Harry Seidler and posterity
Dear Editor,
Congratulations for publishing Philip Goad’s excellent review of Helen O’Neill’s biography of Harry Seidler (February 2014), which was a complete contrast to Elizabeth Farrelly’s derogatory review in the Sydney Morning Herald (11–12 January 2014).
Goad is right to stress Seidler’s internationalism and to point out there were other émigré architects besides Seidler who deserved recognition. Australian architects such as Sydney Ancher, Morton Herman, Arthur Baldwinson, and Raymond McGrath not only knew about but designed modern buildings in advance of Seidler’s arrival in Australia. Ancher’s Prevost house at Bellevue Hill in 1937 was the real thing. By comparison, the Rose Seidler house, designed for a site at Foxborough in the United States, was a deft instance of rubber-stamp modernism that ended up by accident in Killara.
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