Where modernism came from, who brought it to Sydney, how shortages, councils, height rules, the sun and the landscape changed it, and what has since been demolished or listed.
Modern architecture took shape among European architects working from the first decade of the twentieth century to the 1930s. They rejected historical styles and largely abandoned ornament. They favoured framed structures of reinforced concrete, steel and glass, which allowed open plans. Their buildings tended to be asymmetrical, were meant to be seen as free-standing objects, and showed their internal functions on the outside. Many of these architects saw design as a means of social reform.
One centre of these ideas was the Bauhaus. Walter Gropius founded the school in Weimar in 1919. It moved to Dessau in 1925 and to Berlin in 1932, and closed in 1933 under Nazi pressure. Le Corbusier’s work matured during the 1920s, and his concrete buildings after the Second World War later informed Brutalism.
The name International Style comes from an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1932, curated by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson. It presented lightweight construction, modern materials and flexible planning as the essence of the movement, and largely passed over the social concerns of the Europeans. Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer moved to America as the Nazis rose to power. By the 1950s the American version had become corporate, typified by the tall office block in a skin of aluminium and glass. Sydney took up both lines: European ideas arrived through people, and the American office tower followed.
The first route was through Australians working abroad. In the 1930s many young architects travelled to work and study, mostly in England. Sydney Ancher, Arthur Baldwinson, Walter Bunning and Morton Herman were among those who came back to promote the new architecture. The State Library of NSW records that Ancher travelled in Europe from 1930 to 1936 and brought home “flat roofs, and strong clear rectangular shapes, rendered in white”. Baldwinson worked in London for Maxwell Fry and returned in 1936.
The second route was migration. Rebecca Hawcroft puts the number of European refugees who reached Australia before the war at some 8,000, and they included architects who had studied and practised modern architecture. Hans Peter Oser and Hugo Stossel both trained in Vienna and arrived in 1938. Henry Epstein built at Pymble and Roseville in 1947, and Hugh Buhrich, a refugee from Germany, at Castlecrag from 1948. The first histories of Australian modernism, written in the 1960s, identified none of these designers.
Harry Seidler arrived in 1948. Born in Vienna in 1923, he was interned in Britain and Canada as an enemy alien, studied at the University of Manitoba, then studied under Gropius at Harvard. The Bauhaus closed while he was still a child, so his connection to it ran through his teachers: Gropius, Breuer, and Josef Albers, under whom he studied at Black Mountain College. He worked as Breuer’s assistant in New York and spent some weeks with Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil on the way to Australia. (The Dictionary of Sydney gives 1925 for his birth and 1949 for his arrival. The City of Sydney’s heritage study gives 1923 and 1948.)
His parents had invited him to design them a house at Wahroonga. Rose Seidler House, built from 1948 to 1950, is a raised white box of timber and glass with a ramp, sandstone walls and bushland beside Ku-ring-gai Chase. It won the Sulman Medal in 1951, the first of five for Seidler, and its heritage listing records its influence on domestic architecture in NSW.
The listing for the house notes that it was built “in a period of conservative building regulations, scarcity of materials, skills and industrial process”. General building restrictions were lifted only in June 1952, with materials still scarce and costs high. Berger House in Elizabeth Street received its permit in 1951 on the condition that imported materials be used. Its planned window shading was dropped, and on completion around 1955 it gave Sydney its first lightweight curtain wall aesthetic.
Local councils were a further obstacle. The State Library’s index to Seidler’s scrapbooks lists headlines such as “Council won’t pass modernistic roof” (1949) and “Architect wins dispute over house design” (1951). In 1952 he won an appeal against Ku-ring-gai Council’s refusal of a glass house at Roseville. His only course, he said later, was the Land and Valuation Court.
every time I designed a house and submitted it to local council it was refused on the grounds of design.
