Robin Boyd Quotes

#1. Australia is, in fact, an old man's bureaucracy.

Robin Boyd

#2. When most objects are truly functional, this technological age, which is just beginning, will be truly civilised. When all objects in this country are truly functional, Australia will be as beautiful in its own way as classical Greece.

Robin Boyd

#3. Many new churches, I regret to say, can be described from the design point of view only as holy terrors.

Robin Boyd

#4. Australia's is a special kind of philistinism, an immovable materialism which puts art and ideas of any kind deliberately and firmly to one side to let the serious business of living proceed without distraction.

Robin Boyd

#5. The suburb was the major element of Australian society.

Robin Boyd

#6. Yet the small house, probably more than anything else that man has done, has made the face of Australia and to an extent the faces of Australians. Australia is the small house. Ownership of one in a fenced allotment is as inevitable and unquestionable a goal of the average Australian as marriage.

Robin Boyd

#7. We need better architecture and planning: more imaginatively exciting, more involving, more our own.

Robin Boyd

#8. Solemn Australians think that an interest in design is a superficial and trivial interest. This is actually an improvement, they used to think it effeminate and vaguely immoral.

Robin Boyd

#9. Adelaide was the first city in Australia, if not in the world, to provide for the health and recreation of all its citizens.

Robin Boyd

#10. The Australian is forcefully loquacious, until the moment of expressing any emotion. He is aggressively committed to equality and equal-opportunity for all men, except for black Australians. He has high assurance in anything he does combined with a gnawing lack of confidence in anything he thinks.

Robin Boyd