The Modern Hospital as Dream and Machine

Abstract

Ever since Robin Boyd highlighted the hospital work of Leighton Irwin and Arthur Stephenson in Victorian Modern in 1947, architectural historians have recognized the significance of hospital design for the development of modernist architecture in Australia. For the most part, however, that significance has been understood within a narrow framework: the pathways by which the expressive architectural language of European modernism was adopted by Australian architects. In this article I argue that modernization in Australian architecture was not simply a matter of embracing new directions in design. It was also deeply intertwined with visual representation and publicity. Visual depictions of modern hospitals in particular came to occupy a central place within the imagination of social progress in Australia. European and North American innovations of the 1920s and 1930s influenced this process. Nevertheless, the ways in which Australian architects promoted the importance of hospital building in the 1930s and 1940s were quite specific to the Australian situation. Such promotional efforts prefigured changes in the architectural profession in subsequent decades and helped establish a link between advanced architecture and historical progress.