collective uncertainty as to Why we are here, and where we are going.
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