Designing a Critical Voice: Discourse and the Victorian Architectural Students Society (VASS), 1907-1961

Students are a necessary part of the architecture profession. Their training and preparation have long been key to maintaining the business and culture of architecture, and in doing so perpetuating traditional territories that control the institutionalisation of a profession. Students have also created their own associations, often mirroring, and at the instigation of, their parent organizations. More often than not though, in addition to acting as social binders and playing out the role of disciplinary ‘club’, these associations have developed a critical voice, urging change and injecting critique: in short, setting the basis for the framing of a local discourse. Using its publications as primary source material, this paper explores the critical activities of the Victorian Architectural Students Society (VASS), which developed under the auspices of the Royal Victorian Institute of Architects (RVIA). VASS published its annual from 1908, which evolved by 1932 to become Lines and, then additionally in 1939, students Robin Boyd and Roy Simpson expanded VASS’s publishing remit, producing the oft-controversial fold-away pamphlet Smudges that infamously gave ‘blots’ and ‘bouquets’ to new buildings. In 1947, VASS published Victorian Modern, Australia’s first polemical history of modern architecture and in 1952, it was the first publisher of the influential journal, Architecture and Arts. This paper examines the shifting ambitions of VASS, its chief protagonists, the role of graphics and the deft blending of the social, satirical and the critical that eventually framed and shaped Victoria’s architecture culture after World War II.