A Singular Vision: Harry Seidler

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Epilogue

Endnotes

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Photos Section

About the Author

Copyright

‘Architecture is a language and architects speak it. Most of them just barely manage to speak — very few ever speak eloquent prose, but it happens rarely indeed that any of them create poetry with just a few words.’

Harry Seidler

This spiral stairway at the 1993 Farrell House in Vaucluse, NSW, echoes the internal structure of an ocean shell. (Photo: Eric Sierins)

Prologue

Harry Seidler loved no metaphor more than that of the Gordian knot. Tethered within the convoluted landscapes of Roman and Greek mythology it reaches back to an instant in 333BC when Alexander the Great supposedly faced an actual knot which had been very tightly tied by a peasant-turned-king named Gordius. An oracle had predicted that whoever unravelled the puzzle would rule, and as the years had gone by many had tried and failed.

At first Alexander approached the task just as those who had come before him, with a fruitless search to locate the ends of this intricate, impenetrable tangle. Wracked with impatience he raised his sword and sliced the Gordian knot clean through. He would go on to conquer Asia.

It is an allegory, of course, about how an apparently intractable problem can be dismissed with a single blow, but to the architect Harry Seidler, a man whose ability to solve ‘unsolvable’ problems was so powerful it defined and propelled his career, the legend can be read as something more. To him the Gordian knot epitomised a fundamental approach to life itself.

Seidler’s own story is remarkable by any measure: a curvilinear trajectory the sweep of which takes in a vast spectrum of events from his early existence as a young refugee fleeing the Nazis to his ultimate incarnation as the most high-profile architect Australia has ever produced, and a man who, if the range of reactions he provoked is any guide, became something of a Gordian knot himself.

Seidler fought for limitless horizons. He channelled his energies into defining the world around him instead of allowing it to define him. Of him Lord Richard Rogers, the creator of iconic and controversial structures across the globe, says simply, ‘I think that Harry is one of the world’s greatest architects. There are not many like him.’

I.M. Pei, the New York-based nonagenarian perhaps best known for his startling glass-and-steel pyramid at Paris’s Louvre Museum, and a man who leaves the impression that he chooses his words as carefully as the monuments he shapes, was no less generous. ‘I miss him,’ he says. ‘I remember him as more than as a fellow architect but as a friend.’

American abstract artist Frank Stella offered another take on the famously combative architect: ‘Harry was just incredibly sweet . . . it was really nice to be around him. I loved him.’

From some quarters the accolades fly yet Seidler’s name also provokes anger and disdain. Harry Seidler lived for his work and for the ideals of Modernism. He fought ferociously to express his artistic vision during an era in which the very notion of Modernism became cultural shorthand for a sterile brutality of purpose, an empty artfulness that denies humanity itself.

As Seidler battled, he polarised, infuriated and inflamed, and nowhere was this more the case than in his adopted home of Sydney, a city riven by architectural wars and within which one of his own buildings, Blues Point Tower, became a lightning rod for everything despised about modern architecture and those who seek to shape urban lives.

His widow Penelope, an aristocratic woman known both as a patron of the arts and a dedicated defender of her late husband’s artistic legacy, provided for this book unfettered access to his unabridged diaries, private archives and address books along with the enigmatic observation, ‘He wasn’t like other people.’

As research progressed it became clear that the architect’s memory for many beyond his inner circle remained mired in half-remembered headlines about court cases, public spats and open disputes. Despite this, glimpses of a gentler soul quickly began to emerge. Almost every interviewee who knew Harry and Penelope to any meaningful degree commented upon the depth, intimacy and power of their relationship on both an emotional and a creative level. Penelope, it seemed, operated as something of an avatar to her husband, the person who might smooth things over when he, in his irascible haste, could not. She brought more manageable overtones to his astringent pronouncements of design and of purpose. She served to humanise the man.

By architectural standards Seidler’s output was large and varied, comprising around one hundred and eighty buildings of every kind, from the tiniest of homes to the tallest of towers. His work attracted accolades, medals, prizes and honours both at home and abroad; in fact this biography is bound together by monuments of all sizes, and by moments frozen in the minds of those who knew the man, for better or, as some of them still see it, for worse.

Art patron John Kaldor realised one year that Seidler had arrived at the Venice Biennale without booking hotels. ‘He stayed in a bar . . . until it closed, and then he lay down on the couch of the bar and slept until the next morning,’ Kaldor recalls. ‘He was a well-known architect by then, but he had no airs about him really.’

