The Other Moderns: Sydney's Forgotten European Design Legacy [1 ed.] 9781742248400, 9781742235561

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The Other Moderns Sydney’s forgotten European design legacy Edited by Rebecca Hawcroft

A NewSouth book Published by NewSouth Publishing University of New South Wales Press Ltd University of New South Wales Sydney NSW 2052 AUSTRALIA newsouthpublishing.com Published in partnership with Hotel Hotel. Hotel Hotel 25 Edinburgh Ave Canberra ACT 2601 AUSTRALIA hotel-hotel.com.au Molonglo Group Canberra ACT 2601 AUSTRALIA molonglogroup.com.au Published with the support of GML Heritage and the Orlay family. © Rebecca Hawcroft and individual authors 2017 © Design and hero imagery Molonglo Group 2017 First published 2017 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is copyright. While copyright of the work as a whole is vested in University of New South Wales Press Ltd, copyright of individual chapters is retained by the chapter authors and copyright of the design is retained by Molonglo Group. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Title: The Other Moderns: Sydney’s forgotten European design legacy / Rebecca Hawcroft, editor. ISBN 9781742235561 (paperback) ISBN 9781742248400 (ePDF) Notes: Includes index. Subjects: Architecture – Australia – History – 20th century. Architecture, European – 20th century. European Australian architects – Influence. Architecture, Modern – 20th century. Other Creators/Contributors: Hawcroft, Rebecca, editor. Design U-P Cover design U-P Cover image: 1950s typing chair designed by George Kóródy. Image by Hotel Hotel and U-P Printer 1010 All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard. This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

Contents

Foreword by Nectar Efkarpidis Introduction: Remembering Sydney’s European design legacy by Rebecca Hawcroft

8 10

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

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Lessons from things: European design training by Michael Bogle The lucky escapees: European architects in postwar Sydney by Rebecca Hawcroft Ferdinand Silberstein-Silvan: Loss and legacy by Rebecca Hawcroft Custom-made for European tastes: The Gerstl Furniture story by Catriona Quinn Design for happiness: George Kóródy and Artes Studios by Jeromie Maver The Bonyhady desks by Tim Bonyhady From the margins to the mainstream by Rebecca Hawcroft A hidden legacy: Margaret Michaelis’s photography by Helen Ennis Zsuzsa Kozma and the drinks trolley by Rebecca Hawcroft The migrants who built modern Sydney by Tone Wheeler

Q and A: Ken Neale and his furniture Notes Image credits Index Editor’s acknowledgments Contributors

47 69 89 121 145 165 191 213 241 265 270 279 281 285 286

Telephone or typing chair, 1953. Designed by George Kóródy for Artes Studios. Kóródy’s simple and refined design was produced in solid coachwood with upholstered leather or fabric seat. Photographed at Hotel Hotel in Canberra, 2017.

Foreword Nectar Efkarpidis

What binds these stories together was the back-against-the-wall, reluctant yet hopeful search for something better, any place but where they were. They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left. — The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson

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The country we end up being born in dictates many of our opportunities and freedoms. There is a plaque on the border of Italy and France, in the Alps on the Col de Cerise, that reads ‘Through this pass, in September 1943, hundreds of Jewish people from all over Europe came and sought, often in vain, to escape from anti-Semitic persecution. You who pass freely, remember that this happened, and remember that not everyone enjoys the same rights as you do.’ And yet we forget. Today refugees from Africa and the Middle East are routinely stopped at that same border. They come hoping for a better life but they are sent back. All countries, to begin with however, are somewhat of an accident. Our sovereign borders are drawn on top of what was the ancient supercontinent, Gondwana, and before that Pangaea, and possibly many other supercontinents before that. Bits of land pushed around by eruptions and collisions and then much later by people with power drawing lines on a map. In that sense, borders seem to have very little to do with the humans that live inside them. But humanity, through customs and genes, finds its way across those borders – to merge and change and swell. As a first generation Australian these thoughts resonate with me. My father, Anastasios, arrived in Australia in 1963 from the small beach town of Katerini in Greece. He first went to Forbes in New South Wales and then moved to Australia’s capital, Canberra. This is where he met my mother, Mary, who had emigrated a few years after him from Rhodes, Greece. If he hadn’t made this trip my life would be a very different one. At our hotel in Canberra, Hotel Hotel, the story of many is a story we relate to. We worked through many ideas with many friends to make this place. Today, it continues as a site to explore new and old ideas. The process is messy and iterative and authorship is difficult to trace.

What is clear is that it would not be as rich without these influences and multiple interventions. This book tells the myriad stories of a specific group of immigrants – highly skilled but almost unknown modernist designers, photographers, architects and manufacturers who came to Australia to flee Hitler’s Europe during and after WWII. It traces their lives, their work and their legacy. Their arrival had a profound impact on what was at that time a very Anglo-centric nation. They helped shape Australian culture from the 1930s to the 1960s and onwards – during the postwar building boom, when the suburbs exploded and cities evolved in a high-rise motion. We spend a lot of our time publishing our own stories about the people and ideas that have shaped and continue to shape Hotel Hotel. Beyond aesthetics and an appreciation for design, our spaces and furnishings speak of people, traditions and divergent ways of thinking. Stories of migration to Australia are also ones we tell. The Salon and Dining rooms, where food and drink are served on the ground floor, are our loving salute to the often over-the-top living rooms of Greeks and Italians who arrived here post WWII. In these rooms we have collected a number of mid-century furniture pieces. Central to the space is the work of European cabinetmakers of the likes of Paul Kafka and Michael Gerstl. We acquired these pieces through our close friendship with Ken Neale who spent the last 25 years on an object and furniture hoarding spree that took him all over Australia and New Zealand. As custom-made pieces without a label or maker’s mark, their origins were not easy to trace. Through much research however their stories have unfolded. They tell of the postwar homes they once occupied, but also of the craftspeople who made them. We are drawn to these pieces for their familiarity as well as their craftsmanship. We like how they morphed, slightly awkward, to take on ‘Australian’ attributes – as an animal might evolve over time when taken from its natural habitat and placed into a foreign environment. These pieces seem odd when compared to those from Europe. Their oddity makes them beautiful – you can see the hand of the maker; they aren’t machine-made carbon copies. They are imperfect and uniquely human. Through The Other Moderns, we have learnt more about this furniture, its patrons and producers. We are proud to support this valuable resource in a field where so little information has previously been available. These stories of European designers working in Sydney we believe will be an Australian design reference – the first contribution to what we hope will be a growing body of knowledge. Reading the The Other Moderns I cannot help but think of the enormous contribution migrants make to our society. While the book comments on a specific subset of our migrant population, the same is true of arrivals from all countries and of all vocations. A timely message as we push to welcome a new generation of migrants and refugees to Australia. For when we share, we have more.

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Introduction: Remembering Sydney’s European design legacy Rebecca Hawcroft

Modern Western culture is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés and refugees. — Edward Said, Reflections on Exile, 1984

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The other moderns The young Viennese-born architect Harry Seidler arrived in Sydney in 1948. He had come to design a house for his parents, Rose and Max, on a bush block in the northern Sydney suburb of Wahroonga. The Rose Seidler House emerged shortly after, a remarkable example of pure modernism encapsulating the Seidlers’ European background and Harry’s Bauhaus-influenced education. Starkly modern, its geometric forms, white walls and flat roof were very different from the bungalows that characterised Sydney’s postwar suburbs. The house received considerable attention and was the focus of much discussion; it is often noted that Rose Seidler House was like nothing else then known in Sydney. Rose Seidler House was in fact one of a number of similarly Europeaninfluenced modernist designs built across Sydney’s north shore and eastern suburbs in the late 1940s and early 1950s. When Seidler arrived in Sydney, he joined an emerging community of European migrants committed to designing and building modernist architecture. As wartime restrictions lifted, many architects and designers who had fled the rise of Nazism swiftly returned to their professions, working closely with a network of European clients. Working across architecture, furniture, interiors, graphics, textiles and in the media, Sydney’s émigré community made a unique contribution to the adoption of modernism as both a philosophical approach and an aesthetic choice. Over the following decades, Harry Seidler became one of Australia’s most famous architects. In contrast, very little is known about his European contemporaries. Seidler had studied in the United States with a number of European modernist architects who had relocated there prior to World War II. In Sydney, Seidler was working among architects who had studied in Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Zurich and Stuttgart with some of modernism’s key practitioners, many with established careers in Europe prior to migration.

Although far less known, Seidler’s early Sydney domestic work sat alongside that of Viennese-trained Dr Henry Epstein. Epstein had a successful career with prominent clients, including Gerard Dusseldorp, founder of Lend Lease’s first project, the 1959 North Shore Medical Centre. Seidler would go on to a number of significant partnerships with Dusseldorp that brought great acclaim. Epstein, despite being well published, disappeared from the histories of modernism. Another contemporary, Hungarian Hugo Stossel, had also completed a number of prominent modernist houses in Sydney by 1949. Stossel had designed the innovative St Ursula apartment building by 1950, and by the late 1960s had completed some of the largest and most high-profile apartment projects in inner Sydney. His firm, H Stossel & Associates, continued into the 1980s under the direction of another Hungarian, George Buda. Despite his once high-profile presence, Stossel is also largely unknown. Equally successful Hans Peter Oser was well published as a designer of modernist houses in the early 1950s. His partnership with French émigré Jean Fombertaux from 1956, Oser Fombertaux & Associates, was responsible for a number of significant and high-rise projects including the William Bland Centre on Macquarie Street and Tooheys Headquarters in Surry Hills. When Oser died in 1967, he fell off the radar, unacknowledged as one of Sydney’s early modernist architects. While the achievements of Harry Seidler continue to be celebrated, the stories of the many other migrant designers should also be remembered. Rose Seidler House is preserved today as a key example of the great flowering of modern design that came to Sydney in the postwar period. The house is also an important reminder of the many examples of European modernism emerging across Sydney’s suburbs during the 1950s, an important yet under-explored part of Sydney’s architectural landscape. This is the first collection of the stories of Sydney’s émigré modernist designers. Far from a few exceptional outliers, this collection identifies that Sydney’s émigré modernists were a diverse and dynamic community working within a network of clients, manufacturers, academics and journalists, all displaying a strong influence of the principles of European modernism in their work. Postwar European migration While Harry Seidler had spent the war years first in the United Kingdom, then in an internment camp in Canada, the majority of Sydney’s émigré designers arrived in 1939, having fled the increasing dangers of a repressive and expansionist Germany under Nazi rule. The rise of National Socialism in Europe, and the war that followed, led to the displacement of more than 12 million people, of which Australia took some 200,000. For a country with a small population, that number made a significant impact and increased the number of non-British of European descent from just 1.3 per cent in 1933 to more than 10 per cent by 1965. Europe’s émigrés were a strong presence in Sydney from the mid-1930s. European immigration in this period occurred in three waves. The first, from the mid-1930s, consisted of independent migrants, in many instances Europeans of Jewish heritage fleeing persecution. The requirement for

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The Hillman House, 40 Findlay Avenue, Roseville, 1949. Designed by Viennese-trained architect Dr Henry Epstein, it was the home of Polish tailor Chaim Hillman and his wife Florence.

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sponsorship or a guarantee of £200 savings ensured the wealthy and well educated predominated. Although this group was small in number, it included a significant number of architects and designers who, by the 1940s, had commenced practice in Sydney. A second group arrived during the early war years or were stranded in Australia by the changing world events. This included the Austrian Bodenwieser Dance Company and some 6000 internees shipped from the United Kingdom, most famously aboard the Dunera. A significant number settled in Australia and became important contributors to wartime cultural life. The third wave, arriving in the postwar years from 1947 to 1954, were carefully selected by the newly formed Department of Immigration, and included more than 180,000 of Europe’s Displaced Persons, brought in under the ‘Populate or perish’ mantra. Many of these people came from the Baltic States, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland. An unusually high proportion were intellectuals with tertiary qualifications, including large numbers of graduates of architecture and engineering.[1] By favouring professionals, university graduates and the wealthy middle class, Australia’s migration policies ensured the cultural group that had been the strongest supporters of modernism in Europe predominated. European modernism Modernism was a philosophy intertwined with ideas of industrial functionality, socialist reform and health, and led to comprehensive changes in production, housing and city planning. Closely associated with both left-wing politics and Europe’s urbanised Jewish communities, it developed in the centres of Europe where these groups were strongest and had the most influence. Although Germany and Austria were the recognised centres of European modernism before World War II, the movement spread across Europe through universities, Werkbund (workshop or craftsman) organisations, the regional chapters of CIAM (Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne or International Congresses of Modern Architecture) as well as through the movement of practitioners around Europe. These links saw the other parts of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, generate sophisticated modern architectural cultures. These eastern European centres are well represented among the émigrés who came to Australia, and it is not surprising therefore that those trained in, or patrons of, modernist design were prominent among Australia’s European émigré population. After arrival, this group set about both adapting to and recasting centres such as Sydney into places that reflected their values, communities and culture. European design training was diverse across Europe’s universities, applied arts schools and technical colleges, many of which integrated industrial arts and design programs. While the Bauhaus school has received much attention, only two graduates of the Bauhaus were known designers in Australia. In contrast, significant numbers of graduates of universities in Prague, Zurich, Vienna and Budapest spent the majority of their working lives in Australia. Chapter 1 provides a timely focus on the context of modernism in European

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design education before World War II and the reception of European graduates as they began to practise in Australia. Another important group of migrants included in the Displaced Persons scheme was graduates of European industrial high schools. Combining matriculation with intensive technical training from the age of 14, these schools prepared students for supervisory positions within workshops and factories. Mostly from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Latvia and Yugoslavia, some 5000 of these graduates were included in the postwar Displaced Persons program.[2] This group of carpenters, furniture makers, weavers, builders and designers had an immediate impact in Australia, which was starved of skilled labour. As right-wing regimes asserted control across Europe in the 1930s, there were fewer opportunities for modernism, and by 1938 its development in Europe had all but ceased. August Sarnitz noted: ‘When one attempts nowadays to offer an interpretation of the effect emigration from Vienna had on culture, it can be said for the field of architecture that practically the entire artistic avant-garde was compelled to leave the country involuntarily’.[3] This mass migration of Europe’s skilled designers – mostly socialist, Jewish and from the wealthy industrial class – while devastating Europe’s avant-garde, had a significant effect on transporting modernism to the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. The impact of European émigrés in the United States and England has been well acknowledged in a number of publications since the 1960s.[4] Giedion’s influential 1941 Space, Time and Architecture places Walter Gropius’ migration to America in the context of the emigration of ‘the most advanced scientists, humanists, and artists who during the thirties had a direct impact in every domain of science and culture, from modern aesthetics to nuclear physics’.[5] The movement of European modernism to Australia had an equally profound impact, but one that has received less attention.

