The Moderns, Museum of Sydney: the problem with living in style

Inhabitants of modernist dwellings may be living in the alienation of self-representation, not the ­reality of home.

Frisco Furniture Store, Punchbowl, 1963, designed by Lukacs & Gergely Architects.

The Moderns

Museum of Sydney, until November 26

Modernism, perhaps above all in architecture, was instinctively drawn to amnesia, to the obliteration of memory and tradition and the multifarious echoes of cultural reference. This was in part a condition of its instinctive, if naive, belief in the possibility of radical renewal; but it was also a reaction against a cultural environment that had become stifling in the course of the previous century.

The 19th century was the period in which culture became self-conscious and consequently was mobilised by governments and revolutionary movements alike. The concept of culture — the valorisation of local and traditional ways of life and beliefs as against the universal values of the Enlightenment — was an invention of the romantic period, and when the romantic idea of culture was combined with the Enlightenment ideas of the citizen and the state, a powerful and dangerous hybrid called nationalism appeared.

The official view of art was broadly that it should celebrate national culture and promote the moral and political values of the state. Early modernists such as the impressionists, in contrast, show no interest at all in the social and political correctness of their day, and the aesthetic movement of the fin de siecle defiantly promoted the slogan of art for art’s sake.

In architecture, nationalist interest in native traditions lay behind the gothic revival, but the reappropriation of historical styles spread into a more general eclecticism that made all past ­idioms available for re-use according to a semiotic and didactic system: thus the gothic style was used for churches and universities, romanesque or byzantine for synagogues, Greek classical for art galleries and libraries, high renaissance palace for clubs, and various combinations of baroque and neoclassical for banks.

And this is not to mention the particular architecture of railway stations, a grand new category of edifice in the 19th century. St Pancras in London (1868) was said by Kenneth Clark to resemble “the west end of a German cathedral combined with several Flemish town halls”. Hotels and department stores were also new architectural categories, and the biggest example in Sydney, the Queen Victoria Building, was erected in a neo-byzantine style.

From an architectural point of view, what was unsatisfactory about this eclecticism was that styles that had originally arisen out of an organic combination of technical resources, available materials and social and cultural needs that were unique in each case were now being detached from their roots, treated as mere signifiers or labels and, even worse, applied as superficial adornment over structures that were increasingly made of the modern materials of steel and concrete.

Modernist architects sought to derive simple new forms from the real structural principles of modern buildings, and to avoid stylistic elements that did not arise naturally from the structure and materials of the building.

This development can be seen long before World War I, but the modernist impulse and the rejection of memory and tradition were inevitably given new impetus by the disaster of a war that seemed to represent the bankruptcy, or at least powerlessness, of tradition. Thus it is not surprising that so many modernist architects came from central Europe, the area most devastated by the war and especially by its aftermath in which empires collapsed and societies were thrown into disarray.

It was from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary that many architects and designers, especially Jews, left for the English-speaking world in the face of the rise of Nazism which, unlike Italian Fascism, was generally hostile to modernism. A few of these, like Harry Seidler, are well known, but this exhibition surveys others who made a new life in Australia, and in some cases achieved significant success, but who have been largely forgotten in the past few decades.

Artes Studios window display, 1961.

Many of the architects in particular had difficulty establishing themselves here because the Australian authorities did not recognise European university qualifications and it was necessary to submit to an arduous examination process in order to have the right to set up a business as an architect; some of those in the exhibition avoided this hurdle by working either as consultants or as in-house designers for corporations or public bodies.

One man who made a successful career in Australia was George Korody (1890-1957), a Hungarian who founded the influential Artes Studio; an interior has been reconstructed with several of his pieces, including a light and elegant armchair — the timber is left in its natural colour, because Korody believed it was a crime to stain Australian woods dark to resemble European ones. Nearby is a portrait of Rabbi Porusch by Sali Herman (1960), evoking the central European and often Jewish communities that were among the first clients for modernist designers. There is also a desk made for the Bonyhady family, which had in an earlier generation, in Vienna, been patrons of the Wiener Werkstatt and of Gustav Klimt.

Hans Peter Oser (1913-67) from Vienna and his French partner Jean Fombertaux (1920-75) were responsible for one of the showcases of modernist design in Sydney at the time, the BOAC travel centre, illustrated here in photographs. Hugo Stossel (1905-2002) designed the handsome and modestly proportioned modernist block of flats in Elizabeth Bay, opposite Elizabeth Bay House, known as St Ursula, but as we see from further photographs, also produced some much less appealing tower blocks in Darling Point that helped to destroy the original architectural character of that part of Sydney.