Architect Louise Chapman, a former employee, popped into her old office one day with her three-year-old daughter Lucinda, who became fascinated by one of the architectural models. ‘I looked up and Harry was standing beside her and seriously asking her: What do you think? He was listening intently to her. That was the thing about Harry . . . he was genuinely interested in people’s opinions. Even in the advice of a three-year-old.’

Graphic designer Harry Williamson remembers the architect as a man of enthusiasm, citing an evening in Hong Kong when Seidler joined him, his wife and their two small children for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. ‘It wasn’t elegant dining, it was high-quality knock-about food [and] we had a lovely meal,’ Williamson says. ‘At the end of it, he said, This is so good I’m going to order it all again. Which he did.’

When quizzed about Seidler, Edmund Capon, the former director of Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales, pointed to the view, through the panoramic windows at the back of the gallery, of what he describes as a city ‘built on deals’. While a gallery trustee, Seidler had violently opposed the British curator’s 1978 appointment and Capon recalls their first encounter as not promising, to put it mildly: ‘It took about six months to get over that hurdle.’

As Capon got to know the architect he decided that ‘he was a person with . . . intelligence [and] a vision that was so outstanding . . . They [Seidler’s buildings] stood out like a sore thumb in this plethora of mediocrity. He loved that word mediocrity. Anything he didn’t like, it was mediocre. I am surrounded, awash in mediocrity, Harry would say. And he was right, absolutely right . . . To achieve what you want to do, there has to be a strong sense of anarchy about the present conditions, and he had that.’

Capon gestures north through the art gallery glass: ‘You look that way and you see the harbour.’ He turns his head: ‘You look this way and you see the greatest panorama of crap architecture in the world . . . A disaster. Look at all this rubbish. And in amongst it is Horizon . . . That building is incredibly determined, elegant; it’s got its own rhythms. It is a wonderful creation.’

Seidler claimed architecture as the mother of all arts, a point upon which Capon the art expert demurs before reasoning that in some cases, indeed perhaps in this case, the argument could be made: ‘For the simple reason that Harry’s architecture started with an idea, and a form, rather than a function . . . He was a great friend of I.M. Pei, and they have very similar views. You can see when you look at I.M. Pei’s architecture that the birth of the building is an idea. They don’t work from the ground up, they work with an idea [which] is distilled down into a reality.’

Even so, hostility remains towards both the man and his work, something Capon finds ‘rather remarkable’. ‘Time,’ he predicts, ‘is going to be very kind to Harry Seidler.’

Baby Harry with mother Rose and brother Marcell, in Vienna, 1923. (Seidler family collection)

Chapter 1

The only thing we must never do is disown our own time.

HARRY SEIDLER

Harry Seidler drew his first breath in a hospital in the 9th district of the Austrian capital Vienna, and his official birth certificate, penned in German, translates to certify that according to the registers of birth of the Mosaic [Jewish] Community: Harry Seidler was born in Vienna, IX, Loblichgasse 14, on 25 June, 1923 . . . the legitimate son of Mendel Maks Seidler and of Rosa, maiden name Schwarz.

His parents’ decision to settle upon their newborn a name neither Austrian nor traditional echoed the one they had made with their first son, Marcell, who arrived four years earlier on 3 November 1919. It would cause Harry a minor headache at his conservative high school, when one teacher, a former military officer, insisted he be known by a more nationalistic moniker — Hans or Heinrich, say — but as Harry explained to his wife decades later his ‘Mutti’ and ‘Papa’ had named him thus in recognition of the victors of World War I. So, it was Marcell (French) and Harry (English). ‘In both cases they got it a bit wrong,’ Penelope observes. ‘Marcell does not [generally] have a double l and Harry is unusual, more often Henry shortened. [But] it was very fashionable.’

Yet this was only part of the picture. Mendel Maks would change his own name to ‘Max’ while Rosa ensured that everybody called her ‘Rose’. In fabricating the basic details of their lives, Harry’s parents were in fact rebuilding from the ground up; a process of transformation which began years before the boy ever appeared.

In 1902 Max had walked into Vienna for the first time. He was a bone-poor fourteen-year-old, one of thousands of German-speaking desperates flooding into the capital from the far-flung wilds of the Hapsburg hinterland, and his father, Chune Seidler, had demanded he do it. Chune wanted Max to find a better life, not just for himself but also for the entire Seidler clan.

So where had Chune come from? Seidler does not seem to have been entirely sure. In 1997 he told an interviewer compiling accounts of the Holocaust for the international Survivors of the Shoah Visual History project that he believed some of his grandparents came from the eastern part of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

‘I think they worked in Czechoslovakia or on the border of Galicia,’ he said. ‘But my father’s grandfather . . . and my grandfather, I think, were born in Vienna.’