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Forgetting Modernism, one of the watershed moments of the 20th century, has been the subject of extensive critical scrutiny. As the first surveys of modernism in Australia emerged, the focus was on a search for a nationalist form of modernism, suited to Australia’s climate and culture. The Australian modernism of the 1940s was characterised by neo-Georgian models of simplicity and refinement.[6] Architects like Roy Grounds further developed what was emerging as a particularly Australian version of modernism with an ‘instinctive sympathy with the principles of the eighteenth century: the house with a view, a self-sufficient order and restraint’.[7] While a modernism more akin to the ‘International Style’ emerged in isolated examples from the 1950s and 1960s, the popularity of Georgian Revivalism can be seen to have reinforced the notion that modernism was a European cultural movement with little relevance to Australia. In the development of a narrative of a uniquely Australian modernism, the eclectic and identifiably European work of émigré architects was difficult to categorise and was omitted from the histories.

Hugh Buhrich’s 1957 Franklin House, 205 Birrell Street, Waverley (now demolished)

Discussions of European influence in the development of modernism in Australia focused on the work of Seidler in Sydney and Frederick Romberg in Melbourne, with very little indication of the presence and production of a wide community of other émigré designers.[8] The pattern was set in 1952 when Robin Boyd’s Australian Home identified Romberg and Seidler as Australia’s only European designers, aside from a mention of Fritz Janeba. In John Maxwell Freeland’s 1968 book Architecture in Australia, Seidler and Romberg are the only émigrés identified. Despite noting the importance of ‘European strains’ in the local development of modernism throughout the text, DL Johnson’s 1980 Australian Architecture 1901–1951: Sources of Modernism focuses on Seidler and Romberg with brief mentions of Victorian émigré Ernest Fooks and Queensland resident Karl Langer. Common to all these texts is that, with the exception of Seidler, no European designer working in Sydney was considered important enough to name. This is particularly surprising as numerous émigré architects had been regularly included in both popular and architectural publications through the decades preceding 1970. The arrival of a large and robust community that continued European forms of modernism was nothing more than a footnote. Europeans Romberg and Seidler have been presented as unique practitioners working outside of, and other to, the development of a wider Australian modern architecture. Early in his career, Seidler was referred to as a Canadian architect.[9] Having architectural degrees from Canada and the United States, Seidler astutely registered as an architect in RIBA-associated Canada before his 1948 arrival in Sydney. It was only later that a narrative developed around Seidler’s work as ‘European’ and credited him with bringing a modern architecture ‘quite different from anything then existing in Australia’.[10] For many decades, this focus on Seidler and his Bauhaus-influenced training

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Mid-century lozenge-shaped coffee table, topped with black Vitrolite and glass. Unknown designer. Photographed at Hotel Hotel in Canberra, 2017.

with Walter Gropius meant a very limited range of architecture was considered to be authentically European and modernist. In reality, Sydney’s postwar architecture included the work of many European-educated designers. Aside from architects that led large and successful firms such as Stossel and Oser, low-profile designers such as Hugh and Eva Buhrich also made a significant contribution. With an education and work experience that included time with modernist luminaries Hans Poelzig and Alfred Roth, the pair operated a small practice during the 1940s before Eva turned to design writing full-time and Hugh, unregistered, maintained a small practice by referring to himself as a ‘planning consultant’ and ‘designer’. Although unknown for most of his career, Buhrich’s own house of 1968–72 is now considered one of Australia’s finest modern houses.[11] Organic and sculptural, it is very different from Seidler’s Harvard School modernism, and represents the diversity of Sydney’s modern architecture, which is only now just being appreciated. Chapter 2 of this collection identifies some of the many European-trained architects and their work from 1945 into the late 1960s. While most began with domestic projects, often for European clients, a considerable number turned to high-rise and apartment design and construction in their later careers. A wide range of Australian modernist architecture is discussed, challenging previous notions of what was authentically European and modernist. As Hamann notes: there is now a real chance for historians and critics of Australian architecture … going beyond what Australian architecture wanted European authenticity to be, and instead looking at both the full diversity of European architectural culture, and the real transformations that this diversity would undergo in Australia.[12]

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Part of this diversity is an acknowledgment that, while numerous European architects re-established careers in Australia, it seems likely a significant number did not. Migration involved considerable disruption; many Europeans arrived in Australia after a decade of persecution and displacement that had prevented them from working. Czechoslovakian Ernst Korner was 51 when he arrived in 1939. He had studied architecture in Vienna, and after working for a number of years in Sweden and Prague, he had established a strong practice in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia.[13] A number of his projects had been featured in magazines, and he had won architectural prizes for the design of an iron works in Sarajevo and workers’ housing for 400. The planned housing scheme of Jubilejní kolonie, including some 600 apartments, remains a valued part of Ostrava’s modern built heritage, with Korner recognised as one of Ostrava’s important architects.[14] Korner immediately began designing in Sydney, working in partnership with his brother-in-law, Kurt Hermann Singer. The pair designed Korner’s own functionalist modernist house in Mosman and an apartment complex in Cremorne, before wartime restrictions on building halted their practice. Singer died in 1949 and Korner in 1966, having not resumed designing, the years of displacement and disruption having all but ended his career. Australia was not good at recognising the previous achievements of its émigrés and

Korner’s work and experience were unknown here. His story can be seen as one of a number that, through migration, dropped out of history. The precise impact of the dislocation inherent in the experience of migration and exile is difficult to identify. For some, the challenges of a changed language and culture were too difficult to overcome. While Korner registered as an architect, those who did not often remain unaccounted for in the historic record. A focus on the lost generation of émigré architects in Europe over recent decades has identified previously unknown migrants working in Australia. The story of Ferdinand Silberstein-Silvan, an accomplished Slovakian functionalist modernist who in Australia worked in the public service, his work unauthored and his skills underutilised, is another example. Following the 2002 publication of a monograph of his Slovakian work, attention turned to his time in Australia. Chapter 3 looks at Silvan’s career and speculates on the experiences of those that were unable to navigate the considerable cultural and administrative challenges of transplanting a profession from Europe to Australia in the 1940s. ‘Total design’ and the importance of furniture Harry Seidler’s design practice extended beyond architecture into the furniture and functions of his projects. He designed his houses with extensive use of space-saving, built-in furniture, as well as free-standing furniture selected to be in harmony with the design. Epstein, Stossel, Oser and many other European architects worked in the same way, often designing the full furnishings for their projects. The tenet of ‘total design’ within modernist practice meant custom-made furniture was a key feature of the work of European-trained architects and something high on European clients’ list of priorities. Like Seidler, these architects worked closely with cabinetmakers such as the Viennese émigré firms of Paul Kafka and Michael Gerstl. Although Kafka is well known, virtually no other cabinetmaking company from this period has been studied.[15]

Darling, you know we’re not supposed to use the balcony. You’re spoiling the crystalline proportions of the building. Hungarian George Molnar was a prominent figure as both Assistant Professor of Architecture first at Sydney University and then University of New South Wales, and long-term cartoonist at the Sydney Morning Herald. This cartoon from 1956 is part of the collection of the National Library of Australia.

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The work to date on émigré designers has tended to focus on architects and their buildings or planning, with very little attention paid to the ‘total design’ principles that were central to modernism and feature strongly in the work of this group. The role of furniture makers within this community is important and one that has been largely missed. The Gerstl Furniture Company, whose roots go back to a successful business in Vienna in the 1920s, operated in Sydney for three decades. Their clients included an extensive list of architects, home owners in the eastern suburbs, and commercial fit-outs. Chapter 4 identifies Gerstl’s work and the way clients, architects and furniture makers came together to give a European flavour to Sydney’s postwar homes. Émigré designers also played an important role in Sydney’s postwar furniture market. Hungarian designer Steven Kalmar’s Kalmar Interiors, and George Kóródy’s Artes Studios, provided locally produced modern furniture for a receptive market. Both architecture graduates who did not register as architects in Australia, they demonstrated the way many European designers adapted their skills to furniture and interior design. Kóródy arrived in Australia with significant achievements, yet his multifaceted career has not previously been investigated. Chapter 5 details, for the first time, Kóródy’s career in Hungary and his contribution to Artes Studios, a firm with significant European connections. After Kóródy’s death, Artes Studios evolved into an importer of international design brands, remaining an important Sydney design destination for more than 40 years. Kóródy and Artes Studios also provided custom-made furniture. The Bonyhady family, with a history of design patronage brought from Vienna, continued to commission furniture in Australia. Anne Bonyhady’s diary detailed the role makers such as Leslie Buckwell played in realising Kóródy’s designs, an important feature of the furniture industry of which very little is known. Through a close look at his own family’s furniture in Chapter 6, Tim Bonyhady provides insight into the design choices of an émigré couple as they established their lives in postwar Sydney.

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How to be modern: Émigrés in the media A considerable degree of Harry Seidler’s reputation stems from his tireless promotion of his own work and the principles of modernism in the media. Seidler was a regular presence in Sydney’s media, championing high-density housing, urban renewal and planning reform. A number of other European figures also held prominent places in Sydney design media, although their fame has not been as long-lasting. The work of migrant designers was regularly featured in magazines and newspapers from the 1940s into the late 1960s. When Hans Peter Oser provided house plans in Australian Homemaker and Handyman in 1956, it was under a heading of his name and portrait, indicating he was a widely known figure. In addition to this, a number of modernism’s most prominent commentators were émigrés. Trained architects Eva Buhrich, George Molnar and Steven Kalmar adapted their careers in Australia to include prominent roles as commentators on modern design, planning and interiors. Chapter 7 identifies

that, although often outside the official architectural media, journalism was an important avenue through which émigrés influenced Sydney’s design culture. Photography was another field where European migrants were to have a significant impact in the postwar years. Examples of the European Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity movement, had been available in Australia in journals such as Das Deutsche Lichtbild (German Light Pictures) since the 1930s. While few Australian photographers had direct experience of the style, a number of European émigrés arrived accomplished in its development and use. The impact of the work of émigrés Wolfgang Sievers, Henry Talbot and Helmut Newton in Melbourne was significant and has been celebrated.[16] A number of other less well-known émigré photographers were working in Sydney. These included Austrian Grete Weissenstein and Germans Hans Hasenpflug and Nanette Kuehn, all of whom had low-profile careers and little influence.[17] Margaret Michaelis, Austrian born and with work experience in Vienna, Berlin and Barcelona, arrived in Sydney an accomplished modernist photographer. During her time in Spain, Michaelis worked closely with a group of modernist architects known as the GATCPAC, led by JL Sert. Many of her photographs were published in leading journals that championed modernity. Despite this experience, Michaelis did not photograph architecture in Sydney and instead established a small-scale studio portrait business. Helen Ennis, through her long connection to the National Gallery of Australia’s Michaelis archive, is able to provide unique insight into the particular challenges the photographer navigated. In Chapter 8, Ennis looks at Michaelis’ place in Sydney and the difficulties she faced in both living and working in a changed context. Patrons, clients and the importance of the European migrant community The story of the transportation of European modernism is as much a client story as a designer story. Chapter 9 looks at the relationship between a drinks trolley now in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) and its designer, Zsuzsa (Susan) Kozma-Orlay, who migrated to Sydney in 1947. It was only through the gift of the drinks trolley to the V&A in 1997 that we came to know about Kozma-Orlay’s career in Australia, despite the fact that she was involved with a number of important design firms and worked as an interior and furniture designer into her 80s. The trolley, a remnant of the Budapest apartment it was designed for, was transported to Britain as its owners fled postwar Hungary. Kozma-Orlay, who worked largely within Sydney’s Hungarian community, can be seen as similarly transported out of the context that gave her training and skills meaning. Émigré clients played an important part in supporting her career as they did more generally in the commissioning and patronage of European modernist design. The patrons of modernism that had the most impact on Sydney were its migrant developers. In Chapter 10, Tone Wheeler identifies that the character of postwar Sydney was one that was shaped by the migrant developers, construction firms and entrepreneurs that set about recasting the

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Born in Hungary and trained in Italy and Vienna, Hugo Stossel had a successful architectural career in Sydney. In 1969, H Stossel & Associates designed the 22-storey Wynyard Travelodge, at the time Australia’s largest ‘motor hotel’.

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low-scale centre, planned along ‘city beautiful’ lines, into an urban metropolis. With expectations of high-density apartment living, experience in concrete construction and innovative business structures, émigrés including Gerard Dusseldorp (Lend Lease founder), Henry Pollack (Mirvac co-founder), Ervin Graf (Stockland founder) and John Saunders and Frank Lowy (Westfield Corp founders) rode the postwar boom to become the developers who shaped Sydney more than any others. By the 1960s, Sydney had become a very different place. Australia’s population had increased threefold to more than 10 million, and the increasingly diverse mix of cultures that postwar migration brought had challenged Sydney’s low-scale, red-roofed suburbs that were once dominated by Anglo-Celtic cultural norms. Remembering This collection is an important reminder of the richness that refugees bring. At a time when the numbers of stateless people globally are far exceeding those of the postwar period, it is timely to note the great skills postwar migration brought to Australia. In this context particularly, we must pay close attention to historical processes of erasure; whereby the complex mix of cultures in our past is collapsed into a single narrative and difference is forgotten. Although the stories of many of the designers featured in this collection have been omitted, they have not been lost. By looking for the complexities in history, we create our national identity through remembering rather than forgetting. This collection of essays remembers the European designers who came to Sydney, the distinct form of European modernism they brought with them, and the contribution they made to making the modern city.

