This week Julie Power, writer on architecture and design (amongst other things) in the SMH, wrote about the Holland House in Sydney's Middle Cove. A spectacular, cantilevered glass tour de force from 1962 (see pic in the title). It was being inspected by modernist aficionados galore.

In the article I was quoted saying, “Gruzman would take an idea and then push it to excess… (the) Holland House was … dramatic and relentless with the entire eastern wall covered in windows.” But I also said, “Gruzman (was) …quick to criticise others, including Harry Seidler … and launched a personal attack on Wheeler at one stage."

This is the tricky backstory.

In the 80s and 90s I was a teacher in architecture at the University of Sydney. I had high regard for Gruzman. He had designed some wonderful houses, and I extolled their virtues to students. Joern Utzon described the living room of his own house in Darling Point as being the finest in Australia (a quote that Gruzman himself often repeated).

I also had a small architectural practice providing experience for undergraduate students. One project we’d designed was a house in Darling Point, in Sydney's eastern suburbs. I had strayed into Gruzman's territory. I didn’t know it, but he hated the house, and it’s solid defensive form.

I was now on his blacklist, not being invited to present at his exhibitions of young architects he liked (hello, Peter Lonergan and Julie Cracknell). Nor in his publication of his gathered articles for Kerry Packer’s Bulletin (the ‘real one’ he once caustically told me, not the rag that was the ‘Architecture Bulletin’).

I thought he was up for a little bit of public debate on architecture. In August 1990 I responded to a letter from Gruzman in the SMH that had denigrated the profession and needed to be called out. Amongst other comments in my letter, I wrote:

“Neville Gruzman seeks to lay the blame for Australia's urban ills on a seriously out-of-touch architecture profession, in particular as expressed in the recent architectural awards. It is he who is out of touch. He furthers the public's perception of the profession as an internally bickering group of aesthetes, ignorant of society's needs. When the opposite is now the case.

“Few architects care for the technologically based solutions that Mr Gruzman advocates. Most architects now seek an architecture more concerned with finding forms that fit and respect the landscape and the diversity of people's needs. The recent awards reflect these changes.”

I described some of the better awarded buildings and continued:

"They seek to repair the city and country to make good some of the damage done by the blind pursuit of technology that led to the urban blight of the ‘60s and ‘70s. This is a huge change in the architect's thinking, and it is to be applauded, not denigrated.”

You see, some things never change. I could have written that letter any time over the last 35 years, with the same sentiments about supporting architecture needing to meet people's needs and place.

Gruzman wrote to me personally on his letterhead:

“Good letter Tone - the only problem is that it exposes a rather limited, perhaps half-baked philosophy… you and those who design like you simply ignore the true responsibility of the architect and build as though there was no tomorrow.

“You take the easy, superficial road. You are wrong, Tone, and no doubt you are embedding in your unfortunate students this wrongness, which is also wrong. You are even dangerous.”

And then he closed with a PS: “It might be a good idea if you posted a few copies of this letter on the school's noticeboards.”

I was banished. To be punished with his risibly stupid suggestion to defame myself by posting his letter around the architecture school. He had no knowledge of my teaching work, which focussed on developing every student’s ‘voice’, not following one ideology.

Nevertheless, the good that came from it was my long-professed avoidance of “argumentum ad hominem” (playing the person, not the idea). Never attack the architect, even if I have hypocritically lapsed from time to time, including this week.

Cross-Sections are Friday musings from Tone Wheeler, formerly of Tone on Tuesday. Amateurs draw plans; professionals draw sections – never at cross purposes.

Tone Wheeler

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