When Harry met the suburbs — Robin Larsen Design | Architect Sustainability Daylesford Melbourne Australia

When Harry Seidler first arrived in Australia just after the Second World War, it wasn’t a pretty picture, or at least the messy red-roofed suburbs sprawling over the flat brown land were not. It wasn’t a love story by any means. The Australian bush and beaches were a different matter. It is not like he really wanted to come here. He didn’t want to return to war-worn traumatised Austria and he was over Britain where he had endured the humiliations of war internment. But he had experienced the excitements and stimulations of North America, fed by the ideas of European emigres, and it was only the inducements or insistence of his parents that he agreed to drop into this place at the far end of the world, if only for a short time.[1]

He grew up in a Europe that was in a state of upheaval, with old regimes, ideas and certainties crashing down and intense people busily trying to reconstruct new ones in their place. Despite technology’s vital part in the both World Wars, the slaughter fields of the First and the aerial killing of civilians in their cities in the Second (to name just a few), evidently more technology was the solution in this new remade world. Despite the uncertainties, sudden shocks and convulsions created by the world wars, the unstable economies, and the political fermentation of revolutionary ideas, and answer it seems was to start from scratch, throwing out all the old ways, rethinking the fundamentals of how things should work. In essence, there needed to be more revolution not less. Just as war leads to a sharply-focused rationality, where the urgency of the moment is paramount and all available elements must be drawn together to support a single objective, that is victory or at least survival, so in this modern world, ways of living would be reformed on a rational basis, with old habits or entrenched conventions and anything else holding back the better world of the future had to be jettisoned. The promise was freer and healthier lives, with easier movement and connections, more access to sunlight and the outdoors, and less human drudgery. New technologies and the notion of continuous progress would be embraced to create a wholly new and better world.

As well as his sharp American suites and distinctive bow ties, Harry brought these notions with him. And you might think that the suburbs were about to change. They would never be the same again as the new ideas, technological solutions and possibilities rolled through them. They would be stripped of the past, beginning again on a rational basis not simply the result of accumulated habits. From places weighed down by the past, by the accretion of heavy ornamentation and fixed notions of form, they could suddenly become places of freedom and enlightenment not slow quiet comfort and contentment.

In his first revolutionary house in Australia, Harry did what he was taught to do by his European masters, he turned everything upside down or inside out. The idea was to have gardens on roofs (not a ring of comforting foliage and flowers about the house), houses detached from the ground (not reassuringly anchored on the earth, allowing easy access), walls as smooth light-weight screens of glass and opaque materials as needs demanded (not substantial traditional materials offering thermal and other protection), and roofs as flat planes to complete the sense of an abstract cubic shape (not a comforting cap to cheaply shed water). In his house at Wahroonga, Harry managed to unite both the front and back yards (and thereby upset traditional Australian notions of where to locate display flowerbeds and where to grow the more utilitarian vegetables). [2] He was able to avoid anything resembling a front façade. There were ramps instead of stairs. While it had no roof garden, the house was elevated on poles and was painted white, displaying no commitment to any arbitrary or emotional choice of colour (except for the a painting of his own creation where only the reliable primary colours of red, blue and yellow were used). So he managed to tick many of the boxes he was required to do and well as some of his own. So all in all it was suitably revolutionary, or enough so, to get good press and shock the local population, as well as impress his professional audience in Europe and North America. Evidently the future was floating, white, simple solids, starkly abstract forms set against the Australian bush.

Of course, this was the first of many new, and sometimes shocking, buildings that he designed, both houses and later buildings. His eye for publicity, his learning at the feet of the famous European master architects, and his superb timing – beginning his work as expert opinion shifted almost wholly to this new modern architectural revolution, and as the post-war economic boom began to gather speed, helped to ensure his success. But it was perhaps his singular focus and zeal – almost religious – propelled by the dark times in Europe and seeking a new light, that ensured his success

Harry was completely opposed to the suburban houses that he first encountered getting off the boat from Brazil, or arguably the very notion of a suburban house, then or now. Famous for his confrontations with authorities, who he seems to have viewed as mortal enemies, representatives of the suburbs and the discredited past, illogical obstructionists and driven more by habits of thought than any sound basis.

The suburban house had its origins in the romantic notions of the nineteenth century where the rationalising influence of science, and technologies that it inspired, was rejected in favour of a partial return to nature with all the sensuality, stimulation, and comfort that this suggested. Suburbs could be about unpressured quiet repose or more active play. They could allow engagement with plants and animals, both those we chose – in our gardens and our pets, and those in broader nature. Houses could help maintain a connection to the earth and the physical, not simply a concentration on the intellectual and abstract. In short, they would allow the possibility of full-rounded human beings not narrowly-focused manual or clerical workers.[3]

How did Harry’s revolution pan out? Ten years later, with the revolution seemingly underway, the suburban house was accommodating as usual. As in the past, it took the impression of the new without changing its essence. Just as it could embrace the idea of Craft, traditional European cottages, exotic Japanese homes or spreading bungalows in the Californian forest, the Australian house could romanticise technology. Post-war houses were built in the era of the space race, jet airliners linking us to the world quickly and cheaply, and other new and surprising technologies. Of course, houses needed to take on some of this aura. The earthy and heavily textural could be jettisoned in favour of pure smooth surfaces. What now could be thought of as extraneous and peripheral – anything from the past, anything decorative - , could be cut away to focus on the essentials: what was needed to efficiently protect or provide privacy and at the same time allow openness and light as demanded.

