Though I respect Harry Seidler as an architect I've never been overly fond of his high modernist architecture with its roots in the Bauhaus. He also dislikes criticism (scroll down the page to Angry lecturer) of his buildings. Here is some criticism of Seidlers modernist buildings.
But I do agree with this remark by Harry Seidler:
"To be perfectly honest, Australian architects don't measure up in international terms – I only measure success in those terms. There's nobody and nothing here that sends the blood pressure up. It's a backwater, a provincial dump in terms of the built environment."
Rewrite Australian with South Australian and I'd agree.
Though I think that Adelaide's regional architecture should be conserved as regional cultural heritage, and so is not simply a constraint on the progress of a universal architecture, I also concur with Siedler on heritage:
"All this heritage mania is mindless junk most of the time. I'll defend a heritage building but all of this neighbourhood character stuff is unsupportable. The dictum is, often, if you can't keep the building, keep the front. If there is no old façade, imitate one, copy an old-looking neighbour. The result is architecture reduced to two dimensions with remnants of the old stuck on new buildings like postage stamps. It amounts to nothing more than fakery."
There is a lot of fakery in the new/old architecture in Adelaide. But heritage and high modernism are not the only options. Consider Glenn Murcutt
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 19, 2003 02:53 PM | TrackBack