Leave it to The Guardian to lead with the outrageous side of Harry Seidler, the groundbreaking Australian architect who died March 19 at 82.

“It doesn’t worry me that people have criticized the building,” he told a Sydney paper four years ago. “What do you expect from illiterate people? They’re insensitive and uneducated, so why should I take them seriously?”

Seidler was talking about the Blues Point Tower, the controversial 1961 apartment tower that was the first of many Australian skyscrapers he designed. Still occupying a prominent place on the list of most-hated Sydney buildings, it became the emblem for the ambivalence Aussies felt for their best-known (if least modest) architect and the man, as the Guardian says, who brought the Bauhaus down under.

Seidler returned the compliment, cheerfully denigrating Aussie taste at every opportunity. “It’s a backwater, a provincial dump in terms of the built environment,” he told a newspaper in 2002. This despite the fact that he lived and did the bulk of his work there for more than 50 years.

Seidler was a refugee from Vienna who fled with his family in 1938, to London, where they were sent to an internment camp, and then shipped to Canada as enemy aliens. Released in 1941, he got a degree at the University of Manitoba before heading to Harvard, where he studied with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer.

After Harvard he followed Joseph Albers to Black Mountain College, worked for Alvar Aalto at MIT, and assisted Breuer in New York before moving with his parents to Sidney in 1948.

And what did he think of Jorn Utzon’s Opera House, Sydney’s most widely admired building and utterly unlike anything he would have designed? We’re happy to report, per The Guardian, that he wasn’t too arrogant to admit it was his favorite Australian building.