 | OBITUARY VALE HARRY SEIDLER 1923–2006
| Passionate, determined and debonair, Harry Seidler was one of Australia’s most significant architects for over half a century. He is remembered here by four friends and colleagues – Kenneth Frampton, Dirk Meinecke, Alex Popov and Peter Myers. |
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Photograph Eric Sierins
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Rose Seidler House, Wahroonga. The first
project designed by Harry Seidler in Australia,
as photographed by Marcel Seidler, 1950.
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Max
Dupain’s famous image of Seidler’s Australia
Square, 1967.
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Wohnpark Neue Donau housing
estate, Vienna, 1998. Photograph Eric Sierins.
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Harry Seidler outside the Museum of Sydney
in 2005, (above) with Peter Myers and Penelope
Seidler. Photographs Timothy Williams.
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I first became aware of the work of Harry
Seidler around the time that his first
monograph was published. The book Harry
Seidler 1955–63 became a point of reference
for us in the basement office of Douglas
Stephen and Partners in Wimpole Street,
London. He appeared to us then as yet
another distant hero of the postwar world
prospering in the remote, beneficent climate
of sunny Australia after the renowned
achievement of his mother’s house.
Henceforth we would encounter his work
from time to time in the pages of The
Architectural Review. Little did I imagine
then that I would meet him eventually
some twenty years later in Sydney on the
occasion of The City in Conflict conference
given under the auspices of the RAIA in
1983. There he was, buoyant and bow-tied,
the charming but belligerent Seidler
championing the reconstruction of the
Sydney Opera House auditorium and
seeking our support for the cause.
It was a memorable moment for me
because after the landing in Sydney I was
taken to the top of some nondescript
high-rise by a local newspaper and asked
to comment on the Sydney skyline and to
select what, in my view, were the finest
high-rises in what was then still a rather
small-scale city. Spontaneously my eye
settled on three buildings, John Andrews’
American Express headquarters and Harry’s
two mini-skyscrapers of the moment, his
Australian Square and MLC Centre. There
followed over the next day or two a soiree
in the home of Harry and Penelope with all
the international visitors in attendance and
the illustrious Peter Myers, whom I met
there for the first time.
These brief encounters were enough to
cement our friendship, and three years later
Harry commissioned me to write an essay
for a monograph covering the first four
decades of his practice. This I agreed to do,
providing Philip Drew would also be asked
to contribute a piece. It was necessary of
course to have seen some of Harry’s more
prominent pieces, and this I was able to do,
but not to the extent I would have liked.
However, I did manage a trip to Canberra
and hence a brief visit to the tectonically
brilliant Trade Group Offices, completed
in Canberra in 1974, which remains one
of the most elegant, generic pieces of his
mid-career, and which, incidentally, should
surely be protected. Somewhat later I
happened to be in Paris at that historic
moment when Australia first captured the
America’s Cup. I recall walking past the
yin yang of the Australian Embassy, which,
ablaze with lights and merriment, was a
Seidler building in a festive mood.
Surely one of the most vital aspects of
Harry’s civic architecture was the important
expressive role played by structural
engineering in the generation of his form.
This is very evident in such works as the
Navy Weapons Workshop on Garden Island,
Sydney, of 1985 and the Hong Kong Club in
downtown Hong Kong, completed one year
before with its 17-metre-span, column-free
spaces. One might think of all of these
works as amounting to a kind of isostatic
baroque feeding partly off the joint legacy
of Oscar Niemeyer and Marcel Breuer, with
whom Seidler had briefly worked in the late
40s, and off the work of Pier Luigi Nervi.
Nervi was a perennial presence in Seidler’s
architecture via his top assistant Mario
Desideri, who was the engineer for many
of Harry’s buildings from the mid-60s
onwards.
One has to remark in passing that there
was another side to Seidler’s output that
one often tends to overlook, namely his
feeling for collective habitation and
residential space. This is evident at its best
in his highly topographic Hillside Housing,
Kooralbyn, Queensland of 1982 and in his
city-in-miniature in Vienna completed in
1998 – the remarkable Wohnpark Neue
Donau built over an eight-lane highway.
