The Harry and Penelope Seidler House is a heritage-listed modernist house located at 13 Kalang Avenue in the Sydney suburb of Killara in the Ku-ring-gai Council local government area of New South Wales, Australia. It was designed by architects Penelope and Harry Seidler and Harry Seidler & Associates, and built from 1966 to 1967 by Peter Cussel. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 20 June 2008.
History
Harry Seidler
Harry Seidler (25/06/1923 - 9/03/2006) was born in Vienna in 1923 into a middle-class Jewish family. The Anschluss terminated Seidler's schooling and influenced Seidler's parents Max Seidler and Rose Seidler (née Schwarz) to send their youngest son on a student visa to England where he joined his brother Marcell. On 12 May 1940, he and his older brother were interned as "enemy aliens" - first at Bury St Edmonds, then Liverpool, the Isle of Man (where he turned 17), and Quebec in Canada. Seidler's diaries record the humiliation and discomfort of internment and the fact that he and his brother were interned alongside Nazi prisoners of war.
Seidler's parents managed to follow their sons to England thus escaping the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis. They eventually migrated to Australia where the family's only known relatives outside Austria, the Hermans had moved in the 1920s and established Herman Plastic Mouldings. In 1938 Mr Herman sponsored Seidler's uncle Marcus to move to Australia where he set up a clothing manufacturing business in Sydney. This business established the Seidler family in Sydney.
In 1941 Seidler was released to study at the University of Manitoba where he obtained a Bachelor of Architecture degree with first class honours. After a year of architectural work in Canada he won a scholarship to the Harvard School of Design where he studied under Walter Gropius, former head of Bauhaus. During this time Seidler (and his classmate Peter Oberander) worked with Alvo Aalto, in Cambridge Massachusetts, drawing up plans for Aalto's Baker Dormitory at MIT. He left Harvard's "electrifying atmosphere" with the "feeling that we were destined to play our part in transforming the visual man made world." Seidler's commitment to Modernism was reinforced by his attendance at the 1946 summer school at Black Mountain College where he studied with Josef Albers, former design teacher at the Bauhaus.
In 1946-48 Seidler was chief assistant to Marcel Breuer in his New York office. It was at this point in 1948 that he was enticed to Australia by his mother Rose Seidler to design and build a house for his parents. He came to Australia via Brazil and contact with the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, for whom he worked for several months.
Philip Drew has written that "the dominant influences on Seidler were Gropius, Breuer and Albers; Gropius revealed the ethical basis of Modern architecture and demonstrated the importance of method, Breuer, in a real sense showed Seidler how buildings are made, and developed his architectonic skills as well as influencing his appreciation of space and feeling for materials, but it was from Josef Albers that Seidler learned about the perceptual basis of visual form."
Rose Seidler House at Wahroonga on Sydney's North Shore was Seidler's first commission, for his mother. He was 25 at the time. It was built in 1948-50 as part of a family estate of three houses (including Julian Rose House c.1950 and the Marcus Seidler House c.1949-51). Located on 2.6 hectares of natural bushland overlooking the Ku-ring-gai National Park, it was a watershed in Australian culture. As possibly the purest example of mid-century modern domestic architecture in Australia, it was enormously controversial when built, stimulating much social comment and intellectual debate. Rose Seidler House is listed on the State Heritage Register and is run as a house museum by the Historic Houses Trust.
Seidler's American take on Modernism contrasted with the European modernism of early Australian adopters such as Syd Ancher and Robin Boyd. Seidler was lauded by an older generation of modernists in Australia such as Boyd, Baldwinson and Ancher. Seidler stood his ground and refused to compromise his architectural vision in the face of restrictive building regulations in New South Wales during the 1940s and 1950s, leading to several landmark court cases.
Seidler's early houses from 1949 to 1954 established an authentic version of modern architecture embracing Gropius' modernist principles (which stemmed from the Bauhaus). He designed many houses in either the box-like form of Le Corbusier or the "H" plan of Marcel Breuer. Seidler was busy throughout the 1950s largely designing houses for private clients.