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The house that was to become
the beginning of his Australian career was strongly
influenced by his work on a house with Breuer
called the Thompson House. Never built, it was
however published in the January 1948 issue of
Arts and Architecture, an impressive example of
Breuer’s complex interplay of various influences.
His experience with this and other examples of
American timber housing that were crucial respecters
of site and location was used to formulate the
style of the Rose Seidler House. The site of the
house was to be the North Shore suburb of Wahroonga.
Now part of Sydney’s prime real estate and
home to large family houses on generous blocks
in bushland settings. In the immediate post war
period the area had been the home of the Sydney
Adventist Hospital (The San) and had only seen
some small-scale pre war residential development.
Covered in lush bushland, the site was a world
away from the dense city blocks of his childhood
and the small terraces of traditional Sydney suburbia.
Undaunted by the somewhat alien
and unfamiliar Australian landscape, though impressed
by its marked similarities to the landscape of
his formative time at Black Mountain in North
Carolina with Josef Albers, Seidler was convinced
of the areas natural beauty and set about designing
his first Australian project. It was to be one
that espoused and cemented his philosophy that
"architecture is not just drawing up plans
and specifications for a building. It is a total
attitude to the physical environment around you."
The 200m_ house is designed
around a concrete slab floor that supports a timber
superstructure. This features a hollowed out square
plan that is exposed on all sides, reflecting
Seidler’s desire to maximise interior space.
The living space and sheltered outdoor dining
area or terrace has been opened out in order to
take advantage of the sites spectacular views
of the rugged Ku-ring-gai National Park. The house’s
living and sleeping areas are separate, linked
by a central family room. This family room can
be joined with the alcove-type bedrooms or be
made part of the living space by a dividing curtain.
The mass of the building is
relieved by the opening up of the central terrace
and an adjacent two storey high light well that
is used to vertically separate the structure,
allowing bright natural daylight to penetrate
right into the heart of the living space.
The main rectangular form of
the living accommodation structure is connected
to the landscape by a series of ‘arms’
that fan out around it. These are made up of the
ramp, (a common feature in much of Seidler’s
later work), the rough hewn sandstone retaining
walls and the drying yard wooden louvre fence.
They all serve to cement and blend the structure
into the site. It was intended to link the house
to an in-ground swimming pool that would be common
to another house on the site, built later by Seidler,
The Rose House. However it was never completed
and the site remains pool-less to this day.
Internally, the house utilised
the latest in state of the art technology and
for the first time ever in Australia appliances
and white goods were integrated into the deign
from the beginning. In effect, Australia’s
first built in kitchen. Strong bold colours like
blue; yellow and red were utilised on doors, curtains
and built in cabinets. Furniture was a mixture
of modern classics, all chosen to compliment the
mural designed and painted by Seidler in bold
colours on the wall of the outdoor living space.
It included chairs by Eames and Saarinen and lighting
that accented the rough, warm coloured sandstone
features of the living space.
The Rose Seidler House marked
a turning point in not only Australian architecture,
but culture as well. It acts as a beacon illuminating
the nations march away from the mother country
of Great Britain towards the rising tide of US
popular culture. A tide that would not cease significantly
until the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Seidler’s
legacy is an enduring monument of functionalism
and flexibility to modern design.
The Rose Seidler House
71 Clissold Road
Wahroonga,
NSW, Australia
The house is open to visitors
and is now the property of the Historic Houses
Trust of NSW.
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