Sydney’s first high-rise, the Blues Point Tower by architect Harry Seidler, will turn 64 next week.
With its external influence of Bauhaus artist Josef Albers, the 83-meter-tall, 23-story building completed in 1962 was considered a symbol of modernism.
Long before today’s transit-oriented development, Seidler argued against urban sprawl, suggesting that cities needed more density and housing near public transportation and open spaces.
Seidler’s collaborations with artists and designers such as Albers; his former architectural mentor, Marcel Breuer; and Italian architect and engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, are celebrated in a new exhibition opening on Saturday at the University of Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing museum.
“In his hands architecture rarely came alone,” said architect and historian Kenneth Frampton.
Each of Seidler’s projects – regardless of genre or scale – came with art that he would choose. The owners of the house remembered how he chose the painting. At her mother’s home, the Rose Seidler House in Wahroonga, she painted herself a brightly colored mural, similar to the ones she saw in Brazil.
In Australia Square he commissioned sculptor Alexander Calder to design Crossed Blades. Its curved walls were hung with tapestries by Le Corbusier and Victor Vasarely, which were later replaced by Sol LeWitt. Color Bars.
Art historian Dr Ann Stephen says Seidler was an international model of modernism, ahead of his time. “You had to be a visionary to realize what he did. You can’t imagine how conservative Australia was in the late 1940s when Seidler arrived,” he said.
Stephen and Dr Paolo Stracchi, senior lecturer in architecture, participated in the exhibition. Modern immigration. Harry Seidler Architecture.
Seidler was born in 1923 in a Viennese-Jewish family. After Austria was occupied by the Nazis in September 1938, he was 15 when his family sent him to England.
His wife, architect Penelope Seidler, said Seidler’s design career began in England when he completed a course in carpentry, metalwork and brickwork at the Cambridgeshire Vocational School.
He also learned English. Seidler later told a historian that when he arrived in London, the only thing he could read (and understand) was “the one-way street”.
Although he was a refugee fleeing the Nazis, he was later interned as an enemy alien in England.
He was then deported to Canada, where he wrote that Nazi soldiers were interned with European Jews in a concentration camp. In 1941, then aged 18, he was given a conditional discharge to study architecture, and by 21 he had graduated.
The exhibit includes Seidler’s diaries and scrapbooks, including Penelope Seidler’s sketches, including Blues Point Tower, and the shirt Seidler wore in the concentration camp.
There are also works of art from the artists he commissioned, photographs, architectural designs and drawings, and rare video footage.
Arriving in Australia aged 24 after studying in the US, Seidler introduced “a unique cosmopolitan culture to Australian cities – not only through his buildings, but also through the art he commissioned to open up large public spaces,” Stephen said.
He had the technical skills of his profession and construction, and the ability to realize his vision, he said.
At a time when many Australians lived in basements or detached houses, he said Blues Point Tower showed “the joy of being able to live in an apartment in the middle of the city.”
Long before public opinion turned on Blues Point Towers with critics saying it was a blemish on the harbour, the tower was described as a “multi-million dollar home”. It was a luxury lifestyle, the reports said, an ideal solution for tenants, an example of the towers of the future and “everyone’s idea of home units”.
page double spread New York Times reported Seidler had placed the skyscraper diagonally on the block to maximize residents’ views.
Residents said they had a lot of free time. No more mowing the lawn.
If Blues Point changed the way Australians lived and worked, it also changed the life of 18-year-old Penelope Seidler, then Evatt.
He met Seidler in North Sydney in 1957 when architects and others were lobbying against zoning for industrial use.
Seidler was nothing like the young Penelope knew. “That was a big deal,” he said Thursday, touring the exhibit. “He was driven, that’s for sure. He was clearly the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”
They soon became engaged, and married on his 20th birthday in 1958. They worked and practiced together until his stroke in 2005.
He died in 2006. After Seidler’s death, Australian architect Glenn Murcutt said he had brought art to architecture. “While he wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea … he brought a level of architecture that few architects have seen in this country.”
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Julie Power is a senior reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect through X or email address.
