"Harry Seidler: Modernist" is a retrospective celebration of the life and work of Australia's most
controversial architect. Sixty years of work is showcased through sumptuous photography and
interviews with leading architects from around the world.
Who was Harry Seidler? A Jewish boy from Vienna, sent by his family in September 1938 to England where he first joined his brother at university, then got interned in 1940 and later shipped to Canada, where in 1941 he was released on parole to study architecture at the University of Manitoba, became Australia's best known architect implementing the Bauhaus principles for the first time down under.
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Once graduated with first class honours from the University of Manitoba in 1948, Seidler attended Harvard Graduate School of Design under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. He also went to Mountain College and came very much under the influence of Josef Albers. After having worked as assistant to Marcel Breuer in New York and briefly with Oscar Niemeyer in Rio de Janeiro, he built a home for his parents who had migrated to Australia. The Rose-Seidler-House made him famous in Australia where he finally settled and married Penelope Evatt.
Many more homes followed, sometimes hotly contested as not "blending with the surrounding landscape". Seidler also built Australia Square and MCL Centre office towers in Sidney and the Australian Embassy in Paris to name but a few of his landmark buildings. In the 1980s he also collaborated with Italian structural engineer Pier Luigi Nervi who elegantly extended the spanning power of concrete. Coming full circle, his native Vienna commissioned a major public housing project which as "Wohnpark Neue Donau" demonstrates Seidler's knack for modern urban living quarters.
He summed it all up himself in saying: "As much as the needs of fact, the needs of spirit and the senses, must be satisfied. Architecture is as much a part of the realm of art as it is of technology, the fusion of thinking and feeling."
Daryl Dellora's documentary is one of the very rare films on architecture, mainly narrated by the architect's widow Penelope Evatt-Seidler. Other contributors include photographer Max Dupain, biographer Helen O´Neill, Lord Rogers and Glen Murcutt.
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Directed by Daryl Dellora
Produced by Screen Australia, ABC & Film Art Media
Licensed by Poorhouse, 2016
