Jennifer Taylor

Remembering Harry Seidler 1926-2006

One of the greatest architects of any era to work in the southern hemisphere, Harry Seidler has earned a special place in the history of Modern architecture. Partly trained in an engineering school, his personal technical mastery, especially of reinforced concrete, was rare amongst his own generation of designers, let alone amongst earlier Modernists, and laid the foundation for the fluid, baroque forms he produced with Luigi Nervi that characterized his later work. Matching technical competence with sculptural flair, he was one of those few designers of his age capable of fulfilling the Modernist dream of integrating art and modern technology.

CLASSIC MAKI: PERMISSIVE ORDER AND THE ICONIC IMAGE

In Fumihiko Makis writings and buildings of the late 1970s and 1980s there is afresh, evident awareness of the notion of complexity as a real and involving attribute of the time, and an increased interest in the possibilities of symbolic representation in architecture. Both of these explorations were deployed to extend the constricting limitations of the dogmas of the Modern Movement. That is, he sought a rejuvenation of a tired modernism, and its transformation into a rich and revealing architecture appropriate to the late twentieth century. In these regards Maki acknowledges his debt to the liberating aspects of the positions of architects such as Charles Moore and Robert Stern, and Robert Venturi, notably Venturis Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture of 1965, which had laid the way for a loosening of the constraints of the doctrines of orthodox modernism. Makis architecture of the time, however, bears little resemblance to the popularist indulgences and excesses of American Post Modern architecture. In his hands the theoretical ideas became translated through the Japanese perspective, and the buildings emerged with a customary elegance and restraint.