The Achievement of Harry Seidler

A fine recent documentary on Harry Seidler by Daryl Dellora (Harry Seidler: Modernist) linked Seidler’s life with his architecture and explored his wider cultural impact. Seidler ceaselessly crusaded for Modern architecture and championed Jørn Utzon during the Sydney Opera House crisis in 1966. But how great was Seidler’s architecture?

I worked with Harry Seidler as a writer, contributing essays about his work for publication for more than two decades. Towards the end of a meeting at his spacious Killara home in 1984, I showed Seidler the bound text of Leaves of Iron, about Sydney architect Glenn Murcutt. He opened it, read the title, closed it, gave a stifled grunt, then shoved it across the table towards me, and sat very still, looking down. It was extremely awkward. His silence hung like an accusation between us. It was as though I had betrayed him. His response, or lack thereof, shook me to the core. For years I had listened to Seidler extolling his projects. This was the first occasion on which I had sought approval for something I had done. My book later became a considerable success and brought Murcutt to the attention of the world.

For Seidler, I had violated an unwritten contract never to write about anyone else, anyone he might consider a rival. I was his property. He probably regarded his office assistants similarly. Unknowingly, I had written about Murcutt whom I greatly admired as a nativist. Seidler could not deal with the possibility that Australia might produce architecture expressing its unique geographical and cultural identity. It revealed how he saw himself, how he had worked over the years to position himself in history and Australian society. What I witnessed was Seidler in crisis.

When the late distinguished journalist and early friend of Seidler’s, Murray Sayle, was asked by a visiting French critic in the 1950s to show her the very latest architecture in Sydney, Murray automatically took her to see the Rose Seidler house at Killara. Her reaction surprised him. She brusquely dismissed it, telling him there was plenty of this stuff in Europe, and asking him to show her something local, exciting and new.

In view of the huge fuss the Sydney media made over the Rose Seidler house, Sayle was taken aback. It was so contrary and unexpected. To Sayle, the Rose Seidler house proved we Australians were abreast of the latest in European and US design. But his visitor was looking for new work that reflected the country.

Anyone watching Japan at this time would have been impressed by how Kenzo Tange and Kunio Maekawa injected Japanese carpentry forms into their designs to produce an exciting Japanese version of Le Corbusier. Possibly this is the sort of thing Sayle’s French critic sought. Instead, she was shown a Breuer New England house.

In 1929, Patrick Geddes’s plan for the extension of Tel Aviv was supported by Bauhaus School architects such as Arieh Sharon, Shmuel Mistechkin and Shlomo Berenstein. The plan incorporated deep-set shaded windows, natural ventilation and overhangs that showed a practical response to the local climate.

Seidler is a conundrum: his architecture was in Australia yet remained firmly anchored in the northern hemisphere. Throughout his life he continued to be spiritually estranged even while married to the daughter of Clive Evatt QC, an avowed collector of Australian art. An obvious pointer to Seidler’s internationalism and his alienation from Australia is the choice of US East Coast art in his buildings.

Seidler was enormously proud of his brief time in Oscar Niemeyer’s Rio office. The two were opposites: Niemeyer was a philanderer and sexual extrovert whose sculptural forms were inspired by the erotic curves of the female body; Seidler was sexually repressed. Seidler was profoundly offended when Kenneth Frampton compared his Hong Kong Club with Boullée’s Oikema project for the sexual education of young men.

Niemeyer was more than a match for Le Corbusier. The lovely sweeping roof of the United Nations Assembly Hall in New York is Niemeyer’s, not Le Corbusier’s. Although deeply impressed by Le Corbusier’s ideas, Niemeyer is unequivocally Brazilian, unlike Seidler, who never managed to be Australian. Niemeyer is irrepressibly lyrical and passionate and Brazilian. Seidler’s buildings are irrevocably international.

When we examine Seidler’s relationship to Niemeyer, Nervi, Gropius, Breuer, and to Amer­ican painters and sculptors such as Josep Albers, Alexander Calder, Norman Carlberg, Charles Perry, Frank Stella, Lin Utzon, we see that their specially commissioned works take centre stage in his architectural productions. He uses them as levers to aesthetically empower, elevate and enhance his architecture. They relieve the starkness and absence of colour, and affirm Seidler’s debt to American International corporatism. The few occasions when Australian artists are introduced  such as Arthur Boyd in the Shell Headquarters in Melbourne, or Syd Ball in the Australian Embassy in Paris, are the exception.

Niemeyer needed no such artistic endorsements; he was strong and original without them. Seidler lacked his confident self-assuredness, and was unable to draw on Australian history, its plants and indigenous culture, in the way Niemeyer did in Brazil, particularly the way Niemeyer was inspired by the beauty and colours of Brazil’s plants, and its dramatic landscapes—the sheer beauty of its physical presence. Seidler, by contrast, continually glanced backwards to steady himself. Seidler would concede he was not Niemeyer’s equal, much less his superior. For all the bluster, ranting and attacks on rival contemporaries such Sir Norman Foster, or anyone he considered a threat, Seidler worried about the security of his foothold and continually worked to cement his place in architectural history. This explains the numerous commissioned essays, books and ongoing publicity. He attacked anyone, even cartoonists, who dared to criticise him.

Seidler longed for recognition and applause. Artists are not ordinary. Whether they are unduly modest or unbearably arrogant has little bearing on their greatness. History alone is the final arbiter, since it cannot be bribed or cajoled. El Greco, forgotten for centuries, is the perfect illustration. We may prod history, but we cannot control it. At most, the historian can anticipate its verdict, seek to guide it, even pre-empt it.

