The Seidler File: Glass-jaw Bully
The Good Oil
Mr Harry Seidler was the elder statesman of architecture in Dr Garry's own country of Australia. He was without doubt a brilliant architect: praised for more than fifty years. Even we can see that.
“the gentlest jape and calmest cavill”
In Australia, you couldn't do much else but praise him. Like most of the humourless architectural elite, Mr Seidler construed the gentlest jape and calmest cavil as a vicious personal attack on his entire being: the more so if it arose from one beneath his intellectual stature. Which, it would seem, was the rest of the planet.
Rather than rely on his manifest talent and works to speak for themselves; he used his power, influence and wealth to quash unfavourable comment. Of course, he didn't see it that way: Mr Seidler thought he was upholding standards.
For almost all those fifty years, Australian architects, critics and academics lived in trepidation of offending his genius. Mr Seidler rarely had to say a word. He was the chief gatekeeper of Australia's tiny and incestuous critical and academic community. A flick of his eyebrows, and your career in Aussie architecture, literature or academia was on a fast road to nowhere. No more gallery openings for you!. If you were too dim to get that hint, then a perhaps a few remarks about Australia's exciting defamation laws might leave you with second thoughts.
Contents
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Constant battles.
- Telephoning a reviewer. Are you an authority on my work?
- Telephoning a professor. What shadow?
- The Patrick Cook cartoon. Mr Seidler could dish it out, but he couldn't take it
Constant battles
Mr Seidler was engaged in a constant battle with the hoi-polloi: ‘uneducated and insensitive’, was his favourite epithet for anyone who ventured a critique of any of his buildings. He waged many a legal battle (like this attack on the Pig'n'Whistle) against local building authorities and private individuals, whom he saw as his inferiors, bourgeois philistines working to thwart the architectural millennium. No doubt he was a better designer than many of those who opposed him, but, as they say, ‘Taste is in the eye of the beholder’.
Mr Seidler telephones a reviewer
Typical of Mr Seidler's standover tactics was his conversation with an eminent Australian architectural scholar. The scholar had been asked to review a book on Mr Seidler's work. A call from Our Harry duly followed. Mr Seidler hoped that the review would be fair-minded: very fair-minded, indeed. The academic replied that he would write as he wished. The temperature dropped. Mr Seidler asked on what basis the scholar considered himself an authority on ‘my work’. The conversation continued frosty. As a courtesy, the scholar later asked the publisher if they wished him to continue with his review. They thought better of it.
The scholar thought himself intimidated into writing a good review. We doubt if Mr Seidler thought that he was intimidatory. We're sure he thought he was simply trying to assure a competent review. But through such means did Mr Seidler bully an entire profession.
Mr Seidler telephones a professor
Many years ago Dr Garry's old department at the University of Sydney was commissioned to carry out a sun shading study of one of Mr Seidler's buildings. The local consent authority was worried about overshadowing of popular parks and streets. Mr Seidler lodged a call to the head of department at the time, Dr Henry Cowan. The report's conclusions would not be untoward, would they? And if they were, the department should realise that there might be consequences.
To his eternal credit, Dr Cowan was not to be cowed. He stated clearly and firmly that his department would conduct an unbiased study, and would report as the facts said. Dr Cowan heard no more.
The Patrick Cook cartoon
Like most bullies, Mr Seidler could dish out punishment, but he couldn't take it. The best known case involved this cartoon by Mr Patrick Cook, published in an Australian national weekly, the National Times, in the early 1980s.
The Patrick Cook cartoon.
We thought the cartoon was rather hard. It could apply to any number of major building developers, but not to Mr Seidler's work.
But then, that's what cartoonists are supposed to do: satirize. Mr Seidler was furious. No crocodile tears or feigned shock here. How dare he be lampooned! How dare a mere member of the public criticise his expertise, his judgement, his taste, his skill!
So he sued for defamation.
He had forgotten, though, the rules of court reporting (we owe these details to the excellent discussion by the legal firm Simpsons Solicitors ). The original cartoon had appeared on the inside of a limited-circulation elitist paper (think the UK's Guardian). When the case eventually came to court, he was mortified to find the cartoon reprinted at twice the size on the front page of every newspaper in the country. Oh, the pain! the pain!
The jury tossed the case out.
Mr Seidler appealed. To his discomfiture, Judge Glass in the New South Wales Supreme Court dismissed his appeal in 1982. In the concluding comments about this case, Simpsons Solicitors wryly quote a defence constructed by Dr Johnson and put by his friend James Boswell in a Scottish defamation case two hundred years before:
‘Whether there was, or was not, an animus injuriandi, is not worth inquiring, if no injuria can be proved. But the truth is, there was no animus injuriandi. It was only an animus irritandi, which, happening to be exercised upon a genus irritable, produced unexpected violence of resentment.’