I grew up in a fibro cottage in the shadow of two housing commission towers built on the site of the former Rosebery Park Racecourse. The stables in the back of little houses like mine were the only remaining signs of that history; those towers dominate all of Eastlakes. And yet they’re not the kinds of structures that would vindicate Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness. At nine storeys, the two are well proportioned, set back from the street among ample community space, and so comfortably landscaped among what Boyd recognised as the fundamental necessity of trees as to recede quite elegantly from the streetscape at ground level. As a child I always enjoyed their form, their scale, the shapes they made in the sky as I walked through their park.

Only many years after moving away did I learn that these apartments were designed not by some expedient government draftsperson but by Harry Seidler, who alongside Boyd was the leading architect of Australian Modernism and, in his own right, was Australia’s foremost exponent of the values and methodologies of the Bauhaus. It’s not those values and methodologies, however, that have established the Bauhaus as the most influential design school in history; instead, it’s a set of objects that, thanks to a combination of strong early commercialisation and poor global intellectual-property protections, are commonly found in homes and offices all over the world. And so, like many of us, I grew up in the shadow of the Bauhaus legacy, and two decades later I would go on to work there on a project of great interdisciplinary scope focused on Sydney, critically analysing that legacy’s place in our contemporary world.