Burdekin House display and silent auction

The Sydney moderns exhibition includes an interpretation of the modern living room designed by Sydney graphic artist Hera Roberts for The Burdekin House exhibition in 1929.

Staged in a colonial-era mansion on Sydney’s Macquarie Street, The Burdekin House exhibition juxtaposed antiquarian interiors on the ground floor with six rooms of modern design upstairs. Created by local artist-designers – including Roy de Maistre, Thea Proctor, Adrian Feint, Frank Weitzel and Roberts, and architects Henry Pynor and Arthur Sadler – these rooms emphasised the new streamlined aesthetic and colour orders of cosmopolitan modernity.

Roberts’ room design is an arresting mix of French style moderne (art deco) accents in chairs and moldings, American skyscraper-style bookcases, and a rug after the geometric compositions of German Bauhaus textiles. She also made use of cubes, cylinders and pyramids – the basic shapes that French architect Le Corbusier had promoted as the building blocks of modern design.

This reconstruction is based on black-and-white photographs of the exhibition taken by Harold Cazneaux and a colour impression of the room published in the October 1929 edition of The Home.

Click on one of the small images below to browse the slideshow, and watch video of the reconstruction process.