In 1980, months after his unsuccessful competition entries for the Australian Parliament House and the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank headquarters, Harry Seidler entered into collaboration with Malaysian architect Hijjas (bin) Kasturi that proved much more fruitful. Their design for an office building for Laylian Realty in Kuala Lumpur was a departure from Seidler’s quadrant geometries of the previous decade, introducing a sinuous “S” profile that would define his subsequent work. Although never realised, Kenneth Frampton has described this project as a “canonical work” that was the “basic prototype for a new generation of medium to high-rise commercial structures.” But Seidler’s felicitous collaboration with Hijjas was evidently more than just circumstantial, arising from a longer term relationship that is part of a larger story of Australian-Asian exchange.

It was during Hijjas’s architectural studies at the University of Adelaide two decades earlier that he had first met Seidler. Beginning in the 1950s, prompted by anxiety about the fragility of democracy in postcolonial Asia, large numbers of Asian students had been admitted to Australian universities for the first time. Hijjas Kasturi was one of 40,000 such students sponsored by Australian Government scholarships under the Cold-War era Colombo Plan with the aim of building transnational understanding and new networks of exchange that might integrate the region and strengthen Australia’s geo-political position. Impressed as much by Seidler’s persona as a modernist in the heroic internationalist mould as he was by his work, Hijjas subsequently played a leading role in the propagation of Modern architecture in Malaysia after his return whilst further developing professional and cultural ties with Australia.

With reference to previously unexamined archival material, the present paper revisits the unrealised Kuala Lumpur project and the shared tectonic culture that resulted from the intersecting professional histories of its collaborating designers.