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Lessons from things: European design training by Michael Bogle

Designers and architects shape much of our material world and their work is the culmination of processes both simple and complex. European school children were once taught what the French call Leçons de choses or ‘lessons from things’ tracing the process of the creation of objects ranging from such simple objects as ceramic bowls and loaves of bread to complex ships or tall buildings. Australia’s émigré designers and architects arriving in the interwar period were formed by processes fashioned in the urban settings of Central Europe. Most of them recut their materials for their new world but many of the threads of the past remained: their fluency with new materials; exposure to the earliest European strains of 20th-century modernism; a deftness with abstract ornament and decoration; familiarity with the cool colour palette of the northern hemisphere; and a well-founded sense of their professional standing. This essay explores interwar émigré training in design and architecture in Central Europe (Germany, Austria-Hungary and their neighbours); some of the social and educational settings for these experiences and ultimately the acceptance of the training in New South Wales. Their experiences created a new Australian chapter in Leçons de choses. Europe 1914–39 European émigré architects and designers arriving in Australia in the interwar decades left behind a Europe roiling with the tensions of World War I and the economic consequences of the peace treaties that followed. The AustroHungarian Empire dissolved, leaving the nation-states that resided comfortably under the Hapsburg monarchy’s centralised civil service in Vienna and Budapest burdened with new national responsibilities. Germany’s political borders were redrawn and reduced. The financial reparations levied on the former Axis powers of Austria-Hungary and Germany by Allied treaties precipitated the collapse of their economies. The social, political and financial disruption was severe, with the damaging effects on their civic and educational systems persisting for decades. Austria-Hungary and Germany saw their wartime monarchs, Charles, the Hapsburg Emperor and Wilhelm, the German Kaiser, disappear into exile. Into this vacuum came socialist uprisings and fascist military regimes. The new political map of Central Europe soon bristled with socialist revolutions (German

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and Hungary, 1919); military coups (Poland, 1926); political assassinations in Germany, Austria and Yugoslavia; and street battles between socialists, returned soldiers and fascists. To escape this turmoil, a tide of immigrants swept over national boundaries.

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Design reform prior to 1919 Before the disruption of World War I, many architects and designers in Central Europe found their way into the profession through a combination of craft guild training and formal classroom education. Postwar, the political climate of republicanism and socialism loosened the bonds of tradition, and education innovations accelerated. John Maciuika’s well-documented book Before the Bauhaus explores the early design reform movement in Germany and Austria-Hungary and illustrates how the innovative activities of regional design schools were underway before the development of the Weimar Bauhaus in 1919.[18] While the Bauhaus’s celebrated curriculum integrated design theory and fine arts practice (taught by visual artists) with workshop-based craft skills, Maciuika’s research illustrates that this important innovation was well advanced by 1907. Many of the architects and designers immigrating to Australia presented credentials from these early design-reform institutions. Despite the inflated dominance of the Bauhaus in discussions of modernism, only two émigré designers active in Australia had a direct association with the Bauhaus: the artist and Geelong Grammar School teacher Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack and the print-maker Georg Teltscher (also known as George Adams).[19] Central European design and architecture training initially drew inspiration from the Arts and Crafts movement of England and Belgium in an attempt to amalgamate arts and design training, handcraft skills and the development of commercial products (including standardised building elements). These innovations dissolved the traditional boundaries between arts (painting, print-making, sculpture) and craft skills (designing and making). By 1907, this integrated model was the official platform of the German Werkbund (German Association of Craftspeople), a highly influential professional organisation of artists, designers, architects and manufacturers supported by government funding. The cultural stature of Germany meant neighbouring countries were also drawn to this integrated model of instruction.[20] In one of the earliest manifestations of this progressive model in Breslau, Germany (today Wrocław, Poland), in 1903 the designer Hans Poelzig ‘was able to develop an early form of the “unified art school”’, that is, ‘[a] school that managed to bring together the study of fine arts and applied arts under the banner of architecture’.[21] Two years later, the Belgian painter and designer Henri van de Velde developed a similar workshop/design program for the Grand-Ducal School of Arts and Crafts, Weimar (1905). Van de Velde’s model was adapted by Walter Gropius for the Weimar Bauhaus (1919) and the architect Bruno Paul established a similar program (1924) for the Royal School of Applied Arts, Berlin.[22] As Deborah Barnstone writes, ‘Workshop-based instruction was common to most reformed arts

institutions after 1918; uniting fine and applied arts had long been a goal of reform-minded educators and bureaucrats hoping to improve Germany’s industrial production’.[23] Despite the fame of the Bauhaus, its approach was not exceptional. An integrated design training program was adopted by the following German schools before World War I: • Breslau, Royal School of Art and Applied Arts. Head, Hans Poelzig (1869–1936) and after 1918, August Endell (1871–1925)[24] • Berlin, Royal School of Applied Arts. Head, Bruno Paul (1874–1968)[25] • Dusseldorf, School of Applied Arts. Head, Peter Behrens (1868–1940)[26] • Stuttgart, School of Applied Arts. Lecturer, Bruno Paul (1874–1968)[27] • Stuttgart, Technical University. Head, Theodor Fischer (1862–1938)[28] • Weimar, Grand-Ducal School of Arts and Crafts. Head, Henri van der Velde (1878–1947)[29] Most of these government-supported schools continued their work until the outbreak of World War II and the subsequent political division of Germany into east and west. Architecture and design education The architecture and design schools of Germany and the cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire provided formal training in a diverse range of institutions. In Germany, the approach to the formal profession of architect was different from the British and Australian pathways. An analysis of German training following a 19th-century repeal of the nation’s trade guild regulations points out that ‘anyone, regardless of training or lack of it, could legally work as an architect’.[30] As a consequence, ‘many of the most celebrated architects active in Germany between the late 1890s and 1918, Peter Behrens, Richard Riemerschmid, Bruno Paul and Henri van der Velde, were professional painters who gravitated to the applied arts and architecture without ever having received one semester of formal architectural education’.[31] This also includes the architect and designer August Endell, the Head of the Breslau Academy after 1918, who pursued philosophy, aesthetics and psychology before beginning his design career.[32] These designers ignored the boundaries between architecture, fine arts and design disciplines, and worked in such media as furniture, graphic arts, interiors and industrial design as well as architecture. Indeed, the professionalisation of architects in Germany, by formal training at the Technische Hochschulen or TH (Technical Universities) and licensing of practitioners ‘was seen by [private] architects as an aesthetic impediment, a detriment [to their] art’.[33] The national Federation of German Architects (the Bund Deutscher Architekten or BDA) argued, ‘The greatest danger to our artistic life, the worst enemy to our own endeavours is the ruthless commercialism, which, without ideals … exploits our otherwise beneficial commercial freedom’.[34] While individual chapters of the BDA could establish regional educational criteria, the BDA’s debate on national licensing continued until 1959 when three of 11 German states accepted a statewide licensing system.

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In Hungary in 1866–67, architects joined the Hungarian Association of Engineers to form the Hungarian Union of Engineers and Architects.[35] The Hungarian historian József Sisa records that ‘their operations were completely informal at first’ but by 1930, the union was organising seminars and conferences.[36] To date, sources regarding the structure and dates for their accreditation programs have proven elusive. Vienna At the conclusion of the 19th century, Vienna was the cultural capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and drew artists, designers, architects and artisans from its multi-national expanse as the second-largest nation in Europe. Josef Hoffmann, a major figure in the Viennese design reform movement (the Wiener Secession, founded in 1897) was Czech, and the Secession’s revolutionary program drew members from Hungary, Poland and beyond. The movement’s membership included the renowned Austrian archiJosef Hoffmann, armchair from Gallia apartment hall, tects and educators Josef Olbrich and Otto Wagner, the Vienna, c.1912 a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Supporting this energetic design movement, Vienna was also the site of one of the Empire’s first government-supported design schools, the Kunstgewerbeschule (School for Applied Arts) founded in 1867–68. This design training school was associated with the city’s Museum fur Angewandte Kunst (Museum of Applied Arts) and, following its creation, similar applied art schools appeared in Zagreb, Croatia (1882); Prague, Bohemia (1885) and elsewhere in the Empire. In Vienna, the Technische Hochschule Wien (Technical University, Vienna) had began in 1815 and was offering its first doctoral degrees in architecture in 1902. New South Wales émigré graduates from Viennese institutions in the former Empire include architects Henry Epstein (Doctorate), Ernest Korner, Hans Peter Oser and Hugo Stossel. Demonstrating the migration of talent to Vienna and the importance of its cultural institutions, Epstein was of Russian origin living in Hungary, Stossel arrived from Hungary, and Korner was born in the neighbouring Czech lands.

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Hungary Despite its central position within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hungarian architecture had a strong nationalist or Magyar focus. The practice of architecture and design in Hungary in the interwar period has been described as a politicised amalgam of modernism and ‘National Romanticism’ featuring folk-derived ornament, colours and materials.[37] There was also simmering resentment regarding German influences in education and training.[38] Design training was available at the Hungarian Royal National School of Arts and Crafts,the Academy of Fine Arts, and the Royal Joseph

Lajos Kozma’s Klinger Villa, Budapest, 1933 Main building, Technical University, Berlin, c.1895

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Technical University. In architecture, the Royal Joseph Technical University, Budapest, provided courses as early as 1871 and offered a research-based doctorate from 1901.[39] One of Hungary’s most prominent modernists, Lajos Kozma studied at the Royal Joseph Technical University in the early 1900s. By the 1930s, Kozma’s work was extensively promoted by the expatriate Australian architect Raymond McGrath, who included several Kozma houses in his pivotal 1934 modernist survey Twentieth Century Houses. Kozma, a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest, and later founder of the private design school Atelier, also featured in FRS Yorke’s 1943 edition of The Modern House (Architectural Press). Members of Kozma’s family later emigrated to Australia including his daughter Zsuzsa Kozma, featured in Chapter 9. A selection of Hungarian architecture and design graduates continued their careers in Australia including George Kóródy, George Molnar, George Reves, Frank Kolos, Stephen Gergely, John Pinter, Peter Kollar, designer Zsuzsa Kozma (later known as Susan Orlay) and George Surtees. During the troubled interwar period, when Hungary was impoverished by Allied treaty demands for financial reparations, a number of soon-to-be prominent Hungarians left to study in Russia and Germany, among them the architect and designer Marcel Breuer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and textile designer Otti Berger, all of whom assumed roles at the Bauhaus campuses in Weimar and Dessau.[40]

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The Czech lands ‘The Czech educational system, the most advanced in the Slavic regions was much admired by other Slavic peoples.’ [41] One of the nation’s earliest universities, the Charles-Ferdinand University (Česká universita Karlo-Ferdinandova) was founded in Prague in 1861. However, following an intense nationalist struggle between Czech and German-speaking students and citizens, the national university split into independent German-and Czech-speaking faculties. Architecture was taught at the Prague Technical University with a similar German/Czech-language schism in the school. The Australian émigré Ferdinand Silvan, born in Slovakia with little or no fluency in Czech, studied with the German faculty at the Deutsche Technische Hochschule, Prague. Prague was a centre for architecture training with study available at the Academy of Fine Arts, while the School of Arts and Crafts also taught architecture and design studies and sought to advance Czech national styles in the interwar years. It was one of the few Arts and Crafts schools in the AustroHungarian Empire (other notable Arts and Crafts schools were located in Vienna and Lwów in today’s Ukraine). By 1920, the Czech Technical University, Brno was also offering courses in architecture.[42] The highly influential Viennese modernist Adolf Loos had his initial training there. Ernst Mühlstein, later a well-published émigré to Melbourne (working as Ernst Milstrom), studied at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts where he formed a well-regarded Prague partnership with fellow-Czech designer Victor Furth.

Poland While 20th-century Poland did not exist as a politically independent state immediately before the Versailles treaties, 19th-century regional education followed the programs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with architecture taught in polytechnic institutes in Lwów and elsewhere.[43] The architecture faculty, University of Technology, Warsaw, founded in 1915 is considered the Polish Republic’s first modern architecture school.[44] Poland’s geographic isolation and post-1918 turmoil, however, prevented a fulsome development of academy-based architectural training and ‘Poland’s future architects and planners had to undertake their studies abroad, mainly in Russia, Austria, Germany, Italy and France’.[45] Polish architectural historians consider that this phenomenon of travelling scholarships led to a rich and diverse exposure to European ideas and building methodologies in the interwar period. Polish émigré Henry Kurzer immigrated to Australia, for example, and took a further diploma at Sydney Technical College, while Theodore Fry (Freiwillig), one of the few Poles to practise in Sydney during the interwar period studied at the Lwów Polytechnic. Germany In Germany, the educational system began to formalise architecture and design training in the 19th century with the founding of the Technische Hochschulen network. After the 1860s, these technical schools typically consisted of five subdepartments of architecture: with coursework in structural engineering, machine engineering (including naval architecture), chemistry and metallurgy, and general studies (mostly mathematics and natural sciences).[46] Nineteenth-century education reform created three paths for architectural education: the Staatsgewerbeschule (trade school), the Technische Hochschulen and a new grouping of Polytechniken.[47] ‘These measures provided technical education [with] an official near equality with that of the universities.’[48] University status was much sought by the technical universities.

