Brave New World Celebrating the legacy of Modernist designers in Australia.
A series of events explores the Modernist movement and the postwar designers who revolutionised our urban landscape.
It’s a mistake to think of Modernism as a flatpack design formula that can be achieved by emptying a room and utilising a lot of glass, wood, stone and right angles. Modernists from the 1920s to the 1970s were doing more than just stripping back ornamental fripperies. They were building a whole new world that felt every bit as bracing and young as minimal interiors look now. “Imagine a house where every single part provides usable space,” says Dr Caroline Butler-Bowdon, director of strategy and engagement at Sydney Living Museums. “In a Modernist house, every centimetre matters. And all the small parts build the aesthetic: the design, the rugs, the art, the ceramics, even the music on the turntable contributed to living inside a work of art.”
The Germans call this Gesamtkunstwerk, others call it smarter living – a house where you can breathe. It’s an idea strongly expressed in ‘A Modernist Season’, a series of events and exhibits curated by Sydney Living Museums at the Museum of Sydney and Rose Seidler House, the bandbox-perfect early work architect Harry Seidler designed for his mother in 1949.
Located in Turramurra, on Sydney’s North Shore, Rose Seidler House is a highlight for international archi-tourists. In a suburb replete with mock Tudor manses and McMansions, the clarity of its design stands out. This home was one of the first built by the young Bauhaus-schooled architect and swiftly became the most talked-about house in Sydney.
‘The Moderns: European Designers in Sydney’ brings to light a cluster of architects less famous than Seidler and some lesser-known furniture designers who flourished in a brief and idealistic window of time. Sadly, all that remains of one home by Hugh Buhrich is a photograph by Max Dupain, yet designophiles will surely zero in on the dollhouse-like exterior wood panelling and sweet little concrete steps. The untold story of Modernist pioneers is one of daring and chutzpah. If you feel nervous painting your front door cadmium yellow, imagine how much courage it took for the Hillman family to commission Dr Henry Epstein to design a boxy white house with a porthole window in sedate, waspy Roseville (on Sydney’s North Shore) in 1948!
Furnishings are another important part of the story and this show includes a dining chair by Paul Kafka from 1959 that is beautifully odd. Penelope Seidler, architect, aesthete and regular contributor to Modernist events in Sydney, is always forthright about furnishings. “What’s the point of designing a great house and not investing in great, ageless pieces?” she says. “When we moved in [to Killara House], we bought expensive things, really good things and I still use them – every chair, every table, every sofa – 50 years later. That’s the value of beautiful design.” Seidler leads the tour of Killara House, the Brutalist home she and Harry built in 1966. It’s probably one of the best examples of a creative risk paying off, for her generation and all who follow. Double-height ceilings, interior timber panelling, raw-cement finishes and big bold modern art are the hallmarks of her interior and, to a degree, many of the houses built after 1950 by architects with flair.
The legacy of these houses is that everyone can aspire to live in a more functional, inventive and playful home. What strikes you most about this brief burst of postwar Modernism is how young it still looks today. And how groovy.
All the small parts build the Modernist aesthetic: the design, the art, the ceramics – even the music.
‘A Modernist Season’ is on at Rose Seidler House and the Museum of Sydney, July 22–November 26. sydneylivingmuseums.com.au