AUSTRALIAN CLIFFHANGER.

Teetering on the edge of a cliff, Harry Seidler's latest remarkable house is an assertive work in the tradition of Heroic Modernism, shaped equally by global culture and technology and local influences from site and place.

One of the few Modernists of the postwar generation to continue working in the Heroic tradition, Harry Seidler is best known for his innovative and sometimes controversial urban high-rise structures (see for instance AR August 1991 and June 2001).

At the other end of the scale, Seidler also has an outstanding record of house designs, of which this recently completed holiday house in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales is the latest. He was acquainted as a student in the US with such luminaries as Gropius, Breuer, Albers and Niemeyer. His early career in Sydney was distinguished by carefully sited timber-framed houses, strongly influenced by Breuer's New England work; they fitted surprisingly well with Australian building traditions.

This house owes more to Niemeyer, with whom Seidler worked in Brazil, and to Seidler's own later inclination as a mature architect towards sculpted and bold forms. It stands in direct opposition to the more modest and restrained tradition of contemporary Australian residential architecture established by Glenn Murcutt, Philip Cox and Rex Addison, whose sophistication and foreign influences are mostly concealed by more obvious regional elements. Situated in the midst of wilderness and dramatically poised on the crest of a red sandstone escarpment overlooking a river, Seidler's design asserts itself as a self-consciously Modern work, shaped as much by a global culture and technology as by the rugged landscape it inhabits so forcefully.

Seidler achieves this splendidly confident result through a number of classic Modernist devices. A simple, 'L'-shaped plan accommodates bedrooms, bathrooms and other private rooms in the shorter leg along a north-south axis at the rear, parallel with the cliff. Living, dining and kitchen are grouped in one large space in the other, longer leg pointing westwards over the cliff edge.

Functional and spatial division into cellular and open plan spaces is further marked by a drop in floor level from east to west which follows the fall in the rocky plateau. The north-south axis is also picked up again by a swimming pool cut out of the rock to the north and by a separate garage to the south, the two being linked by a continuous sandstone retaining wall running under the house, where it forms part of the basement. A differentiation of the structure from heavy below (reinforced concrete floors, random rubble walls and fireplaces) to lightweight above (steel superstructure) helps to root the house securely into its site. This classic design is combined with more recent concerns with energy efficiency, the isolated house being by necessity relatively self-sufficient in power, heat and water supply, as well as waste management and bush fire sprinklers (which are fed from the swimming pool/reservoir).

What turns this essentially straightforward and mostly familiar configuration into stunning spectacle, is Seidler's handling of the curved, overhanging lines of the white painted steel roof, which seems to float above the rest of the house and the yawning space beyond the cliff, defying gravity. Made from curved steel beams with differing radii using new industrial technologies and covered with corrugated steel roofing bent to suit -- a local touch there -- the sculptured roof shapes loudly proclaim an artistic intent as well as modern technique. A suspended steel balcony thrusting its way out below the dipping roof line from the living space invites visitors (those who don't suffer from vertigo that is) to step out into the void and reinforces the generally assertive tone of the design. Heroic Modernism is dead? Not in Seidler's hands.

Architect

Harry Seidler & Associates, Milsons Point, NSW, Australia