33 Henri van de Velde, Head, Weimar School of Arts and Crafts, 1904

The Hochschulen and Polytechniken offered a four-year course of study in architecture and engineering culminating in a final diploma examination, which conferred the title Diplom-Ingenieur and the privilege of sitting for civil service examinations that could lead to valued government employment.[49] These schools ‘assumed the dominant role in architectural education and resembled the university in both rigor and prestige’.[50] The German state of Prussia, considered among Germany’s most advanced regions, had 34 schools of arts, crafts and trades under the direct control of the Prussian Ministry of Commerce in the late 19th century, this department assuming the role of the Ministry of Culture.[51] The state contained major cities such as Aachen, Hanover, Dusseldorf and Berlin. [In Prussia], it was in 1899 that one of the most important academic changes was realized by proponents of educational reform: all the Technische Hochschulen in the Prussian state were given the right to confer doctoral degrees, as was already offered by universities, a measure that was adopted soon after by the rest of Germany.[52]

Advanced study in architecture typically led to the Doktor-Ingenieur degree, the PhD equivalent in Germany, Austria and Central Europe. This degree was generally considered a teaching qualification and the award was predicated on academic research and the presentation and defence of a dissertation. A selection of Australian (NSW) émigré students and graduates from the German technical universities include PR Block, Akademie der Künste (Prussian Academy of Arts); Paul Schwerin, Anatol Kagan, Eva Buhrich and Hugh Buhrich, Technische Hochschule Berlin (Technical University, Berlin or TUB). Hugh Buhrich finished his degree at the Technische Hochschule der Freien Stadt Danzig (Technical School of the Free State of Danzig), today Gdansk, Poland. The innovators

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Henri van de Velde The Belgian émigré Henri van de Velde (1863–1957), the founder and head of the German Weimar School of Arts and Crafts, established the formal integrated model for theory and workshop training for architects and designers at Weimar. Trained as a painter and practising as an architect and designer, he became head of the Brussels Institut des Arts Décoratifs. His European fame led to a request by the Grand Duke of Weimar to establish the Grand-Ducal Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) in 1902. The well-funded school opened in 1907 and as a prominent educator, van de Velde’s influence was pervasive. He also became a founding member of the German Werkbund, the first professional organisation for designers and architects, but during World War I, as a Belgian citizen, he had to leave Germany in 1917. On his departure, he recommended the designers and architects August Endell, Walter Gropius and Hermann Obrist as potential successors for the postwar leadership of the School of Arts and Crafts, later transformed by his successor into the Bauhaus.

Hans Poelzig, foyer lighting, The Great Theatre (Großes Schauspielhaus), Berlin, c.1920

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Three versions of Peter Behrens’ AEG electric kettles, designed c.1910 Next: Exterior and interior of houses 49 and 50, in the 1932 modernist housing development Wiener Werkbundsiedlung. Houses 49 and 50 were designed by Adolf Loos, one of the founders of Viennese modernism, in partnership with Henry Kulka, who in 1939 migrated to New Zealand.

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Hans Poelzig Hans Poelzig (1869–1936), like van de Velde, was a prominent architect, designer and educator whose educational career had begun at the Academy of Art and Applied Arts (also known as the Royal School of Art and Applied Arts), Breslau, Germany and continued at the Technical University of Berlin where his teaching influenced a generation. He was a key member of the German Werkbund. Adapting the integrated workshop model of progressive education, ‘Breslau hired expert machinists to help students execute their designs, intentionally distancing students from the study of craftsmanship; hands-on experience was never meant to lead to hands-on practice. Rather, it was a way of becoming familiar with the materials and methods of making, so that design could improve’.[53] Poelzig did not quarantine the studies of art and design but encouraged interdisciplinary work. Workshops were under the control of a professor overseeing design and a form master who directed the use of materials and media. Female instructors in design were also employed in Breslau, a unique practice in the era. By 1920, Poelzig was teaching in Berlin at the Technical University, but retained an active design career in architecture and film scenography until the early 1930s. When he died in 1936, his career was waning and commissions were few. Three émigré architects and designers working in Sydney studied under Poelzig: Eva Buhrich, Hugh Buhrich and Anatol Kagan. Peter Behrens Like many of the notable educators in design and architecture, Behrens studied painting and design at several German academies. And similar to Bruno Paul, he was involved in the design of avant-garde journals, notably the Berlin magazine Pan, and became a founder member of the German Werkbund. In Dusseldorf where he had previously undertaken art studies, he was appointed Director of the Kunstgewerbeschule, a position he occupied in 1903–07. After leaving Dusseldorf, he was invited by the German manufacturer AEG to reshape their entire product line and branding. This unprecedented appointment resulted in major architecture, typography and industrial design commissions that stand as landmarks in product development and branding. His status as an architect (using assistants such as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Adolf Meyer) led to dual appointments at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (1921–36) and the Prussian Academy of Arts, Berlin (1936–49). Behrens’ teaching celebrated European diversity, ‘There can be no doubt the … mingling of various national qualities and tastes, the discussion of experiences in construction in different foreign countries of cultural traditions all help to inspire the development of modern architecture’.[54] His acclaim reached England where, in 1923–25, he was given a commission for domestic housing in Northampton, considered by English architectural historians as one of the earliest manifestations of the new European modernist style in Britain. His educational roles in Vienna and Berlin and his commercial

37

success made him an aspirational figure for a generation of architecture and design students. Two émigré architects studied under Behrens: Karl Langer, based in Queensland and the New Zealand émigré Ernst Plischke, with Sydney émigré Hans Peter Oser working briefly in Behrens’ office in Vienna. Josef Frank Josef Frank, a founding member of the Vienna Werkbund, the Austrian equivalent of the German Werkbund, was a close associate of the internationally celebrated city planner Otto Neurath, developer of the international picture language ISOTYPE. Frank studied architecture at Vienna’s Technische Hochschule and took up a teaching post at the Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien from 1919 to 1925. A celebrated wit, he has been described as Vienna’s ‘intellectual heir … to Adolf Loos’.[55] Frank lectured and taught courses on a variety of subjects related to ‘settlement (cooperative) housing design’ and as a committed socialist, volunteered at the advisory agency Bauburo (Vienna Building Information Centre).[56] He was an outspoken theorist and was at odds with the modernist architecture that was beginning to dominate Germany. The whole world is endeavouring … to organize life as pleasantly as possible and therefore railway carriages and ships are made like houses … while German architecture is determined to operate the other way around and model houses on [railway] sleeping cars where one could sleep for a night [only] if one had to.[57]

His 1930 book, Architektur als Symbol (Architecture as Symbol) argued for design diversity rather than the uniformity he saw spreading among his Werkbund associates.

40 Josef Frank, Bunzl House, Vienna, 1936. Photo: © MAK

Frank and his associates considered architecture an essential tool in progressing society and the domestic interior as a ‘scaffold’ for the occupant to live as they please. ‘The living room is never unfinished or finished,’ Frank insisted, ‘it lives with the people who live in it.’[58] Like many designers of his generation, Frank was also threatened by National Socialism; leaving Germany for Sweden in 1933. He took Swedish citizenship in 1939 and continued his design career, designing objects and furnishings for Estrid Ericson’s Svenskt Tenn. The New Zealand émigré Ernst Plischke studied under Frank. Advances in Central European architecture The European architects and designers on this list of educators share many of the modernist advances in Europe in the early 20th century. All of them trained, taught and worked across a range of media including painting, furniture, architecture, textiles and graphic arts, and in the case of Hans Poelzig, cinema set design. This design diversity also gave them a fluency in exploring interior architecture that was rare among Australian and British trained architects of the era. But most importantly, they taught that the built environment could change lives, influence society and shape a better future. This modernist activism was enthusiastically transmitted to their students. Pursuing professional standing in NSW There were profound differences between European and Australian architectural cultures and education systems. Some émigré architects found difficulties in re-establishing their credentials with the Board of Architects of NSW and the local architectural community. There can be little doubt that postwar arrivals of German-speaking émigrés from Central Europe were also disadvantaged by the residual community memories of the Allied wartime propaganda during World War I.[59] Anti-German Leagues appeared in several communities during wartime, with calls to ‘disenfranchise’ or ‘de-naturalise’ German-born Australians. There were also subliminal political issues associated with university-trained émigrés, as many of the progressive schools and educators in Central Europe had direct associations with Marxist movements or demonstrated what has been described as ‘Marxish’ sympathies during their careers.[60] There were also questions of educational equivalence with the unfamiliar qualifications presented from European institutions. As mentioned earlier, the Federation of German Architects resisted formalising architectural training qualifications, seeing it as a potential barrier to creativity, while the German and Austrian Werkbund lacked the recognition or professional status of the Royal Institute of British Architects to whom the Board of Architects of NSW habitually deferred.[61] When the first wave of émigré architects applied for registration with the Board of Architects of NSW, the upheavals in Europe were so severe that some applicants came from nation-states with no political status before 1919 and presented credentials from unfamiliar technical universities and academies.

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Repose Chair, 1953. Designed by George Kóródy for Artes Studios. Rubber cushion in original Belgian linen. Photographed at Hotel Hotel in Canberra, 2017.

Naturally, there were difficulties translating émigré training into categories paralleling conventional Australian and British schooling. In addition NSW architectural registration required ‘naturalisation’; the applicant had to have been resident in Australia for two years and was required to advertise their intention to file for naturalisation in the newspapers to allow for public objections. Policies, policies, policies A typical example of this cultural dissonance appears in the wartime application of the naturalised Hungarian architect George Molnar to the Board of Architects of NSW. On 4 June 1941, the president of the Board of Architects of NSW, BJ Waterhouse, wrote to his counterpart, Sir Ian MacAlister, the secretary of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) inquiring about the registration of émigré architects in Britain.[62] He wrote regarding the credentials of Molnar who had arrived in Australia in 1939. Molnar was born in Nagyvarad, Hungary (a town later renamed Oradea, Romania). Our policy here at present is to refrain from registering foreigners, especially those who have come from Europe in recent years ... [W]e would like to have some information regarding … [George Molnar’s] credentials … He has produced a certificate from the Royal Hungarian Technical University ‘Joseph’, Budapest. The certificate indicates he passed an examination in ancient architecture, descriptive geometry, applied theory of mechanical strength and theory of reinforced concrete, mediaeval architecture, building structures, modern architecture and design of buildings. I should be glad to know whether any recognition is given by the R.I.B.A. to such a diploma.

The RIBA assistant secretary replied on 5 August 1941: The certificate or diploma of the Royal Hungarian Technical University ‘Joseph’, Budapest, is not in any way recognised by the R.I.B.A. We might in certain cases be prepared to grant a slight measure of exemption from some subjects of the [R.I.B.A.] examinations to a foreigner who produces satisfactory evidence of having taken a full course at a foreign school of architecture of standing, but as I say, no foreign school is recognised. (author’s emphasis).

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Ultimately, the Board decided that, ‘in view of the international position, the Board last year (1942) decided to defer, until the end of the war, consideration of such applications for registration’.[63] There was concern that if the Board pursued a policy contrary to RIBA’s, this could jeopardise the reciprocal arrangement between the British organisation and the Royal Australian Institute of Architects. Molnar’s registration by the NSW Board of Architects was deferred until World War II was over and he was duly registered on 1 January 1946. Molnar was employed in the Faculty of Architecture, Sydney University, in 1945 where he introduced the European group project (or team) method of design. He later took a position with the University of NSW retiring in 1975. Applicants for registration with the Board of Architects of NSW were required to have undertaken naturalisation and to take examinations if waivers were not granted for specific courses. The examinations could include such topics as design, general construction, iron and steel construction and

reinforced concrete, hygiene, specifications, properties and uses of building materials, professional practice and history of architecture. Following a group of mid-1940 assessments of émigré architects by the Board of Architects, the examiners reported that while ‘their academic qualifications and experience entitled them to exemption in some subjects … these applicants should be asked to present themselves for [further] examination’.[64] Breakthrough for émigrés The number of applications for émigrés presenting foreign credentials continued in the postwar period and a special committee was formed within the Board of Architects of NSW to study the issue of European training and assess the architectural education of selected institutions. Ultimately this committee was able to grant exemptions from sections of the examinations based on professional practice and previous study. In a 1945 letter, the new president (Cobden Parkes) of the Board of Architects of NSW explained the issue. During the latter part of 1945, the board was faced in a number of applications from New Australians with foreign qualifications and set up a special committee so these cases could have full consideration. It was found impracticable to correctly assess the true value of these qualifications and find a level of comparison with the requirements of the recognised schools in this state and this was borne out by the [poor examination] results of many of the New Australian candidates.[65]

After 24 June 1945, Cobden Parkes and the special committee prepared a list of continental European educational institutions whose diplomas and/or degrees would ‘be recognised and accepted as qualification for registration’ under the Architects Act 1921 No. 8 and related regulations. As mentioned above, the Board’s assessment committee did require additional examinations in selected subjects when they were unsure of competencies. The institutions ‘recognised and accepted’ in 1945 included: • The Royal Hungarian Palantine ‘Joseph’ University for Technical and Economic Sciences (Royal Joseph Technical University) • The Federal Technical University, Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, ETH) • The Technical University of Vienna (Technische Hochschule Wien) • The University of Bucharest (Universitatea din București) • The Royal Technical Academy, Berlin (Technische Hochschule Berlin) • The Royal Technical High School, Munich (Technische Hochschule München).[66] Émigrés presenting credentials from these training programs, however, could be asked to attend an interview before the Board of Architects Committee (typically three professionals) for further assessment. Committee assessments were made for proficiencies in individual subjects or overall architectural competencies (all subjects). For example, when George Reves and Francis Feledy (graduates of the Royal Joseph Technical University, Budapest) applied for Board registration in 1944–45, they were admitted

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without written examination. On the other hand, Frank Kolos (also a Royal Joseph Technical University graduate) was required to sit the ‘General Building Construction’ section of the Board’s 28th Prescribed Examination in 1952. Kolos received a pass.[67] Émigrés and professional standing These professional restrictions did not apply, however, to the use of the title of ‘designer’, and in 1941, amendments were also made to the NSW Architects Act allowing the use of new terms ‘architectural assistant’ and ‘architectural draftsman’ within an architectural practice.[68] These titles often appeared in the documents submitted by employed émigrés applying for Board of Architects registration. Perhaps frustrated by language and cultural obstacles, some architects with European training or experience chose not to pursue registration. Other European-trained architects may have abandoned architecture as a profession. While the precise reasons for an individual’s decision not to pursue registration cannot be known, the failure to gain this certification meant the professional title of ‘architect’ could not be used under penalty of law.[69] This left only the titles ‘designer’, ‘architectural assistant’ and ‘architectural draftsman’ as options for a creative practice.[70] Seeking independence, a number of émigré architects pursued other design options that enriched the Australian creative environment. Certainly, the interwar surge in the local design professions such as graphic arts, interior design, textile design, furniture design and manufacturing profited from émigrés with design or architecture backgrounds in the unique integrated studio training so much a part of the progressive Central European educational experience.

