Harry Seidler
| Harry Seidler | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
25 June 1923 Vienna, First Austrian Republic |
| Died | 9 March 2006 (aged 82) Sydney, Australia |
| Cause of death | Stroke and septicemia |
| Citizenship | Australian |
| Occupation | Architect |
| Known for | modern houses and skyscraper designs |
| Children | Timothy and Polly |
Harry Seidler, AC OBE (25 June 1923 – 9 March 2006) was an Austrian-born Australian architect who is considered to be one of the leading exponents of Modernism's methodology in Australia and the first architect to fully express the principles of the Bauhaus in Australia.
Seidler designed more than 180 buildings and he received much recognition for his contribution to the architecture of Australia. Seidler consistently won architectural awards every decade throughout his Australian career of almost 58 years across the varied categories – his residential work from 1950, his commercial work from 1964, and his public commissions from the 1970s. He was a controversial figure throughout his long career as he regularly publicly criticised planning authorities and the planning system in Sydney.
Seidler was born in Vienna, the son of a Jewish textile manufacturer. He fled as a teenager to England soon after Nazi Germany occupied Austria in 1938.
In England, he studied building and construction at Cambridgeshire Technical School. Even though he was a refugee fleeing the Nazis, because he was born in Austria, on 12 May 1940, he was interned by the British authorities as an enemy alien, where he was in internment camp on the Isle of Man before being shipped to Quebec, Canada and continued to be interned until October 1941, when he was released on probational release from internment to study architecture at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, where he graduated with first class honours in 1944.
After working briefly for an architectural firm in Toronto, Seidler was registered as an architect in Canada in early 1945. He became a Canadian citizen in mid 1946.
Although he was ten years old when the Bauhaus was closed, Seidler's analysts invariably associate him with the Bauhaus because he later studied under emigrent Bauhaus teachers in the USA. He attended Harvard Graduate School of Design under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer on a scholarship in 1945/46, during which time he did vacation work with Alvar Aalto in Boston drawing up plans for the Baker dormitory at MIT. He then attended Black Mountain College under the painter Josef Albers in mid 1946.
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