Harry Seidler’s Sydney Vision

Helen O’Neill, a British/Australian writer, who has worked as a journalist for over 25 years, on The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian and Vogue Australia, The Independent, The Observer and The Telegraph newspapers in the UK, USA’s Marie Claire magazine and Reader’s Digest worldwide. She has won awards in science and health journalism, a Walkley nomination and was the Australian Society of Travel Writers’ Travel Writer of the Year. She has written four books, – her most recent A Singular Vision: Harry Seidler (HarperCollins, 2013). On Monday 20 March 2014, Helen O’Neill addressed The Sydney Institute to discuss why she took up the task of becoming Harry Seidler’s biographer and why he became an extraordinary force in architecture world wide.

HARRY SEIDLER’S SYDNEY VISION

HELEN O’NEILL

Thank you very much to The Sydney Institute for having me along this evening.

The title of my talk is “Harry Seidler’s Sydney Vision”, Harry Seidler being the subject of my latest biography and Sydney of course the city he made his home.

I first arrived in this city fresh from England in the late 1980s. I took a job as a young journalist at The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper and found myself immersed in a crash course in my new culture and its hierarchies – about the personalities, the politics, the assumptions, the controversies.

This is when I first heard the name Harry Seidler, and I remember being somewhat surprised by the emotions he appeared to provoke. From some quarters, there appeared to be a river of venom flowing towards this man. At the time, I found this rather perplexing, after all he was an architect of all things. What was going on?

Around four years ago, I was approached by Penelope Seidler, the architect’s widow, who wanted to ask me if I would be interested in writing a biography of her late husband. After consideration I agreed, and the result is this book Harry Seidler: A Singular Vision – a biography that is authorised but that is in no way sanitised. The Seidler family did not have control over the contents of this book. I would not have an entered such an arrangement on such a project, and what a project it turned out to be.

Harry Seidler’s life story is an epic tale, taking in some of the most traumatic and significant events of the twentieth century. It is a fascinating narrative, particularly when it comes to ideas and issues relating to Australia, and to the city of Sydney in particular.

This architect’s story raises issues of perspective, of debate, of what progress should entail, of cultural cage-rattling, of control, and of what it means to be an outsider.

These issues are fuelled by Harry Seidler legacies some of which are easy to see, such as the buildings he created – in Sydney, particularly, but across Australia, in Europe and in other parts of the world. There is also the artwork that is in place as an integral part of these buildings. And then there is the more nebulous question of the influence he wielded, and what this has resulted in.

Someone said to me the other day, “Oh, Harry Seidler – people love him or they hate him.” Well, it is by no means quite as simple as that. As my research progressed I realised that some of the heavyweights of international architecture wanted to have some form of involvement with this book. Oscar Niemeyer – one of the most significant architectural figures of the twentieth century, was very keen to contribute. IM Pei, perhaps best known for his glass pyramid at Paris’s Louvre museum, wanted to talk to me about Harry, a man he’d once described as one of the world’s great architects. Lord Richard Rogers, another big modernist name, echoed that sentiment. “There are not many like him,” he told me.

Upon Seidler’s death in 2006, the architect Glen Murcutt described the difference between Harry’s ruthless public persona and the person that his friends had come to know. He said: “Harry was a roaring bear, but can I tell you, he was also the most cuddlesome person you could find. Harry had a gentleness, a kindness … this is a great loss to Australia, to have lost Harry.”

Yet, during the process of writing this biography, I also encountered utter disdain. One person I mentioned this book to, said to me quite bluntly: “Helen I don’t understand why you’d take this on. Why on earth would you write a book about the man who ruined Sydney?”

The answer to this question lies in who Harry Seidler was.

His life story begins in Vienna, Austria on the 25 June 1923 when he was born to a reasonably affluent family. His mother is called Rose, his older brother Marcell and his father, Max, jointly runs the family textile business. The Seidlers are Jewish.

My book is liberally illustrated and one of the early images shows young Harry in Vienna with the first real love of his life, his bicycle. He looks so happy in this picture; he has not a care in the world. The year is 1937 he doesn’t know it, but everything is about to change.

The following year brought the Anscluss with Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Austria and, in January, Harry Seidler started a diary. It would be the first of a series of diaries – this boy had the instincts of an historian – and from it we get a bird’s eye view of an extraordinary moment in time as seen through the prism of an unusually intelligent, if perhaps sometimes lazy, teenage schoolboy.

Read the book for the full picture but in short Harry and the family had to leave. The efforts of his older brother Marcell, who already happened to be in England at this time, proved critical. Marcell managed to get Harry out and found him a home with an aristocratic pair of elderly sisters in Cambridge. Harry had fallen on his feet. He began studying at Cambridge Technical College.

His parents managed to escape eventually as well. At this point, the Seidlers were all in England, unable to live together but at least in the same country, and safe. Or were they? In 1940, 16-year-old Harry, and his older brother Marcell, were interned by the British as enemy aliens.

Winston Churchill would later call this refugee internment policy a deplorable mistake but that admission came years too late for the tens of thousand of people, many of them Jewish, he locked up. Harry was one of the youngest.