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2

The lucky escapees: European architects in postwar Sydney by Rebecca Hawcroft

In 1945, Dr Henrik Epstein, of Russian origin with a degree from Vienna, wrote to the NSW Board of Architects, ‘I am one of those refugee architects who has been lucky enough to escape from Europe in 1939 and enjoy the hospitality of this country’.[71] Epstein, requesting professional registration, provided details of his study, his European experience and a long list of projects he had completed since his arrival in Australia. Duly registered, Epstein is one of a significant group of European-trained architects who commenced their practice in Sydney in the 1940s. Architecture graduates were well represented in the more than 200,000 European migrants who came to Australia in the three main phases of migration associated with World War II. Their experience was diverse; some had established careers and a number of significant projects published in European journals; others were recent graduates, their student years disrupted by the upheavals of Europe during the previous 10 years. The NSW Board of Architects registration files show that when registration was recommenced postwar, more than 20 European-trained architects were accepted into the profession. A significant number did not register and pursued other careers, often in related fields of design. The single biggest group of émigré architects registered in NSW were Hungarians, but reflecting the movement of students across Europe, they had studied in Hungary, Austria, Germany, Holland and Switzerland. A smaller number of Austrian, Czechoslovakian, Dutch, Polish and Italians are also shown. Over the next decade, more continued to be registered, often having spent time in the public service or having obtained an additional degree in Australia. When, in 1948, wartime restrictions began to lift, and despite great shortages of materials and ongoing limitations, the huge need for postwar housing led to a boom in construction. A close look at the work of registered émigré architects practising from the 1940s shows a remarkable range of examples of transplanted European modernism taking shape in Sydney’s suburbs. Carrying on a strongly European modernist-influenced architectural practice, this group was supported by a network of European clients and assisted by European craftsmen, all of whom were well represented in postwar migration. Over the next decades, the work of these European-trained architects was prominent among the houses, apartments and commercial projects that characterised the development of postwar Sydney.

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Residential projects of the 1940s and 1950s At the end of the war, Dr Henry Epstein was quick to establish his own architectural practice with his own house in Pymble (1947); his first private project. The compact, rectilinear house, rendered white with steel-framed strip windows, a flat roof and steel ladder leading to a roof deck, was a direct expression of the European modernism popular in Epstein’s native Vienna. Epstein, having taken the extra year-long theory course, had graduated with a Doctorate of Technical Sciences in 1935 from Technical University, Vienna.[72] With only a few years of architectural experience before emigration, Epstein had spent a number of years doing drafting work before designing and supervising architectural ceramics on numerous projects including Stephenson & Turner’s 1941 King George V Hospital. Following his registration as an architect, Epstein completed a number of residential projects before the end of the 1940s.

Dr Henry Epstein’s own house in Pymble, completed in 1947. Constructed with a slab laid directly on the ground, the first in the area to do so, it challenged the council’s building standards, but was eventually approved.

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In the summer of 1949, as the Rose Seidler House was being constructed in Wahroonga, not far away in Roseville, Epstein was completing the Hillman House, his fourth and best known residential project. Epstein used the steep block to develop a dramatic composition of white rectangular prisms arranged at 90 degrees to one another, providing three levels of living spaces with adjoining roof terraces and sheltered porches. The use of continuous strip steel-frame windows and suspended concrete slabs demonstrate the architect’s considerable skill with modernist materials. Epstein’s own house in Pymble, his Perlman House, Killara (1948), and the Hillman House (1949) are unusual 1940s examples of Adolf Loos’ style of modernism in Sydney.

The Hillman House in Roseville designed in 1949. Epstein cleverly used angled volumes and roof terraces to step down the steep site. Photographed in 1997.

Integral to these projects was Epstein’s collaboration with Viennese furniture maker Paul Kafka. Kafka, having arrived in Sydney in 1939 an accomplished manufacturer of European-style custom-made furniture, was already well established in the émigré community. In the Hillman House, Epstein designed numerous joinery components (room partitions, stairway unit and built-in furniture) as well as free-standing furniture pieces for his Polish émigré client Chaim Hillman, and his wife Florence. Using highly figured veneers, the house’s joinery was manufactured by Paul Kafka Exclusive Furniture Pty Ltd, bringing a distinctive Viennese quality to the interiors. Although most of Epstein’s 1940s work is residential, his private practice included industrial-design clients such as AWA, for whom he designed vacuum cleaners and radios.[73] Epstein formed a friendship with sculptor Lyndon Dadswell that, in 1946, saw the pair win the design competition for a King George V memorial in Sydney’s Botanic Gardens. Their monolithic scheme was wildly unpopular and eventually scrapped, but five years later they were engaged to produce the more subdued Sandringham Memorial Gardens in Hyde Park. Opened by the Queen in 1954, the structured landscape space has sculptural metal gates opening to a semi-circular timber pergola hugging a sunken circular fountain with a mosaic of Aboriginal-inspired motifs. Maintained in as-new condition, it is arguably one of the city’s most intact mid-century landscape spaces. The pair also collaborated on the 1960–66 extension to the Jewish Museum’s Maccabean Hall, Darlinghurst, with Epstein designing the building and Dadswell the heavily modulated off-form concrete facade. Although none of Epstein’s early projects were published, in 1948, a similar white-rendered, two-storey, flat-roofed house in Victoria Road, Bellevue Hill, with cantilevered balcony and linear iron railings, was celebrated in Australian Home Beautiful for its ‘bold clarity of modern Viennese architecture’.[74] It was in fact an extension of a single-storey bluestone cottage undertaken

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Hugo Stossel’s 1948 design for Mr and Mrs Eisner, in Warrawee, included extensive built-in furniture to maximise space in the house’s compact plan. The colourful interior was featured in Australian House & Garden in 1951. Stossel’s Eisner House was published in a number of magazines and collections of house plans during the 1950s.

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by Viennese architect ET Reeves for a Dr Steiner. The article’s main focus is on the interior where the architect has maximised the limited floor space by designing an extensive range of economical and flexible built-in furniture. The house features full-height wall units, built-in day beds, desks and sofas, with the timber veneers a feature of each room. The article noted that the house’s moveable furniture was limited to pieces Dr Steiner brought from Vienna. After this 1948 project, Reeves, who never registered as an architect in NSW, all but disappears from the historic record.[75] Recognisably modern and European, the Steiner house is one of many that challenged the red-roofed bungalows that had previously dominated Sydney’s suburbs. Houses designed by Hungarian Hugo Stossel were also being constructed in Sydney’s north-shore suburbs through the late 1940s. Strongly influenced by his Viennese architectural training and European experience, Stossel’s 1940s and early 1950s houses are boldly geometric with rectangular prism forms punctuated by window and door openings. Projecting sills and architraves create strong linear elements on the buildings’ white-rendered facades. Generally arranged vertically, the houses’ compact plans, a response to postwar building restrictions, indicate a consistent focus on open living spaces adjoining extensive outdoor terraces. Stossel, although born in Hungary, had studied architecture in Italy before graduating from the Technical University, Vienna in 1932. In 1935, the young architect was invited to Bucharest, Romania, to design and supervise the construction of a number of large, high-profile projects. Stossel’s completed projects included the ‘Scala’ Picture Theatre complex, seating 2000, with office building above, which had reportedly been published in a number of European architecture journals. Stossel notes in his application for registration: While in Europe, I visited repeatedly several other countries for shorter and sometimes long periods, such as Germany where I stayed for 18 months; Holland, Italy, Switzerland, England, France, Czechoslovakia, etc. where I had the opportunity to study all aspects of Architecture and especially the problem of housing.[76]

Stossel registered as an architect in NSW in 1947, aged 43. His early projects in Sydney included a house he designed for furniture-maker Paul Kafka in Lindfield (1948), his own house in East Lindfield (1951), and a house for Mr and Mrs Eisner in Warrawee (1947). The use of colour and built-in furniture in the space-conscious floor plan of the Eisner house was featured in Australian House & Garden in 1951. The 1954 collection 60 Beach and Holiday Homes, published by influential designer and teacher Phyllis Shillito, also features the Eisner house, one of four Stossel designs included; interestingly, not in fact holiday houses, each had been completed for urbane European clients. Stossel’s early collaboration with Moses Eisner is an important one. The Polish engineer established the Arcos Steel Company, and by 1946, Stossel had designed a number of Arcos prototypes, all steel, prefabricated houses that were in production for the NSW Housing Commission.[77] Although the project seems to have waned after the initial demonstration house was

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erected in Ryde, Arcos Steel was central to numerous construction projects undertaken with Stossel and other émigré architects over the coming decades. While Stossel’s work in Sydney in the 1940s was mostly houses and factories, by 1950 Stossel had designed a project that marked a future significant contribution to apartment design: the St Ursula Apartments on a corner block in Onslow Avenue, Elizabeth Bay.[78] Like Aaron Bolot’s acclaimed Wylde Street Apartments of 1948–50, Stossel designed a curved structure of steelframed, reinforced concrete with cavity brick curtain walls and floor-to-ceiling steel-framed windows responsive to the site’s harbour setting. The project’s rationally designed compact living spaces and creative planning heralded a new urban model of living, when restrictions on apartment construction were still widespread. Having arrived with a remarkable exposure to European modernism, by the late 1940s, Austrian architect Hans Peter Oser was also carving out a significant career in Sydney. Despite his father running an interior, furniture and upholstery business, Oser had pursued architecture, graduating from the Technical University, Vienna, in 1936. Although only working in the European capital for a short time, his experience included periods in the office of acclaimed modernist Peter Behrens and as chief draftsman in the practice of Josef Hoffmann and Oswald Haerdtl.[79] Hoffmann and Haerdtl were central figures in the Vienna Werkbund and teachers at the School for Applied Arts, Vienna. Oser’s time with the firm included accompanying Haerdtl to the 1937 Paris Exhibition to assist in the design of the Austrian pavilion.[80] Despite plans to work in Paris, as one of Vienna’s many Jewish residents Oser faced increasing restrictions and by 1938, as German troops marched into Austria, Oser was forced to leave Vienna. Arriving in Australia in 1939, as early as 1941 Oser’s work was featured in the Australian media; a house he remodelled was written up in the Sydney Morning Herald.[81] Oser’s considerable skill as an architect was demonstrated by his wartime position as chief architect of the NSW Housing Commission.[82] At the end of the war, Oser formed his own practice and during the 1940s and 1950s his numerous projects were regularly featured in the professional journals Architecture and Arts and Architecture in Australia, as well as the more popular publications Australian Women’s Weekly and the Sydney Morning Herald. Four of Oser’s residential projects were included in Phyllis Shillito’s 60 Beach and Holiday Homes, including three timber houses in the Blue Mountains, which evoke vernacular Austrian buildings while using restrained detailing and strongly linear roof lines. Oser was a prominent figure in Sydney during the 1950s and gained a considerable reputation, as demonstrated by the inclusion of his work in the 1952 exhibition Architecture Today and Tomorrow alongside that of Harry Seidler and Arthur Baldwinson.[83] His partnership from 1956 with French-born, Australian-trained, architect Jean Fombertaux, in the firm Oser Fombertaux & Associates made a significant contribution to Sydney’s rising modern skyline.

The work of Viennese architect Hans Peter Oser was regularly published during the early 1950s. This house, designed for the Strouds, was constructed in Clareville c.1955 Interior view of Oser’s Stroud house, Clareville, c.1955

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Another architect contributing to the variety of residential design in the late 1940s to 1950s was Hungarian George Reves (née Revesz). The son of an architect, after graduating from the Royal Joseph Technical University, Budapest, Reves worked in Paris for French modernist Auguste Perret before returning to Budapest in 1934 to begin his own practice.[84] Arriving in Australia in 1939, Reves’ wartime experience included designing numerous structures for James Hardie, and when he registered in 1945, he had already completed houses in Seaforth and Killara. Reves began his own largely residential practice soon after, drawing on his extensive contacts within Sydney’s émigré community. Early work was undertaken in partnership with fellow Hungarian Gabor Lukacs; a house the pair designed in Bellevue Hill was featured on the cover of Architecture in Australia in 1955. [85] One year later, Reves’ own project in Dover Heights was published in the same magazine.[86] Chapter 4 details Reves’ collaboration with clients Laszlo and Magda Schwartz and furniture-maker Michael Gerstl in the 1957 design of 875 New South Head Road, Rose Bay.

‘A new flat-owning system’; the Sydney Morning Herald featured this apartment complex designed by Gabor Lukacs, providing generous three-bedroom apartments in a low-rise complex, designed for owner-occupiers.

