Susan Kozma-Orlay
Susan Kozma-Orlay (nee Zsuzsa Kozma) (1913-2008) studied graphic and furniture design at the School of Applied Arts in Stuttgart and the Kunstgewerbeschule (School for Applied Arts) Vienna. She then worked in the Budapest office of her father, renowned modernist architect and designer Lajos Kozma. Despite a high profile career, as a Jewish architect Lajos Kozma…
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Henry Kurzer
Henry Kurzer (1920–1992) arrived in Australia from Poland in 1938, aged 18. He graduated in architecture from Sydney Technical College, and in the 1950s designed a number of cafe and restaurant interiors. His interior work included the design of all the fitted units, lighting features and many of the murals, which were produced by a…
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Ervin Graf
Hungarian architect Ervin Graf oam (1924–2002) was sent to a German labour camp during World War II. After the war, his initial application to enter Australia as an architect was rejected, and he successfully reapplied as a bricklayer, arriving in 1950. In 1952 Graf subdivided a poultry farm in Sefton and built 19 houses, doing…
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Henry Cowan
Professor Henry Jacob Cowan AO (nee Hans Jacob Cohn-Salisch) (1919–2007) taught at the University of Sydney from 1953 until 2003. In 1935, aged 15, Cowan had fled Germany for England, where he studied civil and mechanical engineering. With the outbreak of war he was sent to an internment camp in Canada. Returning to the United…
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George Surtees
Hungarian George Surtees (nee Szirtes) (born 1922) trained as a decorative artist at the Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest. After internment in a forced labour camp during World War II, he and his wife, Suzie, left Europe and arrived in Australia in 1950. With no English, Surtees found work designing commercial exhibitions and displays, before…
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Imre and Gyula Soos
Hungarian brothers Imre (1925–1998) and Gyula (1927–1994) Soos were prominent designers in Sydney during the 1950s, Imre as an architect and Gyula as a designer. Their 1954 ‘flat for bachelors’, with creatively integrated furniture, was featured in Australian House and Garden, and their ‘three way wonder’ adjustable recliner retailed at Grace Brothers department store; now…
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Laurence Tibor Rayner
Hungarian architect Laurence Tibor Rayner (1911–2007) emigrated to Australia in 1939. From 1950 to 1957 he lived in Melbourne, where he played a key role in the design of the 1956 Olympic Games infrastructure, before returning to Sydney. Rayner’s best-known Sydney project is the four-level Baxter apartments he built for himself at 85 Drumalbyn Road,…
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Frank Zipfinger
Austrian architect Franz Johann (Frank) Zipfinger (1923–1969) designed for the KLM airline in the Netherlands and throughout Asia before emigrating to Australia in 1951. He registered as an architect in 1953 and completed a number of residential and commercial projects and interiors. His design of the One, Two, Three Milk Bar, Double Bay (1958), was…
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Henry Rossler
Born in Prague, Henry Rossler (1928–1992) and younger brother Peter arrived in Sydney in 1948, the only members of their family to survive the Holocaust. Rossler graduated in architecture from Sydney Technical College in 1955 and began a modernist practice based in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Over three decades he designed numerous houses and commercial projects.…
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Ferdinand Silvan
Ferdinand Silvan (nee Silberstein) (1902-1983) began his practice in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, before gaining several large-scale commercial commissions in the regional city of Trenčín. Silvan’s functionalist designs included an apartment and cinema complex and the state-of-the-art Dr M Hodza Business Academy, both of which were featured in the British The Architect & Building News and the…
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The Other Moderns 