Harry Seidler

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Harry Seidler, AC OBE (25 June 1923 – 9 March 2006), an Austrian-born Australian architect and the first architect to fully articulate the Bauhaus's principles. Seidler designed more than 180 buildings, and he has received acclaim for his contribution to Australia's architecture.

Seidler's architectural career spanned nearly ten years, from 1950 to 1964, his commercial work from 1964, and his civic commissions from the 1970s.

Throughout his career, he was a controversial figure in Sydney, as he often attacked planning agencies and the planning system.

Early life

Seidler, the son of a Jewish clothing company, was born in Vienna. He escaped from England as a youth soon after Nazi Germany occupied Austria in 1938.

Education

At Cambridgeshire Technical School, he studied building and construction. Despite being classified as a "Category C" refugee fleeing the Nazis, he was interned by the British authorities as an enemy alien, first in Huyton, then on the Isle of Man, and then to Quebec, Canada, where he continued to be interned until October 1941, where he graduated with first-class honours in 1944.

Seidler, a 21-year-old architect, became a registered architect in Ontario in February 1945 after being employed briefly for an architectural firm in Toronto. In late 1945, he became a Canadian citizen.

Despite being ten years old when the Bauhaus was closed, Seidler's analysts invariably associate him with the Bauhaus because he later studied in the United States under migrant Bauhaus teachers. He attended Harvard Graduate School of Design under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer on a scholarship in 1945-46, during which he spent holiday time with Alvar Aalto in Boston, drawing up blueprints for the Baker dormitory at MIT. In mid 1946, he began studying visual aesthetics at Black Mountain College under the painter Josef Albers.

Life in Australia

Seidler's parents immigrated to Sydney in 1946, and (while he was with Breuer in New York) in early 1948, his mother told him to come to Sydney to style their house. Seidler arrived in Sydney on June 20 1948 (but it was only a few days before his 25th birthday), with no intention to remain in Australia but only until the house was completed. In Wahroonga's remote bushland of a suburb on Sydney's Upper North Shore, the house was named as the Rose Seidler House (1948–1955). This was the first fully modern domestic residence to fully represent the Bauhaus's philosophy and artistic language, winning the Sulman Award of 1951. Some homeowners hired Seidler to style their houses in response to the huge amount of publicity surrounding this house. Seidler decided to stay in Australia after so many clients and his admiration of the Sydney climate and harbour views. In 1991, the Rose Seidler House became a house-museum.

Seidler's 1961-64 design for the Australia Square project broke new ground again (first designs 1961–64, tower 1964–67). The Australia Square tower at the time was the world's highest light weight concrete structure. The design of a large public open plaza and prominent artworks to Australia's office towers.

In 1966, he led the resistance to keep Jrn Utzon as the Sydney Opera House's principal architect.

He was a founding member of the Australian Architecture Association. He was elected as the first Australian to be elected a member of the Académie d'architecture in Paris in 1984, and he was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1987, an honor he received in his trademark suit and bowtie. Mr Seidler was also awarded five Sulman Medals by the Royal Australian Institute of Architects in 1976, as well as the Royal Gold Medal by the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1996.

Personal life

Harry Seidler bought his Canadian passport in 1948 (which he acquired in mid-1946). He had been living in Australia for ten years and then wanted to renew his Canadian passport, but was unable to do so because he had been a naturalized Canadian who had not lived in Canada for more than three years. He became an Australian citizen in late 1958, so he'll have a passport to fly for work and his honeymoon. On December 15, 1958, Harry Seidler married Penelope Evatt, the daughter of Clive Evatt; they had two children.

Seidler loved photographing architecture around the world, and parts of it are chronicled in his photography book The Grand Tour. He also loved skiing.

Penelope Seidler, a self-built architect, obtained her Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Sydney and joined Seidler and Associates in 1964 as an architect and financial manager. She co-designed the Harry & Penelope Seidler House in Killara (suburb of Sydney), which received the NSW Wilkinson award of 1967.

Seidler died of septicaemia in Sydney on March 9, 2006 at the age of 82, on April 24, 2005.

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Early career outside Australia

Seidler then worked as the first ever assistant to Marcel Breuer in New York from late 1946 until March 1948. For almost 2 months from shortly after 20 April to early June 1948, Seidler also worked in Rio de Janeiro with the architect Oscar Niemeyer, whose use of external sunshades was echoed by Seidler in his mid to late 1950s office buildings (such as Horwitz House in Sydney) and whose curves in plan-form were first seen in Seidler's plans from the mid 1960s and 1970s.

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