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…

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,…

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…

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.…

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…