Exterior of house at Seaforth, 1955, designed by Lukacs & Singer Architects.

Here and elsewhere we may notice a common problem with modernist architecture: the individual houses built for wealthy families on comfortable blocks, often integrating the natural environment in spite of their love of austere geometric forms, tend to be well-designed as spaces for living, even if the rather bare interiors, as they appear in architectural magazines, are unlikely to survive the clutter of real life.

When the same idiom is applied to large-scale or mass housing, however, the sense of humanity is soon lost and a kind of anonymous uniformity depresses the spirit. Such buildings often try to make up for the lack of architectural character by offering splendid views of the harbour, but in doing so they demonstrate a complete disregard for the original urban fabric.

Another case of the same dilemma can be seen with the furniture designer Paul Kafka (1907-72), originally from Vienna. He began as a maker of fine individual pieces of furniture but soon realised there was much more money to be made in designing mass-produced fittings for hotel chains such as Sheraton and Travelodge. Michael Gerstl (1908-75), also from Vienna, seems to have devoted himself more to private commissions, and there is an elegant armchair and built-in sofa and sideboard unit that came from the Schwartz House in Rose Bay.

Alex Gemes (1911-94), from Budapest, was a designer who manufactured furniture of many kinds through the firm Berryman. There is an advertisement included in the exhibition that asserts: “Berryman complements an oriental mood … elegantly … or Spanish, Scandinavian, or Colonial … or maybe a Classical mood.” Here, in other words, the original austerity of modernist style has succumbed to a new version of what modernists deplored in 19th-century eclecticism. Style is a matter not of absolute aesthetics but of a set of associations that the consumer mixes and matches to reflect what they like to think about themselves and their own character.

A very talented designer who originally worked with Gemes was Susan Kozma-Orlay (1913-2008), represented here by photographs of a work that is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum: a sophisticated drinks trolley that looks like a compact cabinet but opens out and unfolds to hold glasses, bottles and so on This piece is interesting too in its combination of a chrome-plated metal chassis and rubber wheels that are entirely industrial and akin to the trolleys found in hospitals or restaurants, with a unique and finely handcrafted piece of cabinet work. The contrast seems, once again, to sum up the tension between handmade, bespoke quality and mass-produced cheapness that we also see in the modernist architecture of the time.

Another woman who appears rather obliquely in the exhibition is Margaret Michaelis (1902-85), an Austrian who came out to Melbourne, but unfortunately stopped working after a few years. She was a photographer of architecture rather than an architect, but some of the photographs here are of high quality, like the portrait of a lady from the 1940s. There are also pictures of dancers and a finely composed photography of a house and swimming pool in which light and dark are used to create animation and a sense of depth.

A cartoon by George Molnar, 1956.

The most entertaining items in this exhibition are the cartoons by George Molnar (1910-98), a Hungarian who became an architect and lecturer on architecture but also one of the best cartoonists of his generation. His reflections on architecture and development in particular have the acuteness of an insider. There is a drawing from 1960, for example, of some architects moving picnickers away from a place where they intend to build an open-air eating facility.

From 1959 there is a cartoon of a man sitting on the bumper bar of his car in a traffic jam, reflecting “this simply means that we are enjoying a high standard of living”. Another, also from 1959, has a group of planners looking at the plans for the Domain Expressway as though it were an abstract painting, and suggesting that the amount of bitumen could be extended.

Perhaps the most interesting of Molnar’s cartoons, however, has a man lounging on the first-floor balcony of a modernist house, while his wife chides him from the garden: “Darling, you know we’re not supposed to use the balcony, spoiling the crystalline proportions of the building.” In the background, a bemused figure with a pipe is seen in a ramshackle and old-fashioned house. This cartoon can hardly fail to call to mind the contrast, in Jacques Tati’s film Mon Oncle, of the sterile modern house of the desperately upwardly mobile consumerist family and the run-down but human building in which Tati’s own character lives. The puzzle is that Tati’s film came out in 1958 and this cartoon is dated 1956: is this a remarkable case of Molnar anticipating Tati, or did he know something of the film that was in production by 1956?

In any case, the point is clear: austere ­modernist forms and a quasi-industrial pursuit of efficiency and mechanisation may not ultimately be the best ways to design homes for human ­beings to live in. And those who choose to dwell in them may be living in the alienation of a self-representation rather than in the ­reality of a home.

The Other Moderns: Sydney’s Forgotten European Design Legacy, edited by Rebecca Hawcroft (NewSouth Books, $49.99).