skirted secretaries or bunny girls in evidence', noted
J\1artin Pawley in 1970. Seifert's private rooms in the
practice's head office at Shaftesbury Avenue boasted
ponderous wood panelling, a pedimented door-casing
and repro Georgian furniture, perhaps a con scious
aping of City board rooms. Seifert's pinstripe suits and
regimental ties wouldn't have been out of place in the
Square J\1ile either. J\1uch was made in t he contemporary
pr ess about his chauffer-driven Rolls-R oyce, furnished
with one of the first car-phones in Britain, a nd his Mill
Hill mansion, complete with s'\rimming pool, but Seifert
seems, if anything, to have played down his plutocratic
reputation, and instead projected a persona of quiet
good sen se. As one interviewer noted: 'If he has a
per sonal style it is vaguely establishment ... Ther e is
none of t he hint of bohemia t hat most architects, even
the elderly and t h e eminent, trail behind t hem.'
Above all else, Seifert seem s to have kept uppermost
in his mind that t he work his practice produced was to
serve his clients' requirements for profitability. In an
interview given in the early-1980s Seifert stated firmly
that he was resistant to buildings as 'ideological
statements' and felt that t his chimed wit h his clients'
own e:Arpectations, 'vVhat people want is a building that(J) z
0The NLA Tower (left), also
known as the 50p Building,
next to East Croydon
station, signified the
Manhattanisation of
Croydon during the 1960s.
Sleekly Miesian offices at
London's Euston Station
(above), are due to be
demolished as part
of the HS2 development.
Perspective of the now
demolished Concourse
House (top right), which
loomed over Liverpool's
Lime Street Station.
The 1968 proposal
for the Penta Hotel in
London's Gloucester Road
(right). ltwould have been
the world's largest hotel
with 2, 000 roomsAerial view of Tower 42
(above), the first
skyscraper in the City
of London, originally
designed as the
headquarters of the
National Westminster
Bank. The plan of three
chevrons in a hexagonal
arrangement bears an
uncanny resemblance
to the bank's logo,
although Seifert denied
the similarityis worth the money t hey paid for it'. An architect who
kept progr amme and profit in mind throughout the
design process and wasn't afraid to talk about
architecture in t hose terms, was an obvious asset to a
property developer. That the completed buildings often
looked good, as in t he examples of th e Nat~Test Tower
an d Euston Station offices, can only have helped.
The route of Seifert's success with his clients, then,
was cost-effective, and often striking, architecture
pr oduced efficiently to pr ogramme by architects working
in a soberly appointed office led by a quietly business-like
principal. But n on e of this would have combined to form
one of the most profitable, prolific architecture practices
of the 20th century, wer e it not for Seifert's incredibly
str ong ·work ethic. Seifert described a typical working
day to an interviewer in 1979, when he was 69 years old,
as starting at 7am and finishing around Spm - except on
Thursdays when he attended the opera at Covent
Garden, and Sundays, which he spent at home. E ven his
holidays wer e spent visiting his firm's international jobs.
Writing in 1967, Mary Haddock found that 'Mr Seifert
has very direct views about how you conduct a successful
architectural practice. You work. You work h ard, and
you work all the time.' EwanM Harrison