BARRY BERGDOLL KEYNOTE LECTURE
Wednesday 26 August, 6.30pm – 7.30pm
Auditorium, State Library of NSW
Barry Bergdoll (Columbia University) delivers keynote lecture, On the Move and Localized Modernism: Marcel Breuer from Budapest to Boston via the Bauhaus at the State Library of NSW.
Marcel Breuer, sometime teacher and employer of the young Harry Seidler, was for decades in quest of a place to call home, even as designed scores of houses for himself and others in Germany, England, Switzerland, the United States, and later France. As with the Austrian Harry Seidler, the rise to power of Hitler put the Hungarian Breuer on the move. Yet he was ultimately to create some of the most emblematic architecture of his new homeland in the United States, structures that even came to serve the US Department of State and the Museum of Modern Art in New York as veritable embodiments of a new American modernism. The assimilation of tradition to a constant quest for material and formal experimentation resulted in an architecture open to local engagement and collaboration. The Bauhaus search for universals was gradually inflected to various local contexts as Breuer sought a reconciliation of his continual investigation of new industrially replicable architectural solutions and inspiration from vernacular architectures that were timeless, the quest in the end for a radically up-to-date timeless modern vernacular.
Symposium: Migrating Modernism, Migrating Ideas
Transnational exchanges in architecture and art
Wednesday 26 August – Friday 28 August
State Library of NSW and Chau Chak Wing Museum Migrating Modernism, Migrating Ideas: Transnational Exchanges in Architecture and Art is a symposium bringing together scholars and practitioners to explore how the movement of people, objects, and expertise reshapes art, the built environment, and their cultural meanings.Across three days in Sydney (26–28 August), the symposium traces modern and contemporary exchanges across artistic and architectural cultures, professional networks, and the making of private and public commissions, asking what “migration” produces in terms of identity, authorship, and agency.Keynotes by Prof. Barry Bergdoll (Columbia University) and Dr Lynne Cooke explore, respectively, Marcel Breuer’s work and collaborative networks, and the relation of textiles and architecture.Conceived in dialogue with the exhibition Migrating Modernism: The Architecture of Harry Seidler, the art-focused day examines modernist utopias and broader transatlantic exchanges among artists, patrons, and institutions. The architecture day extends this inquiry to the built environment, exploring how transnational movements shape architectural identity, complicate authorship, and redistribute agency across the professional networks that carry architecture from design conception to material realisation.Please note, registration for events is essential.