Over the years I would meet Harry and
Penelope fairly regularly in New York,
where they would regale me with stories
of Seidler’s succès d’estime in Vienna. He
quite justifiably perceived this as a kind of
architectural homecoming, after an absence
of virtually half a century, following his
exile from Vienna when he was 15,
following the Anschluss of 1938. Little
space remains in this brief appreciation
except to remark on his exceptional
prowess as an architectural photographer,
which was finally to be recognized with the
publication of the book Grand Tour in 2003,
designed by Massimo Vignelli and
published by Taschen. I well recall trying in
vain to get a New York publisher to take this
on and failing dismally. Now, barely three
years later, it has turned into a bestseller.
It has been translated into seven languages
and gone through at least four printings of
the original English text.
The last time I saw Harry was in 2004 in
his office complex at Milson’s Point on the
occasion of his 81st birthday. There he was
with Penelope on the balcony of the
mezzanine, looking down at myself and
Richard Francis-Jones as we entered
abruptly from the street. Glenn Murcutt and
Wendy Lewin were there, on their way out
presumably, pausing at our entrance on the
stairway down – a set piece, as it were. We
had inadvertently crashed into a meeting of
the Australian Architecture Association.
The mood was festive; Harry was ebullient
and beaming as only he knew how to beam,
masking a latent shyness which was an
integral part of his complex character. This
is how I shall remember him: a debonair,
cosmopolitan Australian-Viennese, a
globe-trekker architect of consummate
talent, ability and fulfilment, but still
somehow an émigré who, after nearly sixty
years, with all his honours on, had yet
finally to arrive.
KENNETH FRAMPTON IS WARE PROFESSOR OF
ARCHITECTURE AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.
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A lot has been said and written, and will be
said and written, about Harry Seidler the
architect. I would like to shed some light
on Harry Seidler the person. I had the good
fortune to be around Harry for about a
quarter of his life, and he was a caring,
generous, passionate, modest and
compassionate man.
Harry loved architecture but he had an
even greater love for his wife Penelope.
Having convinced the parents of 19-year-old
Penelope that he, at 35, was the right man
for her, they enjoyed a loving partnership
of some 47 years. They perfectly
complemented each other, and in the office
we rued the times when Penelope would
travel on her own, leaving Harry behind in
Sydney. He would arrive earlier than usual,
be irritable all day long and then stay later
than normal – all because he was missing
his beloved “Penel”. In desperation I would
ring up Polly to find out when her mother
was returning, so we might know when
peace and order would also return.
As a part-time first year student in Harry’s
office, I asked him whether I might make
use of his darkroom at home for my
university projects. He agreed, and
whenever I turned up on a weekend to toil
away in the dark, he would knock on the
door with an “Is it safe to come in?” to see
what I was up to. Trading ideas, we would
then inevitably retire to the balcony for a
cup of coffee while waiting for the film to
dry – it was hung on a paper clip in the
breeze of the kitchen door. The talk, though
wide reaching, always came back to
architecture.
The sandwiches Harry offered on these
occasions followed the simple recipe that
he used each day at the office. Good,
wholesome, heavy rye bread was consumed
with slabs of cheese and cut-up capsicum,
and accompanied by the ubiquitous
kohlrabi. I am sure that many a visitor,
invited by Harry to come and see him over
lunch, arrived expecting somewhat more
sophisticated fare, but Harry would not
upset this routine for anyone.
The same modest tastes came to the fore
when he visited me in Vienna while we did
the Wohnpark Neue Donau housing estate.
He would delight in going to the
Naschmarkt and picking up some fresh
sauerkraut that the vendor would fish with
his fingers out of a great timber barrel or in
getting a simple bratwurst from a roadside
stand. When we did go to a cafe or
restaurant, he would happily relive
childhood memories by ordering traditional
hausmannskost meals.
During the first such visit, Harry insisted
on staying with me in my tiny 26 square
metre apartment for a fortnight. I had
arranged to borrow a folding bed from
bemused colleagues at the partner firm we
worked with – on the assumption that I
would be giving Harry my bed. They were
alarmed to find that it was in fact Harry
who was sleeping on the “banana lounge”.
He dutifully folded this up every morning
so that we would have room to have our
breakfast together before heading off to
work. He delighted, as he did with so many
things, in my way to work. Walking down
to the Graben and down the Kohlmarkt,
past the Loos House through the Hofburg,
Harry told me I was the luckiest guy in the
world and joked that I should pay him for
the privilege.
