The Writing's on the Wall:Inscribed Buildings and Australia

摘要

You see conspicuously inscribed buildings everywhere: where a business has its name conspicuously, or a shop advertises price reductions. Most service stations are nowadays totally inscribed, not only by their more general logo-signage, but by the specifics of large-labelled merchandise, daily petrol price listings and a profusion of brand signs within form an interior furniture. In The Australian Ugliness (1960) Robin Boyd raged against such abounding inscription, seeing it as a major part of Australia's horror vacui, of national insecurity, aping a culturally authentic Roadtown somewhere else: the United States. But Australian experience is often simultaneous as well as derivative: the US Roadtown and Bill-ding Boards examined by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in the 1960s derived from the gold rush and frontier towns of 1849-50. The Australian Roadtown should be seen as developing in parallel, rather than as a derivation: its typography and building types were in use here within two years of the Californian gold rush.