Three years earlier during a recorded interview with Penelope called ‘Harry Seidler Reflects’ the architect told a slightly different story; of Max Seidler being sent to the big city ‘in order to walk on the social ladders’. ‘[Max] always spoke of his father having been engaged in some oil exploration,’ added Harry.

‘Sounds very grand,’ observed Penelope.

‘Well, I don’t think he was so good as that,’ the architect replied. ‘He worked in some oil pits, which I believe were somewhere in Czechoslovakia . . . My mother’s family also came from somewhere east of Vienna, that is all I know. I don’t know the names of the places but my mother said that her father was an expert in the selection of railway sleepers.’

It took author Alice Spigelman to settle the matter, establishing beyond doubt that Chune was emphatically not Viennese by finding documentation to show he had been born in Bukovina, a remote area of northern Romania that was then part of the sprawling empire. Chune had married and been widowed in quick succession, it emerged. He had owned little of value and was itinerant, ekeing out a living wherever the work was — ‘work’ meaning unskilled, physical labour.

Chune variously cut wood, worked on railway construction and sold food, and while living in Galicia, the eastern central European region now divided between Poland and Ukraine, wed for a second time, marrying Marie Lieberman and fathering five children — Max, Fanny, Sally, Jacob and Marcus. He sent Max to Vienna, the Catholic empire’s capital, because this grand city, a cauldron of old powers and new ideas, was in the grip of a population surge.

Between 1890 and 1910 the number of those living in Vienna increased from 1,364,548 to 2,031,498³ and between eight and nine per cent of them were, as Max was, Jewish. The city, like his childhood homeland Galicia, had been the scene of anti-Jewish riots in the late 1800s and in 1895 it became the only European capital with an elected anti-Semitic government⁴ but fin de siècle Vienna was a complicated place. This opulent, ornate metropolis was one of Europe’s largest cosmopolitan centres; a bewitching city that had been a crucible of political and social influence for centuries and which could boast beautiful palaces, churches and mansions, deep-seated musical traditions and a sophisticated, radical culture. It was also riven by deep divisions and mistrust.

Race, class and religion mattered here, yet as Steven Beller points out in his social history Vienna and the Jews, in Viennese high culture many professions and academic specialities, including law, philosophy, economics and literature, were populated by ambitious, forthright Jewish men. Between 1902 and 1906 all of the regular members of Sigmund Freud’s Wednesday Society, the precursor to the Psychoanalytic Society, were Jewish, as was a high proportion of Vienna’s commercial self-employed.⁵

More to the point as far as Chune was concerned, the city was awash with opportunity and that spelled promise. If his uneducated son could get only a foothold here the entire family might have a real future ahead of them.

Max told Harry ‘the most horrendous stories’ about those difficult early days; tales of searing loneliness and hardship during the im frieden, what the Seidlers called ‘the peaceful time’⁶ in Austria before World War I. Poor and desperate, Max scrabbled for sustenance at soup kitchens, made do with cast-off shoes and clothes, and took any work that came his way, including, in a move which would change the fortunes of his family forever, packing boxes in a textile factory.

He turned out to be quite the entrepreneur, becoming a salesman, and doing so well that within ten years Chune had moved the rest of the family to Vienna. Max started his own clothing business, and with his father in place as the overseeing patriarch he brought his two brothers Jacob and Marcus into it. It was, Harry would say, ‘the right thing to do, to look after the family’.⁷ The family called their newly formed textile company ‘Brüder Seidler’.

World War I brought the perilous hiccup of compulsory conscription, and Max, who was a slightly built individual with luxuriously thick, kinked dark hair and a determined moustache, found himself called to arms. He had his picture taken in his smart Austrian army uniform as was the wont of the day, and his family turned the image into a postcard.

Max’s first position was in the offices of a military hospital. Then he was sent to the front line to fight the Italians in the battles of the Isonzo. Years later Harry and his father went on a walking trip through the Dolomite mountains of northern Italy and pin-pointed what Max thought was the location of his battlefield experience. The pair happened upon barbed wire and twisted metal that seemed to date back to the conflict. ‘I remember him finding a broken piece of a shell and I wanted to drag it home but it was so heavy in my rucksack I finally left it there,’ Harry told Penelope. While in those mountainous war-time trenches Max met Rudolf Schwarz, another Jewish soldier whose family also came from Galicia.