Again, he kept diaries, and these are searing accounts of what he saw, what he experienced, and of his sense of pure injustice. He would be incarcerated for a year and a half, in England, then in Canada – it had a big, enduring impact on him.

When the Australian government started the indefinite detention of child refugees Harry Seidler spoke out against this policy. He said he found it “painfully similar” to what had he lived through, described it as “a grave act of inhumanity” and “torture”, and declared that “politicians ought to be put in jail themselves who allow that”.

Harry and Marcell’s incarceration, first in England then in Canada, brought them together with many other people including intellectuals and professionals, and it was here that Harry Seidler first immersed himself in architecture, learning everything he could from the people around him. It is possible this single-minded focus insulated him to an extent from what was taking place in internment. Certainly it changed his life.

Seidler used his passion and determination to get into the architecture course at Manitoba University and on 4 October 1941 – “the greatest day of my life” as he would call it – the authorities let him go. The moment was bittersweet. When Seidler walked away, his brother Marcell had yet to be released.

Outside detention, he became entranced by Modern Architecture. He sought out Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus who himself had to escape Nazism and who, by the 1940s, was running the Graduate School of Architecture at Harvard. Seidler considered Gropius a visionary and Modern Architecture a philosophy as well as a methodology. He would become evangelical about it. Seidler also made sure he studied under Josef Albers, another Bauhaus master, at Black Mountain College, and worked for Marcel Breuer in New York.

But his parents, by now settled in Sydney, desperately wanted the family back together. The young architect did, too, this is clear from his letters. But he was torn. He wanted to be at what he saw as the centre of the architecture world, and in his mind this was definitely not Australia.

So his family hit upon the perfect lure; they would give this ambitious young architect carte blanche, his first real commission, in which he would build his parents Max and Rose a family home. He agreed to visit to do this but made sure he spent three months with modern architect Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil on the way across

In September 1948, Seidler arrived in Sydney and did not appear to be terribly impressed by some of what he saw. He constructed “Rose Seidler House” in the upper north shore Sydney suburb of Wahroonga, where it remains to this day. It is an elevated design, that plays with space and “talks” to its surroundings in a way we understand quite clearly now but did not so well back then.

Harry Seidler had not walked into a vacuum. There were other good modern architects at work in Australia but nobody with quite his attitude, his ferociousness or his ruthless determination.

He hit Sydney like an asteroid, and the ripples of his impact can be felt still. Before he knew it, he had a raft of commissions for other houses. He began fighting with authorities to get his visions realised; indeed Harry Seidler would ultimately never stop fighting because for this man architecture was personal, really personal; and he nailed his colours to the mast very early on.

Rose Seidler House has a mural. For Seidler, art and architecture would be profoundly linked, and would generate a significant bounty of commissioned artwork – you can do a tour around Sydney of art that would not be there had this architect not determined that it should. Within a few years of arriving in Sydney he had begun commissioning Max Dupain, another modernist master, to photograph his work.

This marked the start of a close collaboration which would go on for well over four decades and which would come, in a sense, to define both men. Through these pictures – in the early days these are largely pictures of buildings in Sydney – you get a literal sense of Seidler’s vision.

One of the great joys of book research is unexpected spin-offs.  While I was researching this book, Penelope Seidler handed me a box containing a unique series of black and white Max Dupain images. They were beautiful photographs of Paris that would not exist had it not been for Harry Seidler.

The story behind these images is a revealing one. I tell it in the book and it will be told again soon because these images are to become part of a special exhibition being held at the Art Gallery of NSW from May until September 2014.

But, coming back to Seidler’s Sydney vision, there is another angle. Early on in his life here, this polarising man who was never afraid to speak out, started making public comments about the need for real urban planning, about the dangers of unfettered urban sprawl, about how to properly control development to create communities, neighbourhoods, cities that worked.

In my book, I detail an instance in 1994 where Seidler publically pitted his vision for Sydney against that of Frank Sartor, who was then Mayor. It’s a fascinating moment, underlining many things, including the fact that Seidler never stopped trying to explain how he saw things and why. The single-minded passion for his home city is evident – and his frustration with those who do not see things as he does.

Speaking of passion, a pivotal moment for Seidler was meeting Penelope Evatt, daughter of the barrister and Labor politician Clive Evatt, and the women Harry would in 1958 marry. This pairing would prove enormously influential and in my biography I look at how that influence played out – alongside the influence of another vitally important partnership Seidler engaged in during the 1950s, with

Dick Dusseldorp, the man would found the company Lend Lease.

During Harry Seidler’s career, his office of architects produced in the region of 180 different building designs but his reach goes far beyond his own work. He fought for things he believed in, and against what he saw as injustice; in particular his relationship with Jorn Utzon and the Sydney Opera House is intimate, far-reaching and important.

I go into this in full in my biography Harry Seidler: A Singular Vision but do want to quote one key Seidler saying – a comment made when asked by the press what he thought of Utzon’s winning Opera House design. He said: “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.”

Everything about the Harry Seidler’s life story is large: the world events it encompassed, the buildings created, the personalities involved, the debates fuelled, the emotions provoked and the legacies which remain. Where the man’s story ends is a world away from where it began.

There are times when non-fiction outstrips fiction. Certain life stories are epic and that of the architect Harry Seidler is undoubtedly one of those.