Sydney Ancher 'An Australian Modernist' Part 1

This is an online event:

These seminars are live presentations by the Historic Houses Trust and Docomomo (Documentation and Conservation of the Modernist Movement) in Australia, recorded at the Rose Seidler House in Sydney, Australia, during August 2005.

The trilogy of presentations outline the work of Sydney Ancher and explore for different perspectives the character of his personality, the influences on his work and the legacy which he left to Australian architecture.

Part 1: Dr Harry Margalit, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Architecture, University of Sydney, provides an introduction to Syd Ancher, with a timeline of his remarkable career. He discusses the major influences of the period and examines the question ‘what caused the shift in architectural thinking?’ which led to Modernism.

Part 2: Stuart Murray, partner with Syd in Ancher Mortlock & Murray gives his personal insight into what it was like to work with Sydney Ancher. Stuart recalls Ancher as a self-confessed anti-intellectual, deliberately rejecting rational justification of his work.

“Absorbed in things learnt by observation and experience, he used his creative ability to transmit them into fresh statements. ”…Syd Ancher’s buildings have rare quality that speaks and reveals the true spirit of the man…”

Part 3: Jennifer Hill, in association with Docomomo, provides and overall survey of Sydney Ancher’s work, with particular emphasis on the Maytone Avenue houses in Killara, Sydney. She discusses the importance of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier as major influences, with particular reference to the concept of the ‘Miesian Spatial Continuum’ which underlies the Maytone project.