The exhibition "Australia: Seidler's Modernism" curated by Vladimir Belogolovsky managed to travel the world, from Tallinn to Sao Paulo, until it finally reached Moscow. It is dedicated to the greatest Australian architect of the 20th century: it was Seidler who brought the principles of modernism and the "Bauhaus style" to Australia.
The exposition consists of photographs, copies of drawings and sketches, video materials. In the photographs, Seidler appears as an open person with a pleasant smile - in one picture he poses with the photographer Max Dupin near the house, the project of which was developed for his mother, Rosa Seidler, in the other - he walks along with Walter and Isa Gropius. However, his fate was not easy: after the Anschluss of Austria by Germany, 15-year-old Seidler had to leave his native Vienna and begin a series of travels across different continents. But during these wanderings, he absorbed the experience of the best architects of the middle of the 20th century: his teachers were the Bauhaus masters Walter Gropius, Joseph Albers, Marcel Breuer, and Oscar Niemeyer. The architecture of Harry Seidler is a synthesis of the modernist searches of his teachers and contemporaries, embodied in buildings on the Australian soil far from current trends.
The exhibition features the most famous of the 120 buildings of the architect in Australia, Europe, North America and Asia. Among them - the skyscraper Australia Square, built in Sydney in 1961-1967; in the drawing, its constructive solution, developed by Seidler together with Pierluigi Nervi, resembles a children's pyramid: in the same way, its parts are "strung" on top of each other. The Australian Embassy in Paris (1973-1977) has a curved façade reminiscent of the fantastic and free architecture of Oscar Niemeyer, the same can be said of the North Apartments (2004) and Horizon Apartments (1998) in Sydney. According to the architect's wife Penelope Seidler, such curves become a favorite motif in Seidler's works only at the end of his life, although he worked in Niemeyer's workshop in Rio in the late 1940s, before moving to Australia.
But the key theme of Seidler's work and the exhibition is private residences. These are spectacular modernist villas with huge glazed surfaces, raised above the ground on stilts - quite in the spirit of Le Corbusier's precepts. The exhibition also includes Harry Seidler's first project in Australia - the house of his mother Rosa Seidler, built outside Sydney in 1950, and the famous Berman house with a boldly curved roof (1999), and Penelope and Harry Seidler's own villa (1966-1967).
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a collection of many photographs of works of architecture and sculpture, as well as reproductions of paintings that influenced the work of Harry Seidler. Here you can find everything: from the drawing of the villa by Barbaro Andrea Palladio and the baroque facades of Francesco Borromini to the silhouettes of the buildings of Oscar Niemeyer and the colored plan of the roof garden by Roberto Burle-Marx. Traveling the world and learning everything new, Harry Seidler combined epochs and types of art in his work (he looked for inspiration not only in architecture, but also in sculpture, painting and design) and threw these impressions into his projects. At the same time, the architect, throughout his 60-year career, remained a firm adherent of the ethical principles of modernism - ideas about social housing, rational construction, energy savings through the thoughtful use of daylight, etc.
The exhibition about Harry Sideler is small in size, but it allows you to get acquainted with the work of the architect in detail in a chamber setting. A separate plus is its location on the territory of the Moscow Architectural Institute, so it will be especially easy for a new generation of architects to get acquainted with the experience of one of the classics of world modernism.