But for all that, house largely kept their bricks and the tiled or corrugated steel roof. Bricks became uniform walls without distinguishing openings by expressing their arches or edging them with decorative mouldings. Brickwork did lighten up, usually moving to the lighter range of still-earthy colours, not the heavy reds and browns of the past. Roofs did make an effort to flatten out, with pitches coming down but not so much as to achieve the flatness that Harry and other might have demanded. Rather than a distinctive curve, gutters took on a simple cuboid form, more a rim around the now-flattened roof which now appeared to sealing the house top. Openings were simply where there were no bricks, preferably with doors and windows fairly indistinguishable, that is planes of glass with minimal frames, now usually durable aluminium. Sensible labour-saving efficiencies that came to all house interiors in the period were packed in for the new houses: built-in furniture with new surfaces; smokeless heating, cooking and washing; new communications to the outside world, and new heating and cooling options.

The experience of a famous and even iconic Australian housing company- AV Jennings – illustrates the changes in the immediate post-war period, and their sought to absorb the lessons of Modernism in the products that they offered. In the late 1950s, perhaps inspired by new architectural designs appearing in the media produced by prominent architects, AVJ produced designs such as the Type 15 house (see image). This had a simple rectangular form, and a low-pitched gable roof that projected over the front driveway that doubled as an entry porch. Apart from this, the front façade appeared simply as a long grid of glass. While not revolutionary in Harry’s sense, this was quite a step from houses of previous times. But this was not to last. A careful examination of consumer feedback and analysis of costs and production quickly saw: a bedroom pushed forward on one side, with the resulting L-shape form capped by a low hip roof (angled down on all sides to the external wall); brickwork creep up the many of the walls (to differentiate windows from doors); doors themselves return to being a solid statement about entry or threshold; and often a comforting (or decorative ?) chimney added. The Glengarry house of 1962 had these elements (see image). The AV Jennings House remained brown, land-hugging, and made the most mild genuflection to Modernism .

Clearly our houses largely failed to lighten-up and lift-off in the way that Harry and many others expected.

How could this be rationalised? Possibly, the changes that were seen represented the first steps - small but important - on a long journey to reform the Australian House. So in the fullness of time, with the spread of a better understanding, perhaps through more education, the Australian housing consumer would eventually embrace the full Modernism model. Lift-off would finally be achieved in the distant future.

But equally, the Australian House could be seen to roll right over the newcomer. The useful ideas and even the romance were added to the existing mix, but much of its essence remained. This was more like another part of its long evolution than a new beginning. How could we not react to the allure of shinny tech that promises so much, dangling so many possibilities in front of us with almost-magical qualities. Imaginations would run wild with the possibilities as they did in science fiction. Of course, we would embrace the new qualities and appearances in our houses. But equally we would wait for the next wave that would come along – as we did - as the last one inevitably fades away.

It is clear after 70 years of experience that Seidler’s Modernism failed to move the suburbs. True it was influential in many ways, with many shining examples, designed with great flair and a sense of experimentation and adventure. Plus there were broad change to the look and feel of house compared to previous times. But the hoped-for radical change did not occur.

It could simply be as many commentators over many years have claimed that the suburbs and their inhabitants are an unimaginative, stolid, inert inherently unmovable mass and so would not be shifted by anything. So that Harry, or anyone with Modernist ideas, turning up on our shores were bound to fail. Or it could be that Harry and the suburbs existing on completely different planes, occupying incompatible head spaces, with conflicting spirits that were impossible to reconcile. So the failure here was with the party wanting to do the wooing. The failure was with the would-be revolutionaries, whose ideas and approach were clearly inadequate. It was a failure of conception and understanding, not appreciating what suburbs were about, not imagining what the suburbs would respond to. With such a woeful approach, it not surprising that they were unresponsive.

Of course Harry, and his revolutionary friends, may have had no inherent interest in seducing the suburbs. Perhaps it was the conflict that appealed – the battering of the suburbanite brain- the perpetual conflict – “superior” minds always needing to prove their superiority – the preference was not conversion so much as perpetual revolution - a perpetual fight.

Images from:

Alice Spigelman: The Life of Harry Seidler, Brandl & Schlesinger 2001, ISBN 1-876040-15-7 (1)

Roy Edwards & Vic Jennings with Don Garden: AVJENNINGS Home Builders to the Nation, Arcadia 2013, ISBN 978-1-925003-24-6 (2 & 3)

[1] Refer biographies:

O’Neill, Helen, Harry Seidler: A Singular Vision, Harper Collins 2016, ISBN 978-14607-5202-9 (pbk)

Alice Spigelman: The Life of Harry Seidler, Brandl & Schlesinger 2001, ISBN 1-876040-15-7

[2] Rose Seidler House, Wahroonga, 1948–50

[3] According to Sennet, the essential appeal that the great Victorian art-critic and social commentator John Ruskin made was to “get in touch with your body”, to not view surroundings as abstract entities to be systematised and routinized. Arguably Ruskin did much to develop our notion of suburbs. Richard Sennett, “The Craftsman”, 2008, ISBN 978-0-300-11909-1, p 109.