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Gabor Lukacs, although Hungarian, had studied architecture at the highly respected Swiss Federal Technical University, Zurich, under the direction of Professor Otto Salvisberg, one of the forerunners of European modernism. Lukacs had designed apartments in Budapest before working for a period in London, and then migrating to Sydney in 1939.[87] In 1953, Lukacs’ red mahogany weatherboard house with a feature stone chimney, white window frames and daffodil-yellow door, designed for Mr and Mrs Dawson of Seaforth, was featured in Australian Women’s Weekly and the Ideal Homes exhibition at Sydney Town Hall.[88] Like many émigré architects, Lukacs’ architectural work soon turned to exploring high-density housing options in Sydney, where apartment development was in its infancy. Lukacs completed a well-publicised project in Vaucluse in 1954 that provided generous three-bedroom apartments

in a low-rise complex, designed for owner-occupiers. Heralded as a new flat-owning system ‘common in Europe since the 1930s’ this company title project was one of many led by Europeans pushing for higher quality apartments and greater acceptance of apartment living.[89] High rise: The move to apartment design As the decades progressed, Henry Epstein followed many migrant architects in turning to high-rise developments focused on the city, pursuing a number of high-profile entrepreneurial ventures based on higher density living. In 1965, he obtained approval for a 30-storey, female-only housing development in Liverpool Street. A complex for city workers with 12 single-dwelling flats on each floor, it drew harsh public criticism. Commentators brought alarmingly gendered stereotypes to their criticism of the project: ‘The idea that 360 women could happily share a block of flats is almost diabolical’.[90] A surprising concern when ‘bachelor flats’ were becoming an accepted housing form. The scheme failed to find investors and did not go ahead, but another of Epstein’s projects, a medical facility to house specialists close to the Royal North Shore Hospital, did. The concept of a facility for independent medical professionals was a new one pioneered by Epstein and received the important commercial support of Gerard Dusseldorp and his recently founded Civil and Civic construction company; completed in 1959, the building in St Leonards was the first to use Dusseldorp’s ‘lend and lease’ model of development financing. Making a significant contribution as a founding member of the Australian Consumers Association and as a representative of the NSW Fellowship of Jewish Architects and Engineers, Epstein’s career was sadly cut short when he died in 1968 at the age of 59. Under the direction of Austrian Oser and the Frenchman Fombertaux, Oser Fombertaux & Associates developed a strongly internationalist style of modernism applied to a range of residential and commercial buildings during the 1960s. It is likely that Fombertaux’s influence was significant. The architect had earlier worked for modernist designers Lipson and Kaad, before joining Oser. Fombertaux’s own house in Lindfield (1963), a striking experiment in modular units elevated on an expressed steel frame, demonstrates a skilled practitioner. The firm’s noteworthy projects during the 1960s include the Toohey’s Limited Administration building in Mary Street, Surry Hills (1960), the curtain wall William Bland Centre, still prominent on Macquarie Street (1960) and the sophisticated Harrogate office building, Sydney (1963). In 1961, the firm designed a studio complex on Bayswater Road, Kings Cross for ‘young executives who desire to live close to their offices’. Their 1963 open-plan interior of the BOAC Travel Centre, Castlereagh Street, identified the firm as one of the city’s most sophisticated designers.

57 Next: Dr Henry Epstein photographed with a model of his experimental high-density city housing scheme c.1965.

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Shortly after Oser Fombertaux & Associates completed the 215-unit Rosebery public housing scheme (1966), Oser unexpectedly died, aged 57. Despite having been an adept architect, effective promoter and high-profile figure, Oser’s contribution has not been acknowledged in any history of Sydney’s modern architecture. The 1971 collection 444 Sydney Buildings includes three of the firm’s projects: the 1966 Glenmore Apartments, Glenmore Road, Paddington; the 1966 Helena Rubinstein factory, Ermington; and the BOAC Travel Centre interior. The firm continued after Oser’s death as Fombertaux Rice Hanley and moved towards a Brutalist style under the direction of Kevin Rice and David Hanley. Fombertaux remained at the head of the firm until his own untimely death in 1975. During the 1950s, H Stossel & Associates continued to expand, completing a number of significant residential and industrial projects. Stossel’s 1957 Broadwater apartment scheme, at 11 Sutherland Crescent, was one of the first to take advantage of newly subdivided harbourside sites at Darling Point, with a high-density luxury apartment complex stepping down the steep site. The project was followed by the larger Yarranabbe Gardens (1958) constructed close by on a wide north-facing block. The 77 apartment complex was at a scale new to the inner city; the H-shaped block included car parking, a 20-metre harbourside pool, private jetty and beach. The firm’s other work on the rapidly developing peninsula included Eastbourne Towers (1968); a 20-storey block of units constructed with precast structural members and external wall panels. Over on Elizabeth Bay, the firm designed the modernist Elizabeth Gardens on Holdsworth Avenue in 1955 and The Tor and Bayview units, Roslyn Gardens, around 1965. From 1960, fellow Hungarian George Buda became an associate in the firm, along with SC Bates, and they were joined in 1971 by M Tsui. Buda graduated from Sydney Technical College in 1957 at the age of 37. One of H Stossel & Associates’ major commercial projects was the 1969 Wynyard Travelodge. The 22-level building with a rooftop swimming pool, at the time Australia’s largest ‘motor hotel’, rose out of the low-scale York Street, to the west of the city.[91] Stossel played an early role in the debate for a new Sydney Opera House when Eugene Goossens commissioned him to design a speculative opera house on a vacant site at Wynyard. The design was published in the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald on 31 March 1954, and much debate followed. When the official Opera House competition was held in 1957, Stossel made an unsuccessful submission. H Stossel & Associates was one of a number of firms submitting designs for the 1962 Rocks Redevelopment. Featured in Architecture and Australia, their design was not unlike the more famous Seidler submission in that it proposed low-scale podiums with a series of high towers on a peninsula clear of its troublesome 19th-century architectural heritage. By the late 1960s, Stossel had returned to Europe, maintaining only a remote involvement in the firm that continued to operate into the 1980s under the leadership of Buda and the other associates.[92] The Oceania Apartments, built on a narrow site at the end of Elizabeth Bay Crescent in 1958, is another noteworthy apartment project. It was designed

Oser Fombertaux & Associates designed a number of internationalist-style commercial and residential projects built in the city and eastern suburbs during the 1960s. Their William Bland Centre on Macquarie Street remains a prominent example of their work.

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Stossel’s Yarranabbe Gardens boasted some of the largest units in Sydney as it neared completion in 1958 on the water at Darling Point, and was one of several large developments to transform the peninsula.

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by Polish-born Theodore Fry (née Freiwillig) who had studied at the Lwów Polytechnic, Poland (now Ukraine). After ten years of displacement, via Palestine, Fry registered as an architect in NSW in 1949, aged 41.[93] Fry designed a number of apartments, including one at Wolseley Road, Point Piper, in 1956, with Arcos Constructions. Oceania, appeared in Cross Section (1960) and Building Ideas Guide to Sydney Architecture (1962), with its innovative Arcos Steel all-steel form work for column and beam casing highlighted as an innovation.[94] Fry died in 1968, leaving employee Nino Sydney (née Somogy) to take over the running of the firm. The Baxter building at 85 Drumalbyn Road (1958), was the private construction of Hungarian architect Laurence Tibor Rayner. A graduate of the Royal Joseph Technical University, Budapest, Rayner had worked for a period in public works in Melbourne, playing a key role in the design of the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games infrastructure, before returning to Sydney in 1957.[95] The four-level Baxter building hugs an extremely steep site in Bellevue Hill. Rayner’s design supports the expressed concrete floor slabs on slender steel columns, providing panoramic views for the building’s apartments. The curved ship-like main facade is fully glazed, with coloured spandrel panels adding privacy. Rayner took particular care to taper the external edge of each floor slab, giving the impression of wafer-thin concrete. Another émigré making a significant contribution to Sydney’s growing high-rise developments during the 1960s was Hungarian Frank Kolos. Kolos had also studied architecture at the Royal Joseph Technical University, Budapest. Fleeing Hungary’s postwar communist government in 1950, Kolos and his family had taken the considerable risk of secretly crossing the closed and patrolled border. Kolos registered as an architect in 1954, aged 38, and after five years as an employee, began his own practice. In 1959, Kolos designed a block of home units in Henrietta Street, Double Bay, and a modernist house for the Pentlys in Ellesmere Avenue, Hunters Hill.[96] By the time the Pently house was completed (1961), Kolos had formed a partnership with JH Bryant, which was rapidly involved in numerous projects that took advantage of the finance readily available in the 1960s, improvements in construction technology and more liberal planning controls. Before the end of the 1960s, the firm had designed two multihome buildings in Neutral Bay; the ten-storey Harbour View (1966); and a 24-unit waterfront building on Kurraba Road (1967), as well as Highland Towers (1964), Bellevue Hill and Hyde Park House (1968), the first building to take advantage of the city’s new allowance for mixed office and residential uses.[97] In 1961, the firm completed the Rushcutters Bay Travelodge, one of some 38 state-of-the-art hotels that Bryant had completed. Kolos and Bryant’s contribution to the hotel landscape continued with the 600-room, bunker-like Sydney Hilton (1968–72), taking the full block between Pitt and George Streets. During the 1970s, working predominately with precast concrete, the firm also completed multistorey buildings in Clarence Street, Pitt Street and North Sydney. Kolos retired in the 1990s after three decades as the principal of one of Sydney’s largest architectural firms.[98]

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Tear-drop coffee table of coachwood and black Vitrolite, c.1955. Designed by George Kóródy for Artes Studios. Photographed at Hotel Hotel in Canberra, 2017.

Lukacs Gergely–designed apartments, Crown Street, Surry Hills, 1965

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Another prominent Hungarian-run architectural firm, Gergely & Pinter remains in operation under the directorship of the still active Stephen Gergely. Born in Budapest in 1926, Gergely graduated from the Royal Joseph Technical University, Budapest, in 1948, having survived a period of forced labour in a German army–operated copper mine in Bor, Serbia. Despite having a prestigious position as an architect in the state design department and being in charge of the architectural design of major works including the hydroelectric scheme of Tiszalök (with S Nyiri) and the first television transmission tower in Hungary, Gergely became disillusioned with the system and fled Hungary, arriving in Australia in 1957. His first design in Sydney was the Romance espresso bar in Rowe Street and a residence in Cranbrook Road, Rose Bay, for fellow Hungarian Stephen Stux. Registered as an architect in NSW in 1962, he began in partnership with Gabor Lukacs. One of the partnership’s early projects was the 1963 Frisco Furniture Store, Punchbowl, for client Alex Gemes, also Hungarian and operator of the Berryman Furniture Company. Gergely designed numerous projects for Gemes, including stores for Berryman and the 1958 Gemes house in March Street, Bellevue Hill, with Susan Kozma-Orlay interiors. The partnership with Lukacs was dissolved in 1967 and in 1970 Gergely formed a partnership with John Pinter. Pinter, born in 1932 in Budapest, had graduated from the same university. After a period in the NSW public works, Pinter was registered in 1959. Pinter was one of a significant number of refugees displaced from Hungary following the 1956 uprising. Beginning in Budapest’s universities, the student population led an uprising against the government of the Hungarian People’s Republic and its Soviet-imposed policies. By 1957, the Soviet-controlled government had returned and the crackdown on the agitators was harsh. A large wave of Hungarian migration

followed, in Australia, supported by the Hungarian Refugee Assisted Scheme. Gergely and Pinter’s projects from the 1970s included an office building in Foveaux Street, Surry Hills, with extensive architectural ceramics by Czech sculptor Vladimir Tichy, and the Hungarian Embassy, Canberra (1989–90). Diversity: Émigré architects of the late 1960s By the end of the 1960s, the impact of postwar migration was such that architecture had become a diverse field, with practitioners from a wide variety of backgrounds active at all levels of the profession. Many of Sydney’s architects had early periods of employment within the émigré-run firms of the 1950s and 1960s, and exposure to European modernism was integrated into architectural education and readily available in publications. By the 1970s, the European modernism characteristic of the early work of émigré architects evolved into a diverse picture of mixed commercial and residential work, largely Brutalist in style and dominated by new concrete construction technologies. Among the European-born and Australian-trained architects who continued to be active throughout the 1960s and 1970s was Henry Rossler. Rossler was born in Prague in 1928 and arrived in Sydney in 1948 with his younger brother, Peter. Having spent time in a number of German labour camps, including Auschwitz, they are the only members of their family to survive the Holocaust. After graduating from the Sydney Technical College in 1956, Rossler maintained a modernist practice based in Sydney’s eastern suburbs designing numerous houses and other projects over the next three decades. Rossler won a lighting award in 1965 for his renovation of the Moddel house in Bellevue Hill. Trudie Moddel recalls, ‘he liked light and space, which is reflected in all his work and which made him popular and sought after’.[99] Rossler’s modernisation of a Rose Bay bungalow, removal of a rear verandah and addition of full-height windows, was featured in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1966.[100] Nino Sydney, having taken over the practice of Theo Fry, went on to make a considerable contribution as lead architect for Lend Lease Homes, pioneers of Australia’s burgeoning project home industry. Born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, in 1932, Sydney arrived in 1956 with a Yugoslavian architectural degree. However, requiring further study to qualify for registration, he enrolled at Sydney University, graduating in 1959. One of Sydney’s first projects with Lend Lease was the development of the display village at Kingsdene Estate Carlingford, which included five in-house-designed project homes. Sydney’s Beachcomber, a flat-roofed rectangular volume raised on slender steel posts, became an icon of the era; with more than 200 of the official designs constructed as well as numerous copies. Sydney went on to produce numerous award-winning designs for Lend Lease Homes before establishing a private practice in 1973. The period from the 1940s to early 1960s can be seen as a unique time, when architects with European modernist training and exposure migrated to Sydney in significant numbers. Although it was a smaller group that registered and successfully navigated a new country, language and architectural

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system, those that did made a significant impact on the city’s built environment. This brief account of a complex field is by no means comprehensive; the stories of many more émigré architects remain to be told. While this survey condenses a mix of backgrounds, experience and architecture, it demonstrates that the work of this group was markedly different from that of their Australian-born colleagues. The work of émigré architects was also prominent, well published and included a number of the larger architectural practices that pioneered Sydney’s 1960s high-rise development. Central to the understanding of the development of Australian modernism, the story of Sydney’s émigré architects is one that should be better understood.

