along Flinders Street

What people don’t like is the key modernist principle: that forms should be simplified – architectural designs should bear no more ornament than is necessary to function. They eschewed ornament, rejecting what they saw as the frivolous strokes of Victorian and art nouveau styles. Their work was spare and it represented a determined break with the nineteenth century past.

Did a distinctly Australian modernism develop? Harry Seidler comes to mind, but though modernism was a major movement of the twentieth century, spanning art, design and architecture, it was seen as an architectural intrude, even though it transformed the urban landscape.

The period after WW 2 was shaped by rapid population growth, accelerated car ownership, new construction materials and new ideas about how and what to build. It was also an insular, often backward-looking social-political climate never fully comfortable with cultural matters (unless they could be directly translated into money or reflected political glory); a comparatively smaller economy, which limited the prospects for architectural work; and little recognition of local, or Australian, architectural histories, even at universities.

This period bequeathed a brutalist modernist buildings which have endured even though they are neither a well adapted response to the Australian climate nor placed sensibly in their built urbanscape. None in Adelaide included large public areas that greatly improved the amenity and value of the precinct they inhabit. The public spaces that exist are dead zones.