I saw the same delight when we
undertook tours through the Austrian
countryside to scout out old castles,
baroque monasteries and churches. Harry
was always marvelling at and humbled by
what he found around him. Memorably, he
displayed the same sentiments in a cave in
Kakadu National Park, declaring, "Now this
is architecture. These guys knew what they
were talking about. Leaves us for dead."
Harry was intensely loyal to those around
him. If anyone were in need of assistance,
Harry would get on the telephone, write
letters and do anything in his power to
assist. When there were disagreements, he
had the capacity to forget quickly and “get
on it with” – he was not one to harbour bad
feelings, always gave us another go and an
opportunity to prove ourselves. In some
ways we thought of ourselves as a 'family"
rather than an office in the traditional sense.
DIRK MEINECKE HAS WORKED WITH HARRY
SEIDLER SINCE JOINING THE FIRM AS A FIRST
YEAR STUDENT IN 1984. HE ALSO SPENT THREE
YEARS IN VIENNA, LIAISING WITH LOCAL
AUTHORITIES AND CONSULTANTS FOR THE
WOHNPARK NEUE DONAU PROJECT.
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“There are no truths in architecture”, said
Aalto, and whether or not you like
Modernism, or Seidler’s interpretation of it,
he has forced all architects to take their own
position in respect of which architectural
doctrine they will fight for and defend.
Harry certainly fought for his own
position, which also became our shared
legacy, in advancing an articulate and
intelligent urban building response.
A lesser known quality of Harry Seidler’s,
which is common to those who are at ease
with themselves, is the generosity of time,
information and support he extended not
only to students and architects but to
countless others who called on his
wisdom and opinion. Harry always found
time to talk and to support, or, when
encouragement alone was enough, to clear
the fog of day and maintain the fight to
produce outstanding work.
Until Harry Seidler came along, Sydney
had no debate about architecture and
design. Harry empowered architecture to
become a respected voice in the urban
debate and elevated it in the public mind
from a profession to a philosophical force
to be reckoned with. We owe him a debt of
gratitude for this, just as much as for the
legacy of iconic buildings with which
Harry Seidler has endowed Australia’s
urban landscape.
ALEX POPOV IS DIRECTOR OF ALEX POPOV
ASSOCIATES.
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I first encountered Harry Seidler in 1971
when I rented a shoebox in North Sydney
in the same building as his office. This
building, then something of a collectivist
experiment, housed architects, landscape
architects, graphic designers and
photographers all working together (at least
that was the premise). I scratched out a
living on the first floor landing and Harry
would occasionally drop by on his way
upstairs (usually with some droll account
of local scams being worked by persons
from the other side of the Danube).
Harry, himself an entrant in the Sydney
Opera House competition, was among the
first to congratulate Jørn Utzon and his
loyalty to Utzon never faltered. In early
1966 Harry organized an international
petition in support of Utzon’s retention, the
signatories of which included Kenzo Tange
and Alvar Aalto. Notwithstanding, this
appeal failed to move either the Askin
government or the RAIA and Harry never
forgave them: he even swore a statutory
declaration describing the RAIA’s
complicity in Utzon’s removal.
Yet despite his frontier bluffness, Harry
was so intrinsically Viennese. Mention cafes
and he elaborated the perfection of strudel
at Landtmann on the Operngasse. Allude to
Karlskirche and Harry would lovingly
describe every last detail of Fischer von
Erlach’s masterpiece. Appropriately, for
Harry’s sixtieth birthday dinner, a cake was
specially flown from Vienna; we each had a
precious slice served on (of course) glass
plates designed by Josef Hoffmann. Don’t
worry, the accompanying (very good) white
wine was Australian; it was Henschke!
Harry Seidler was a social democrat from
middle-class Vienna. As an architect, Harry
had no illusions as to how difficult it was
to get something halfway decent built
anywhere, let alone in Sydney. Though
preceded by a number of gifted émigré
architects, it was Harry who finally crashed
through the stultifying conservatism of
postwar Australian architecture and for this
we will always be in his debt. Seidler’s first
commission here, the 1948 house at Killara
for his mother, Rose, is, fittingly, his finest
building. Of course, Harry would
vehemently disagree with this assessment
of his work: as far as Harry Seidler was
concerned, his best building was always
his next.
PETER MYERS IS AN ARCHITECT WHO HAS BEEN A
SOLE PRACTITIONER SINCE 1970.
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