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Ferdinand Silberstein-Silvan: Loss and legacy by Rebecca Hawcroft

Ferdinand Silberstein-Silvan was an accomplished architect with a direct experience of the avant-garde modernism of Prague and Bratislava in the early years of the 20th century. A number of his own functionalist modernist projects had been highly acclaimed, and his work had been featured in both the British The Architect & Building News and the influential German journal Forum.[101] When he arrived in Sydney in 1949, his qualifications were not recognised, and he did not register as an architect. Taking the path of many émigrés, he found reliable, if unstimulating, work in the public service where registration was not required. Silvan worked in the NSW Electricity Commission until his retirement in 1968, frustrated with his lack of opportunities and completely unknown. During the years of communist dictatorship in Slovakia, writing about architects who had emigrated was forbidden. There seemed little interest in remembering Silvan as a designer, even though the schools, apartments and offices he designed had remained virtually unchanged. He died in Sydney in 1983 without the two sides of his career being reconciled. Ten years after Silvan’s death, the first movements towards a revival of interest in the lost careers for Slovakia’s émigré architects was underway. A number of Silvan’s buildings were recognised for their excellence, and articles charting his career prior to his emigration were published. This work culminated in 2002’s The Silvan Story, a monograph acknowledging his contribution to Slovakia’s modernist architecture.[102] It was through these publications that Australian architectural historians became aware of Silvan, and it begged the question: how many highly skilled and experienced modernist architects came to Australia in the waves of migration associated with World War II, and how many careers were lost in the way that Silvan’s appears to have been? As more attention is being paid to the presence and experience of European-trained architects, particularly most recently in Sydney, it appears that as a successful architect who remained unknown in Australia, Silvan’s story is unusual. Of the architects who were in the middle of their careers when they immigrated to Australia, a number made contributions that are well acknowledged. These include Swiss architect Frederick Romberg, Czechoslovakians Ernest Fooks (née Fuchs) and Ernest Milston (née Muhlstein), all of whom settled in Melbourne and are well known within the context of

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Silvan in his Bratislava architectural office, c.1935

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postwar modern architecture and planning in Victoria. Some, like Hungarian Hugo Stossel, had considerable overseas experience prior to emigration and continued their careers in Sydney with prominent practices. In contrast, Ernst Korner, a successful and accomplished Czechoslovakian architect who was 51 when he arrived in 1939, completed only a handful of projects in Australia. The interruption of the war years, his advanced age and the disconnection from his previous career meant that Korner had little opportunity to practise in Sydney, and as a result was unknown to the wider Australian architectural community.[103] The story of Ferdinand Silvan is also characteristic of the many European architects who found work in the public service, where authorship was not attributed, and although secure, few opportunities for creative expression were available. On Silvan’s retirement in 1968, the Electricity Commission newspaper, Network, noted that he was ‘closely associated with the plans of all postwar

power stations’[104], despite being a Grade 3 Assistant. Clearly holding more responsibility than his position indicated, Silvan found his situation frustrating. So much so that he carefully recorded all the projects he worked on, documented his role within project teams and kept sketches and drawings of his design work. A typed document, with chapter headings that include ‘A ruthless decision’ and ‘A tragicomical episode’, outlines his role in the Power Station Construction division. These papers provide a unique opportunity to trace European modernist influences in the development of what are usually considered un-authored utilities. The papers also allow us to connect a career from Europe to Australia and to speculate on the frustrations of others in Silvan’s position, their talents and achievements not recognised within the Australian system. Slovakian origins Silvan was born Ferdinand Silberstein in Sered, a small town in Hungary (now in Slovakia), in December 1902, the third son and fourth of six children of Heinrich and Hermina Silberstein, wealthy timber merchants. Caught in the constant flux of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Silvan noted that, through very little change of his own, over his life he had five nationalities: Austrian, Hungarian, Czechoslovakian, Slovakian and, after 1945, Czechoslovakian again, then after his naturalisation in 1956, Australian. The name Silberstein (German for ‘silver stone’) had been chosen by his Jewish ancestors many generations before. After World War II, anti-German sentiment led most people in Czechoslovakia to change German-sounding names to Czech-sounding names. Ferdinand chose Silvan. From 1945, the Silberstein family adopted the name Silvan. When it came to choosing his studies, Silvan, who did not speak Czechoslovakian, chose the architecture course at the German University in Prague (Deutsche Technische Hochschule, which closed at the end of World War II). The university had split into two parts in 1896: a Czech part and a German part. Both schools provided skilled teaching staff and high-quality training for architects and engineers.[105] The course was considered conservative among Prague’s architecture schools, which included the Academy of Fine Arts and the Arts and Crafts School, both of which had experimental teachers who would be influential in the development of the next generation of Czech modernist architects. Silvan’s student projects appear traditional in style following the Mannerist style of Josef Zitek, the architecture school’s professor until 1909.[106] However, modern architecture was prominent in Prague and Bratislava, with the buildings of Josef Gočár, Adolf Loos, Mies van der Rohe and Ladislav Zak forming part of the urban landscape. By 1928, the Bratislava Arts and Crafts School (Skola umeleckych remesiel) had been established as a partner institution of the Bauhaus, with wellknown figures in European modernism Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Hannes Meyer lecturing there.[107] Although not directly taught by functionalist modernists, Silvan appears to have absorbed these influences, and when he graduated in 1925, he had a firm grounding in modernist principles.

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Silvan returned to Bratislava in what emerged as the golden age of Slovak architecture.[108] Following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Slovakia joined with the Czech provinces to become the independent state of Czechoslovakia. Bratislava was the newly declared seat of the Slovakian government. A mood of optimism and expansion encouraged development of the newly independent territory. As the 1920s and 1930s progressed, despite Europe’s economic problems, the building of schools, cultural facilities, sports clubs, state-controlled banks and insurance companies across the newly developing towns of the region had a significant impact on the spread of modern architecture.

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A functional modernist Silvan began his professional life in the office of the prominent Mannerist firm of MM Harminc. After his entry to design the Slovak National Museum in Martin won the firm the contract, he decided to form his own practice. Silvan’s first project as an independent architect was the post office building in his hometown of Sered. Completed in 1930, the building makes a decisively modernist statement in the town’s main square. Occupying a corner position, the building was laid out with the postal hall on the ground floor and two levels of offices above, the third level set back from the main facade. Its white rendered exterior was articulated by symmetrical banks of windows divided by heavy mullions, creating a geometric rhythm to the facade. The building was successful in representing the town’s modernist ambitions and Silvan was quickly commissioned for two other projects in the district: a shopping complex in Sered and a primary school in Dvorniky and Vahom.[109] The city of Trencin was in a region benefiting from Slovakia’s strong industrial economic production and it was here that Silvan was to complete his most successful work. In 1932, Silvan was invited to build the first building in the city’s new district of Horna Sihot, the Dr M Hodza Business Academy. On the reverse of a photograph of the project, Silvan wrote, ‘first prize in my first completion, in my first practice, about 1932’.[110] There was some controversy with the issuing of the tender, but Silvan emerged as the project architect, with construction concluding in 1936.[111] Set at the street edges of a large block, the L-shape plan provided full-height glazing to what were essentially two wings of classrooms. A central stairwell block separated the two volumes of the wings, and finished in brick, it made a vertical statement against the rendered wings. This clear expression of function perfectly matched the school’s focus. Established to teach business skills, it was fitted out with the most up-to-date typing and calculating machines of the day. The most modern school building of its era, it became a symbol of the prosperous economy of the Slovakian region. Published in 1938, the project brought Silvan wide recognition and a steady stream of commissions. Despite some later additions, the school complex remains largely intact and is now one of Slovakia’s protected monuments. Silvan’s other projects of the period include an apartment complex for Mr Sevcik, located in Razusova Street, Trencin. The three-level building

Post office, designed by Silvan, in the main square of his hometown of Sered, 1930

contained six apartments, two on each level. The facade is articulated by projecting balconies contrasted with narrow recessed porches. The horizontal steel handrails at the balconies and roof terrace, characteristic of Silvan’s designs, provide a horizontal continuity across the unadorned facade. Silvan’s only known villa projects were the house for Mr Maisel, in Dolny Kubin, and the house for Mr Mendel in Bratislava. Composed of strong geometric forms with flat roofs, the lower volumes are offset to create roof terraces on the upper levels. With banks of narrow vertical windows punched into rendered facades and projecting awnings, they represent a full realisation of Le Corbusier’s principles. Silvan’s largest and most comprehensive project was the Mestska sporitelna (bank building).The complex included street-level shops, a 500-seat cinema below ground and apartments above. Fitted out with the latest technology of the day, it was equipped with an elevator, central heating, electricity, telephone and laundry facilities. Featured in the German architectural journal Forum in 1938, it was one of a number of regional projects that represented Slovakia’s emergence as a modern nation. The complex remains an important building in Trencin and is now a protected national monument. By this period, Silvan is thought to have designed five villas, four apartment complexes, three schools and several other public buildings. Silvan notes in his personal papers: ‘There was a global economic crisis, but I managed to get some orders from my friends, especially in the smaller towns and I was happy with that’.[112] For such a challenging time, Silvan had a number of notable achievements.

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The Dr M Hodza Business Academy, Trencin, as published in German architecture magazine Forum in 1938 The Dr M Hodza Business Academy was also featured in British journal The Architect & Building News, 1938

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The Mestska sporitelna (bank building), Trencin, as featured in Forum in 1938

Apartment complex for Mr Sevcik, Razusova Street, Trencin, completed in 1937

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Silvan’s remarkable survival It was at this point, after 13 years of designing, that Silvan’s architectural practice abruptly ended. The political climate was such that 1939 is seen as the last year of avant-garde architecture in Slovakia. [113] The Czech countries came under control of the expanding German empire. Slovakia remained independent via the rule of the puppet state of anti-Semite Father Hlinka. Jewish architects were barred from practice, Jewish businesses were seized and Jews who were considered non-essential employees were deported to German labour camps. At least ten famous Slovakian architects died in the Holocaust, including Emil Brull and Friedrich Weinwurm, key practitioners of modern architecture and among the most important architects in Central Europe.[114] Silvan was able to find work in the maintenance section of the State Health Insurance organisation, in a role that was considered an essential service and entitled him to exemption from deportation. For Silvan, the likely outcome of the coming German rule was clear. He recalls in his memoir: When Hitler set in motion the ‘Final Solution’ I was quite convinced that there was no chance of survival for any Jewish person in Slovakia. Knowing the efficiency and ruthlessness of the Germans, I felt that only a miracle could save a Jew from inexorable doom, and the age of miracles had ended long ago.[115]

Emigration remained an expensive possibility for some Slovakians in the early years of German influence, but became increasingly difficult. Escape was a risky option, but still taken by some. In 1939, Silvan planned to join friends in an escape attempt via Bulgaria, with a view of joining his brother Ervin in Palestine. Just before leaving, he changed his mind. Some months before, he had met Edith Lord, the only woman he had ever loved. He decided he could not leave her. He returned to Bratislava hoping to retain his protection from deportation and, as his wife, protect Edith from deportation also. They married in 1941 and their daughter Susan was born under the most trying conditions in April 1942. Over the next three years, they lived an itinerant life in ever more restricted and dangerous circumstances. In the final months of the war, those who had survived deportation since 1939 fled the cities and towns, fearing the retreating German troops. The extended Silvan family joined streams of desperate Slovakian Jews seeking shelter in the wooded hills near Banska Bystrica. During the journey, the family was separated, but Ferdinand, Edith and the now three-year-old Susan remained together and, joining with a group of others, constructed a rough hut in a remote part of the forest. They pooled their money and bribed a local to secretly supply them with food. What they had hoped would be days or weeks of hiding stretched into months. For seven months of the winter between 1944 and 1945, they hid from both the departing Germans and advancing Russians in the forests of the Low Tatras, a mountain range in central Slovakia. Next: Silvan’s wartime diary, closely written in Slovakian, recorded the forest hut in which he, Edith, Susan and a group of other Jews hid for seven months until the defeat of the Germans in March 1945.

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Slovakia was liberated by the Russians in March 1945. The Silvans’ joy of their own survival was quickly tempered by the realisation that so many of their family and friends had not survived those last months. Of their immediate family, only Tommy, the son of Edith’s sister, remained alive. The Silvans adopted Tommy and began to reconstruct their lives. Re-establishing an architectural practice in the new Slovakian Republic was not easy. From 1945 to 1948, Silvan designed two buildings: a post office in Banska Bystrica (which was constructed after he left to a different design) and a large-scale apartment complex on Krizna Street, Bratislava. Commenced before the 1948 nationalisation of industries, investors refused to pay and it was Silvan who was blamed. The family, having acquired a visa for Australia in 1945, finally made the difficult decision to pack their belongings and leave. Unable to remove cash from the Slovakian economy, Silvan purchased a baby grand piano, which accompanied them on their journey. It was to remain in their modest house in Sydney for decades, despite no-one in the family knowing how to play. A new start in the NSW Electricity Commission Like so many Jews born in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, Silvan’s life became one of before National Socialism and after. Re-establishment of his career in Australia proved difficult. Silvan seemed to feel this was in large part due to the failure of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects to recognise his degree from Prague University. Following the war, the Board of Architects developed a system for assessing the training of architects with European degrees, and architects were expected to pass a number of examinations before being accepted by the Board (the evolution of this system is covered in detail in Chapter 1). Many émigré architects took this in their stride and obtained the necessary qualifications. A number, however, likely for a range of reasons, were unable to negotiate this hurdle and never registered. Some, like German-trained architect Hugh Buhrich, carried on a limited practice as a ‘planning consultant’, while others like Silvan found architectural work in the lower levels of the public service where registration was not required. We will never know how many trained architects were deterred by the process and gave the profession away in favour of teaching, journalism, interior design or commercial art. Certainly a number of European-trained architects worked in these fields in Sydney in the postwar period.[116] In 1954, Silvan wrote to former Bauhaus director Walter Gropius. Gropius had visited Australia earlier in 1954, to present at the 4th Australian Architecture Convention in Sydney. Although the letter does not survive, its reply does. One can imagine Silvan has written expressing his frustration that his qualification and experience are not recognised and that he was being asked to either sit examinations or obtain further qualifications. Gropius wrote from Massachusetts with apologies that he was unable to help further, but noted, ‘many countries have similar conditions to the ones you indicate because they want to make the competition coming from outside that county very tough’.[117] It is difficult to identify if this was in fact the

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motivation behind the Board’s registration process. There were a number of fields where highly skilled migrants were restricted from employment as a direct result of fears of locals losing their jobs. The music industry is a stark example. The 2016 translation of Albrecht Dümling’s The Vanished Musicians: Jewish Refugees in Australia notes the terrible impact of the Musicians’ Union’s restriction on the employment of migrants.[118] Many of the German musicians featured were prohibited from working and, in the most tragic of cases, simply gave up their careers. In that context, Silvan’s restrictions were not prohibitive. With a chronic shortage of skilled labour and the postwar building boom beginning, Silvan quickly found a job at the Sydney County Council where, as an assistant architect, registration was not required. Despite his age and experience, he began as an Assistant Architect Grade 1. By 1951, he had been promoted to Assistant Architect Grade 3, and transferred to the newly established Electricity Commission of New South Wales. The 1950s were a period of increasing power demands that the state’s fractured electricity-generating infrastructure could not cope with.[119] The Electricity Commission was created to oversee the construction of three new power stations: Tallawarra (1957), Wallerawang (1958) and Lake Macquarie (1958). The Vales Point, Munmorah, Bunnerong and Liddell power stations were also either constructed or expanded over the next decade. With capital costs in excess of $300 million, each power station consisted of a

A scheme for the South Sydney Substation, this is one of the many sketch designs Silvan retained in his personal papers. Many of the motifs of his prewar functionalist modernism are apparent in his sketches. Archival records of the Wallerawang Power Station include this plan signed ‘FS’.

