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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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,…

Read More

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…

Read More

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.…

Read More

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…

Read More

George Reves

Hungarian architect George Reves (nee Revesz) (1910–2004) graduated from the Royal Joseph Technical University, Budapest. He worked in Paris for modernist Auguste Perret before returning to Budapest in 1934 to begin his own practice, designing a number of houses and apartment buildings. Following the German annexation of Austria, Reves fled Vienna, arriving in Australia in…

Read More

Ernst Korner

Ernst Korner (1888-1966) was born in Czechoslovakia and studied architecture in Vienna. He then worked in Sweden and Prague before establishing a successful practice in the city of Ostrava, in the north-east of Czechoslovakia. In 1928 Korner designed the Rix department store in Ostrava, a radical design following strict functionalist principles. With strong white horizontal…

Read More