From 1912 a statute limited buildings in Sydney to 150 feet (45.72 metres). An amending Act of 1957 widened the Minister’s power to approve greater heights, tied that power to floor space ratios, and set up a Height of Buildings Advisory Committee, which adopted a maximum ratio of 12:1. (The Dictionary of Sydney places the abolition of the limit in the 1960s.) Caltex House had already exceeded the limit on a technicality arising from the levels across its site. Docomomo describes the AMP Building as “the first building to officially break” it.
The AMP Society applied to exceed the limit in early 1957, with a design by Peddle Thorp & Walker. The building opened in 1962 as the tallest in Australia and the first free-standing skyscraper in NSW. It had a steel frame encased in concrete and a central core. It stirred public debate because of its height relative to the Quay and its curved facades.
A boom followed. Between 1967 and 1969, 162 schemes with floor space ratios above 10:1 were approved, though many were never built.
The City of Sydney’s heritage study calls Australia Square the most celebrated civic initiative of the time, and it came from the private sector. Lend Lease amalgamated 30 sites and several narrow streets, and Harry Seidler & Associates designed the scheme with the Italian engineer Pier Luigi Nervi. The Plaza Building on Pitt Street was finished in 1964 and the 50-storey tower in 1967. The tower covers about a quarter of the block. Its round plan was chosen in response to setback regulations and to leave as much open space as possible, with a plaza reaching all four streets. Alexander Calder’s Crossed Blades was installed on the George Street forecourt, and a tapestry by Le Corbusier hung in the lift lobby.
Plazas then became a matter of regulation. A draft ordinance exhibited in the mid 1960s allowed bonuses for open space and pedestrian access that lifted the maximum ratio from 10:1 to 12:1. The heritage study suggests this may reflect New York’s 1961 zoning code. The Floor Space Ratio Code of December 1971 went further: bonuses for plazas, through-site links and retail frontages could raise a base ratio of 6:1 to as much as 12.5:1. The City’s own planning history records mixed results, including “underutilised plazas”, and the heritage study notes that “pocket plazas” tended to erode the line of street facades and gave pedestrians little benefit.
The heritage study observes that Australian office blocks “needed to respond to the sun, more so than in the northern hemisphere”. The glass curtain wall reached Sydney from America in the 1950s. Qantas House, opened in 1957, was glazed above the ground floor in anti-actinic glass. Architects soon began to shade their buildings from outside. Bunning & Madden’s Liner House in Bridge Street, designed in 1958, added louvred sun hoods to its curtain wall and won the Sulman Medal in 1961.
Seidler’s first office building, designed in 1954 for Associated General Publications in Sussex Street and later known as Horwitz House, had full-height adjustable aluminium blades across its west face. The heritage study regards it as probably the city’s first serious attempt at sun control, and traces the idea to Seidler’s time with Niemeyer, who had worked with Le Corbusier on the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro. In the 1960s Ken Woolley’s State Office Block set its windows well back behind the external columns, in what the study calls a “verandah effect”.
During the 1950s younger architects began to explore a local version of modernism in houses. The name is thought to date from 1962, when Milo Dunphy wrote that their work “may soon be regarded as the Sydney School”. Davina Jackson places its heyday between the mid 1950s and the early 1970s. These architects used brick, timber and stone on steep bush and coastal sites, often under raked roofs, and looked to Frank Lloyd Wright, traditional Japanese building and Alvar Aalto.
Peter Muller designed the Audette House at Castlecrag, of 1952 to 1953, after a Fulbright scholarship in America. He responded to the landscape and to Walter Burley Griffin’s plan for the suburb, using red brick, exposed hardwood and floor-to-ceiling glass. Ken Woolley’s house at Mosman of 1962 stepped down rock outcrops on a grid of twelve-foot squares. The approach spread to public buildings, as in Don Gazzard’s Wentworth Memorial Chapel at Vaucluse of 1965, on a rock outcrop above the harbour.