A favourite Seidler/Schwarz legend has it that Rudolf showed Max a picture of his raven-haired sister Rosa and, during leave from the front, Max not only managed to meet her but decided that she was the girl for him. She agreed to marry her compatriot if he made it back alive, and as the war ended they wed and marked the occasion with a formal photography session in which the pair look as stern as they do sophisticated. He was thirty, with little schooling but plenty of determination. She was twenty-seven, better educated and, Harry would always maintain, very ambitious. In the images they come across as upwardly mobile and sharp. Their days as country folk were emphatically behind them.

The Great War brought what had been one of the world’s great powers to its knees. Charles, the last Hapsburg emperor-king, renounced his position and the empire fractured into a series of nations. The new First Austrian Republic was formed and Vienna became its capital.

Back inside Brüder Seidler, the newlywed Max returned his full focus to business matters. Rose concentrated her attentions on motherhood, home-making and moving up in the world. They rented their home, as did many even well-to-do Viennese. That first apartment was in the 20th district, a region Harry would describe as ‘a poor area’, but as he grew so did the Seidler wealth.

Parents Rose and Max’s wedding photo, 1918. (Seidler family collection)

The family business had begun with simply selling garments such as shirts and ladies’ underwear but Brüder Seidler branched out into manufacturing, opening a factory in the city’s 1st district. Max and Rose moved into the fifth floor of an elegant Art Nouveau-influenced apartment block in a better area, the 9th district, which is the first home Harry could really remember.

Harry would later come to realise that conditions during his early years were not as comfortable as they might have been, although he also had memories from this time of having live-in staff. One vivid recollection related to a freezing winter during which he helped the live-in maid, a country girl who probably doubled as his nanny, scrounge fuel by visiting shops to pick up leftover coke before trudging back home to heat up the apartment.⁸

This was an era when many in Vienna struggled yet the Seidlers were doing nicely, and while Max worked ‘all hours very hard’⁹ Rose tried to ensure their new-found sophistication shone through. She had her sons tutored in piano by the best teachers her husband’s money could buy, leading to a rather delicious scandal when one, a former Vienna Opera orchestra musician, had to be sacked after starting an affair with the maid. The Seidlers also employed at least one other staff member, a chauffeur, because while Max had a penchant for prestige cars he never actually learned to drive.

Judging from the way Harry talked about his childhood the era seemed perfect: a crystalline, enchanted kingdom bounded by safety, security and a tightly buttoned affluence but in truth this was all a facade. For the Seidlers, as for all the Jews of Vienna, life was never quite as simple or as safe as it seemed. In the late 1930s when Harry was still a boy Austrian Jews would face genocide. Tens of thousands of them, including many of his relatives, would be murdered, and some of his schoolyard friends would refuse ever again to set foot in the country which they felt had betrayed them so completely. Yet Harry managed to emotionally isolate his early memories. It was as though he had carefully set them behind a pristine glass wall.

His own private family album reflects that halcyon time, from the earliest mid-1920s black-and-white images, which show the youngster posing alongside his older brother Marcell. Harry stands as ramrod tall as his meagre frame allows, a skinny, mop-headed three-year-old engaging the camera with a frank, friendly stare. Clutching a toy, he wears a puffy smock of an outfit that would prompt him to joke decades later about just how much his mother loved to dress him up as a tiny fräulein, so strong, he felt, had been her thwarted desire to have a little girl.

An image taken two years later depicts Harry more rakishly confident, sporting a slightly haughty grin and the type of natty sailor suit so popular then with middle-class boys in Europe and America. Hands thrust into his trouser pockets, the five-year-old looks proud of his uniform, which comes complete with a jaunty handkerchief tucked into its left breast pocket and white stripes running around its collar and cuffs in a disciplined trim.

More casual photographs from the time show him with a Meccano set and learning to swim. Often absent is his father, who spent so many hours at work that Harry would occasionally pop into the factory after school just to see him.

From the age of about six Harry would remember little tram jaunts to the countryside on the outskirts of Vienna, memories now frozen in celluloid inside the family album. Winters brought ski trips to resorts such as Mariazell and during the long summer months he explored the best Austrian lake destinations, as well as holidaying in Italy, Yugoslavia and the Czechoslovakian mountains. The vacations were almost invariably led by Rose, his father ‘never’ having time, Harry would recall. ‘He only came for weekends if that . . . He was constantly working.’¹⁰

Like the other boys around him Harry read and loved Erich Kästner’s rambunctious, boy-detective novel Emil und die Detektive but he was starting to realise that his family’s slide up Vienna’s social scale was setting him apart. When he was around ten years old Rose and Max left their 9th district home for what seemed to Harry to be an ‘enormous’ apartment¹¹ at 68 Peter Jordan Strasse in Vienna’s prestigious and hilly 19th region, a relocation which involved leaving almost all their furniture behind. Harry remembered them keeping a large Baroque dining-room suite but precious little else.

