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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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