Accounts of the group differ. Some describe a reaction against international modernism. The heritage study describes “more an expression of shared beliefs”, one that took on open planning, response to sunlight and fresh air, and honest structure. Historians have also argued over whether a school existed at all, and Jackson writes that most Sydney architects “didn’t take sides in the style war as starkly” as the usual contrast of Muller with Seidler suggests.
Premier Joseph Cahill released the international competition for a building on Bennelong Point on 15 February 1956, and entries closed that December. The Opera House’s own account gives more than 223 entries from 28 countries, and the Dictionary of Sydney gives 220. The four assessors included Eero Saarinen. On 29 January 1957 Cahill named Design 218 by Jørn Utzon the winner. Utzon was a 38-year-old Dane who had worked briefly with Aalto and had met Wright and Mies on his travels. The assessors called his scheme “clearly a controversial design”.
The Opera House belongs to the more expressive modernism of the 1950s. The heritage study says it exemplifies the movement’s delight in structure, thin shell concrete in particular, and that it pioneered the use of computers in design, in Ove Arup’s office.
Work began on 2 March 1959 with key parts of the design unresolved. The spherical solution for the roof came in late 1961, after about four years and twelve proposals for its curvature. The last of 2,194 precast shell segments was placed in January 1967. After the change of government in 1965 the minister, Davis Hughes, stopped payments to Utzon in a dispute over money for plywood prototypes. Hughes announced Utzon’s resignation on 28 February 1966. Utzon regarded himself as forced out, and he left Australia on 28 April and never returned.
A panel of Australian architects took over on 19 April: Peter Hall for design, Lionel Todd for documents and David Littlemore for supervision. Hall recommended a single-purpose concert hall and his team designed the theatres, interiors and glass walls, working within the arched superstructure, which he called a “found object”. Queen Elizabeth II opened the building on 20 October 1973.
In 1999 Utzon agreed to develop guidelines for future change. The Reception Hall reopened to his design as the Utzon Room in September 2004. A colonnade on the western side followed in 2006, and the building joined the World Heritage List on 28 June 2007.
Modern buildings often replaced older ones. The Hotel Australia was demolished in the early 1970s for Seidler’s MLC Centre. A competition scheme of the early 1960s proposed towers across The Rocks, keeping only the Maritime Services Board building and a relocated Cadmans Cottage. It did not proceed, partly because of economic conditions and partly because of a preservation movement reacting against “the wholesale imposition of Modern Movement ideals”. At McMahons Point, residents and architects including Seidler first opposed an industrial rezoning. Resident action then stopped the redevelopment plan that followed, and only Blues Point Tower of 1962 was built. It has often been criticised and is now on the North Sydney heritage register.
The modern buildings then became vulnerable in turn.
An extraordinarily large number have been demolished and many innovative buildings of exceptional architectural quality have been lost in Central Sydney.
Losses named in the study include Seidler’s Lend Lease House, AGC House and the Goodsell Building. Woolley’s State Office Block was demolished in 1997 and replaced by Renzo Piano’s Aurora Place. (Its completion is given as 1965 by the Australian Design Centre and 1967 by the heritage study.)
Such buildings can also be hard to conserve. Butyl caulking in glazing systems had a life of about 20 years, and asbestos has to be removed or sealed in. Replacing the whole curtain wall at Qantas House had been suggested; after investigation it was drained and resealed.
Listing has come gradually. Rose Seidler House joined the State Heritage Register in 1999. The house at Killara that Harry and Penelope Seidler built for themselves in 1966 to 1967 followed in 2008. After the 2019 study the City of Sydney proposed nine items for its local plan, among them Town Hall House, the MLC Centre, the William Bland Centre by Oser and Horwitz House, and the amendment was published in January 2021. Ministers twice declined to list Sirius in the 2010s, against the Heritage Council’s recommendation. The AMP Building joined the State Heritage Register in January 2025, and Seidler’s first apartment building, Ithaca Gardens of 1960 at Elizabeth Bay, was added in 2025.