Harry, age three, dressed in an almost feminine outfit by his mother Rose, with brother Marcell in a sailor suit (a popular garment among boys during the 1920s).

Harry at age five, amusing himself with a Meccano building set. (Both photos from the Seidler family collection)

Rose then proceeded to deftly re-feather their grander new nest. She collected glasswear designed by the fashionable Austrian architect and designer Adolf Loos and demonstrated her artistic avant-garde sensibilities by putting prints by the daring and unconventional painter Gustav Klimt¹² on her walls. As was the habit of upwardly mobile middle-class Viennese, she also employed a specialist to create for her a new family environment.

‘My mother was full of ambition and she wanted to do the socially and culturally right thing, so she had an architect, Fritz Reichl, design our interiors,’¹³ Harry said, explaining how Reichl’s craftsmen worked on the custom-designed furniture, each piece ‘laboriously hand wrought and tailor-made to every corner of the room. French polished, inlaid veneers done in many different coloured woods depicted scenes of people picking fruits’.

Rose did not stop with Reichl (‘the big progressive thing was to buy an English refrigerator’, so she did just that) but the boy became fascinated with what the designer was doing, his ‘specially made fabrics and silk wall papers [and] tailor-made lamps’. Reichl repeatedly visited their home, methodically draughting each new object and furnishing the Seidler home room by room. He brought with him tracing paper upon which played outlines of every lamp, every chair, and would have ‘endless discussions about the minutiae of what it’s going to look like, what’s the material, what is the veneer’.¹⁴

* * *

Harry Seidler would go on to discuss the impact of watching Fritz Reichl at work. Upon reflection the Reichl moment became significant — a memorable rung on the ladder he would climb en route to becoming a designer. As the architect aged he never lost his love of examining and re-examining exactly how he saw things, and why. He talked often of his singular vision and the manner in which he read the world in terms of philosophy, ethics, morals, tone, shape, texture, design and materials. Yet never — in all the thousands of words he wrote, the dozens of essays and books he published, the hundreds of talks he gave and the countless interviews he agreed to — did he once happen to let slip that he was colour-blind.

Even in private, Seidler mentioned it rarely and only to those he held close. Penelope admits that even she probably does not fully understand how it impacted on his life, his world-view, and his fundamental appreciation of the subjects closest to his heart — architecture, art and design — nor whether he considered it a stigma in any way. She never asked the obvious question: exactly how old he was when he realised he saw the world differently from around ninety per cent of the other people in it. Yet given just how meticulous and observant Seidler shows himself to be from his very earliest diary entries it is reasonable to assume that he gained at least an inkling of the fact while watching Reichl at work.

Seidler was born with red–green colour deficiency, the most common form of the condition and a recessive genetic trait often passed on to boys by mothers who carry the gene but do not express it. The architect may have had a penchant for bold, primary colours for a very simple reason: he could actually see them. He was able to differentiate between very strong blues and reds, for example, but paler hues, such as tints of any kind, pinks, pale greens and tones of grey, would forever be a mystery to him. They did not register in his brain at all.

With typical chutzpah he would later tell Penelope that he believed his ability to see only part of the colour spectrum actually made him more sensitive to the tonal differences within it, although she was never really convinced by that argument and on the odd occasion when he took it upon himself to ‘select’ certain blues and pinks during design tasks she suspects that he could actually not tell them apart. His daughter Polly recalls him proudly showing her and Penelope a new tie. When the pair expressed surprise that he had picked a light green, Harry realised his mistake. He had thought it was light grey.

As an adult Seidler certainly demonstrated a remarkably well-honed eye when it came to distinguishing variations in light itself and in the subtle nuances of texture; indeed it is entirely possible that his sensitivity in these arenas outstripped that of those around him.

Polly remembers being taken aback by his ability to identify the exact type of light being used in the hallway of one of his buildings (it was not what he had wanted and he immediately asked her to have it changed) but her surprise was not just down to the fact he had correctly gauged the ‘problem’. It was that he had done it at a distance while sitting in his car.

* * *

It is unlikely that Seidler reached any great awareness of these ‘talents’ during his early educative years in Vienna, either at his primary school at D’Orsay-Gasse, which had been a short walk from the family’s apartment in the 9th, or at his secondary school, the prestigious Wasagymnasium, in which his mother enrolled him at the age of ten.

Harry disliked the Wasagymnasium for all sorts of reasons, not least because it took twenty-five minutes to get there from his new home and there was what seemed to him a perfectly good school just down the road. Uppermost in his mind was dealing with the situation both he and Marcell had