Where does Seidler rank? Was he truly great?

Seidler was prolific, his architecture is notable for its consistency, and he dominated Australian architecture over half a century. About this there is little disagreement. Whether he was our most important Modernist remains open to debate. One of the challenges at that time was to establish Modernism, but there was an even more important challenge—to produce architecture that acknowledged our geography, that connected us with our landscape. We needed to find our distinctive Australian voice in architecture, in order to overcome a century-long legacy of colonial occupation and habitual dependency under Great Britain and the US. This cultural struggle persists even to the present.

Seidler illustrates the transfer of allegiance from Britain to the US after the Second World War. Our foreign policy deference to US interests is as strong today as it was in 1950. Seidler is symptomatic of such cultural dependence. His importance will inevitably decline should we free ourselves of such ties. Seidler held us back in the process of national maturation following a prolonged cultural adolescence. His forceful promotion of international Modernism overshadowed local factors and prevented them from shaping an authentic regional expression.

Seidler remained an Austrian of Jewish inheritance. The ready acceptance by the French of his scheme for the Australian Embassy near the Eiffel Tower is a powerful demonstration of how easily Seidler fitted in to the European order. He never left Europe in a spiritual or aesthetic sense—although, one should add, his design was American with its reversed Frank Stella quadrant composition of opposed blocks. Such obvious painterly qualities probably enhanced its appeal to the French. Glenn Murcutt could not have done it, not in such a sophisticated and demanding urban precinct, and at such a large scale. Nor could Murcutt have produced the office towers Seidler did in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. Such large urban projects were beyond him.

The arrival of Modern architecture was the biggest architectural event of the century, much more important than postmodernism, which was reactive and false. No narrative of Australian architecture is complete, or even believable, without Seidler’s presence. But his contribution was to hold back rather than advance the inevitable acceptance of Australia in shaping our architecture. More than any other art form, architecture cannot avoid its context—the physical environment to which it is fitted, its urban or landscape setting. Landscape, the sky, plants, sea, cliffs, geology are all unavoidable in the city, so to speak of urban architecture as though it has no landscape and relates only to other architecture is false.

Architecture, whether in the countryside or in the city, must confront its unique location, must somehow express through its particulars, in the relationship of interior space to the outdoors, the quality of the light where it is located. This is a necessary qualification for belonging to Australia. Seidler was jealous of Glenn Murcutt, and not without justification. Murcutt took on Sydney Ancher’s quest to produce a recognisable corrugated galvanised iron vernacular that was distinctively Australian. Murcutt did not originate the idea, which belonged entirely to Ancher. But it needed Murcutt’s tenacity and determination to bring it to fruition and produce the quintessential Australian veranda house connected to the hard delicacy of the flora.

In many ways Seidler was Murcutt’s superior: where Murcutt stumbled and seemed incapable, indeed refused to participate, Seidler was the superior urbanist who orchestrated complex urban designs. Murcutt never ran a large architectural office and even boasted he was a one-man-band. There were obvious reasons for this. Seidler recognised that architecture is a collaborative art and employed assistants even for small domestic projects. But regardless of how many were involved, Seidler always achieved absolute aesthetic control. He directed others masterfully without sacrificing his integrity, unlike Romaldo Giurgola on the New Parliament House, Canberra. Seidler was comfortable working at a large scale, it exhilarated him, whereas Murcutt shied away from large projects. At the scale of the dwelling Murcutt failed to see that the narrow footprint of his long veranda house model matched the over-rated nineteenth-century English terrace house.

Where Murcutt shone and is so obviously a more significant architect lay in his adoption and reinvention of established traditional vernacular building traditions and elements. He did not abandon Modern architecture, but he recast it, taking Miesian Minimalism and applying it in a new way that utterly transformed the Australian house in the context of Australian landscapes. His recasting of the familiar—corrugated iron, the veranda, glass louvres—was very different in approach to Seidler, who was content, once a detail had been standardised, to repeat it over and over, thus making his work instantly recognisable, regardless of context. Murcutt continually revised, improved and innovated. Each new project of his is fresh, a surprise, advancing a step beyond the previous one. The catalyst in each instance is the local situation, which triggers new experiments.

Where Murcutt is most convincing is in dealing with intimate aspects that contribute to and make up the whole. Seidler is far less interested in detail; his focus is the larger form, with abstract geometry, and if we follow his progress we discover a few preferred motifs repeated over and over with fine adjustments. Seidler ranges within a few recurring gestures that are met again and again and become stale through over-use.

Seidler and Murcutt are entirely different. They set out from entirely divergent premises: where Seidler begins with the universal, Murcutt begins with the local, the specific. Yet both work within, and are true to, Modernism. Seidler connects to the past, to Europe and the US, Murcutt to a future Australia, to new possibilities engendered by geography, landscape, climate, materials and culture. As an architect, Murcutt opens up new, unique local possibilities and experiences.

Just which of the two you admire more, will, I suspect, depend on where you were born—here or overseas. I was born here. Forgive me, then, if I take Glenn Murcutt as the more important architect. That judgment was supported by the committee which awarded him the Pritzker Prize for Architecture in 2002.

Whilst it would be a mistake to minimise Harry Seidler’s impact, he was but one of a number who contributed to establishing Modern design, and he may well have been responsible for delaying Australia’s progress on the long road towards cultural maturity.