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complex of structures and took more than two years to design and detail. The commission’s facilities also included an extensive network of smaller power-generating sites and regional depots. Employed within the Power Stations Construction division, Silvan was one of a small team responsible for the design of the commission’s major facilities. Silvan’s personal papers include sketches for buildings at Vales Point, Wallerawang, Bunnerong, South Sydney substation and a regional depot at Newcastle. He noted the power stations he was most involved with were Wallerawang, Vales Point, Munmorah and Liddell.[120] The completed form of these power stations, such as Vales Point and Wallerawang, resembles Silvan’s sketches.[121] A number of Electricity Commission plans show an FS signature in the title block, thought to be Silvan. However, the title blocks for most plans also show a layered contribution of various levels of input and review with up to ten contributors’ initials. It is clear that authorship in the context of power-station design is difficult to attribute. Based on the nature of Silvan’s retained sketches, what seems most likely is that Silvan played an early role in the design of the facilities and was able to shape the overall form of components before the detailed functionality was handed over to a team of specialists. It is tempting to think that the play of volumes, horizontals broken by central vertical forms and the linear window arrangements as seen at Wallerawang, are characteristic of Silvan’s Slovakian work. In truth, Silvan’s architectural work disappeared into the nameless production of public-service-designed infrastructure. Despite the scale of the work, Silvan’s frustration with the structure of the commission and his position within it is clear. Silvan’s record of his employment includes an organisational chart of the Power Station Construction division.[122] He is marked at the bottom, with the Section Supervisor Architect directly above him and the Deputy Chief Engineer at the top of the tree. His notes record a failure of the commission to acknowledge his work. As Silvan approached the age of 65 and compulsory retirement, he was filled with dread. ‘I felt physically fit … (and) sure that I was at the peak of my creativity and productivity’.[123] He requested special consideration so that he could continue in his position. He was elated when, in January 1967, he was assigned the role of designing the new Liddell power station, assuming he was to be retained for the next two to three years to complete the project. The outcome was not a happy one. The project was complex, mismanaged and understaffed. Silvan was forced into 12 months of a compromised and rushed design process. He was starkly aware that his wage was a fraction of what it would cost the Electricity Commission to outsource the project.[124] He retired at 65, exhausted by the process, and, having been chastised for lateness despite his huge commitment to his work, deeply hurt and disenchanted. The anonymity of the public service An architectural position in the public service presented challenges to the development of an independent career. The difficulties experienced by an architect of the reputation of Ernst Plischke tell us much about the challenges

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Coachwood and black Japan sideboard, c.1955. Designed by George Kóródy for Artes Studios. Photographed at Hotel Hotel in Canberra, 2017.

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of Silvan’s situation. Plischke, a graduate of Peter Behrens’ design masterclass at the Vienna Academy and a highly skilled and respected young Austrian architect, was asked to come to the New Zealand Department of Housing Construction by its then head Gordon Wilson, offering a safe haven. Plischke accepted, and in 1939, he and his wife made the long journey from Vienna to Wellington, New Zealand. Plischke, one of a number of European refugees in the department, took up a role as designer.[125] Plischke appears to have been a valued member of the team, but authorship of the department’s projects was contentious. The design of the 1942 Dixon Street Flats, the first high-rise housing development in Wellington, was attributed to Wilson as Head of the Department, and in 1947 he received a New Zealand Institute of Architects Gold Medal for the building. In later years, having accomplished much in his career, Plischke claimed the Dixon Street Flats as the only major housing department design to be built largely according to his conception.[126] This remains contentious, as no drawings with Plischke’s signature remain to confirm authorship in the way it might be confirmed in private practice.[127] Refusing to sit further examinations to qualify for registration by the New Zealand Institute of Architects, Plischke was both supported and frustrated by his position in the department. In both his (un-registered) private practice and his housing department work, Plischke had a significant impact on the development of modernism in New Zealand before he returned to Vienna in 1963. Taking up a role as Professor of Architecture at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, Plischke remained in Vienna until his death in 1992. For other émigré architects, a position in the public service provided a firm grounding in the local conditions and, as wartime shortages lessoned and building work recommenced, enabled them to begin independent careers. Czechoslovakian architect Ernest Fooks had obtained an architecture degree and doctorate in town planning from the Technical University of Vienna before a period of work experience in the office of Le Corbusier. During the 1930s, he worked in the office of high-profile Viennese architects Theiss and Jaksch, working on the Hochhaus Herrengasse, one of the earliest high-rise blocks in central Vienna. After 1932, he completed a number of other private high-profile projects.[128] He left Austria for Australia in 1939, quickly finding a job in the Victorian Housing Commission. Fooks was able to use his time at the commission to expand his contacts and career. He wrote numerous articles on architecture and in 1946 published the well-received book X-Ray The City! The Density Diagram: Basis for Urban Planning. From 1944, he became the first lecturer in town planning at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He left the Victorian Housing Commission in 1948 disappointed with the lack of recognition he had received, like Silvan and Plischke.[129] In private practice, Fooks designed numerous houses and apartments, as well as schools, shops and public projects including the Jewish Community Centre in Canberra. Gregarious and ambitious, Fooks was able to leave the public service for a successful private practice and have a wider influence through teaching and publishing.

Bunnerong Power Station interior. Power stations were complex structures designed by a team of specialists, making Silvan’s role difficult to identify. The Bunnerong Power Station. With strong rectangular forms and large vertical areas of glazing, the power stations of Silvan’s period of employment show strong influences of European modernism.

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Czechoslovakian-born Alex Jelinek, clearly of a different character type, is known for a single remarkable project: the 1957 Benjamin House in the Canberra suburb of Deakin. Jelinek was a graduate of the elite Special School of Architecture at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts. His professor was the leading Czech modernist, Jaroslav Fragner.[130] Jelinek, like Silvan, fled the communist regime, arriving in Melbourne in 1950. With no money or contacts, he initially found work as a builder on the Snowy Mountains Scheme. In 1956, through the network of his partner Lina Bryans, he was commissioned to design his first architectural project: the Benjamin House. The house is a remarkable example of expressionist modernist residential design, and was awarded House of the Year in 1958 by the magazine Architecture and the Arts. Wolfgang Sievers, who photographed the completed project, considered it ‘the most beautiful private home ever built in Australia’.[131] Jelinek completed only one other project, the majority of his designs remaining unbuilt. Referred to as ‘uncompromising’, Jelinek frequently clashed with his clients.[132] A reclusive person, he withdrew from the architectural profession, instead pursuing inventing, sculpture and furniture. It is difficult to ascribe a single reason for Jelinek’s limited contribution to Australian architecture. It is likely a combination of personality type and a cultural disconnect between his designs and their applications. The Benjamin House, listed on the ACT Register of Significant Buildings, remains a valued example of one of Australia’s more unusual architects. Ferdinand Silberstein-Silvan’s career in Australia was similarly compromised. He survived, but did not flourish. He remained an architect, clearly a vocation that was central to his identity and happiness. He traversed a complex change in culture, aesthetics and social norms in his relocation from private practice in Bratislava to the NSW Electricity Commission. Silvan persevered. His was not the fate of Alex Jelinek, who fell away from the profession after one remarkable achievement. Nor did he have the gregarious and adaptable character of Fooks or Milston, who were able to launch careers that included teaching, commentary and private architectural practice. Silvan, like many European migrants who worked in the public service, brought extensive knowledge, experience and exposure to modern materials and construction methods. This rarely acknowledged legacy is one that had a significant impact across Australia’s infrastructure in the decades after World War II. It is hard to read Silvan’s collected papers without sadness; their very existence is evidence of his deep bitterness and feelings of being maligned. His time as an architect in Australia, half his professional career, seems an opportunity missed. Klara Kubickova, the author of the 2002 Slovakian book that records Silvan’s Slovakian legacy, notes in conclusion:

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on the one hand there are the individuals who lost their lives for meaningless ideologies and human hatred. They were denied the right to use their abilities in a country that was their home. It is a burden that no thinking person can bear. On the other hand there is the priceless, indescribable loss to Slovakia of its most creative people.[133]

Looking in detail at Silvan’s Australian experience, it is clear that loss is ours also.

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Custom-made for European tastes: The Gerstl Furniture story by Catriona Quinn

Paul Kafka is the migrant cabinetmaker most well known to admirers of mid-century modern style and visitors to Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum. Almost entirely forgotten is his brother-in-law, Michael Gerstl, one of many cabinetmakers, decorators, manufacturers and clients whose stories have been unrecorded by historians until now. With its origins in Secessionist Vienna, the history of M. Gerstl Furniture spans four generations of versatile, resilient craftsmen who continued the family business in Shanghai and Sydney.[134] The postwar enterprise of Michael Gerstl and his son Heinz saw the firm grow to over 60 employees in ever expanding factories and showrooms. Skilled and dynamic, M. Gerstl Furniture was in demand, whether for a single chair or the fit-out of entire hotels and office blocks. Working largely, but not exclusively, in the postwar migrant community, Gerstl was part of a wave of European cultural change in Sydney. European migrant clients – both architects and homemakers – played an important role in nurturing a different style of modern furniture; their stories shed new light on 20th century interior design in Sydney. In the mid-1930s, upholsterer Josef Gerstl was the owner of two prosperous furniture stores in Vienna. His father, a cabinetmaker, was one of a mass movement of skilled craftsmen who flooded into Vienna at the end of the 19th century. Retailers Mobel Haus Josef Gerstl, in the 7th District, were large stores with numerous fashionable room settings displaying their furniture to best advantage. A 1937 catalogue illustrates a range of modern styles, designed in-house and made by local cabinetmakers. Josef’s son Michael spent two years, 1923–25, in Czechoslovakia, considered by the family to be the hub of the furniture industry. He first trained in design and manufacturing at the furniture company Emil Gerstel Mobelfabrik (unrelated) in Prague. The firm, whose design roots lay in both historicism and the Vienna Secession, had a history of collaboration with architects, including Adolf Loos and Karel Lhota, whose Villa Muller, 1928, contains many of their designs.[135] Having an understanding of the role of custom-designed furniture within modern architecture was to prove an important model for Michael Gerstl when he established his own firm in Sydney. From February to May in 1925, Michael worked as designer at FC Schalek, an established Prague firm, before stopping in Innsbruck in December 1925 to gain further experience. Aged only 17, Michael returned to the family business as its main designer.

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The events of Kristallnacht prompted the family’s flight from Vienna, leaving their homes and businesses behind. As the extended family readied to board a boat for Australia, they were split at the gangway, the quota for immigrants having being reached. While Paul Kafka and his immediate family sailed in 1939, the Gerstls found themselves unable to board. Michael, his wife Charlotte (Paul Kafka’s younger sister) and baby Heinz, with Josef and his wife Frieda, instead boarded the Conte Bianco in Genoa for Shanghai, arriving on 24 March 1939. Those refugees who shared the Shanghai wartime experience later became, in Australia, a tightly connected community. The stock furniture Josef shipped to China arrived broken, and he returned to his original trade, setting up a business as an upholsterer. Michael worked as a carpenter and cabinetmaker. Charlotte and her sister ran a cake shop, which became the exiles’ meeting place, the centre of celebrations and parties. Heinz spent the war years an only child among extended family, attending a Jewish kindergarten and later St Francis Xavier’s College. In 1947, Michael, Charlotte and nine-year-old Heinz left for Australia on the Hwa Lien, leaving Josef and Frieda, too old to qualify for a visa, to return to Vienna.

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The establishment of M. Gerstl Cabinet Works Despite wartime manufacturing restrictions, prewar émigrés had some advantages over postwar arrivals. Paul Kafka opened his own furniture business in 1941, expanding to premises in Waterloo by 1945. For the first two months of 1947, Michael and his family lived with the Kafkas in Lindfield, and Michael worked at Waterloo alongside Italian and Australian tradesmen. Keen to establish himself independently, Michael moved the family to Clovelly. The families maintained close ties, but the two businesses were unconnected. By mid-1947, Michael was working for Berryman Furniture in Matraville. His superior skills and training were recognised by the Hungarian owner and he quickly progressed to designing. In 1949, he opened his own business in a small area within a Rozelle timber mill. M. Gerstl Cabinet Works began with two employees, a wood machinist and a cabinetmaker. Initially subcontracting some specialist tasks, the firm expanded rapidly to include a variety of craftsmen, including upholsterers, who used fabrics by local manufacturers such as Sekkers and Kornblum. Heinz officially joined M. Gerstl Cabinet Works in 1954, aged 17, after finishing at Sydney Technical High School, where he had studied woodwork, metalwork and technical drawing. Even more valuable was the training he had received having spent holidays and weekends at the factory and helping to install furniture on various sites around Sydney. The mill’s open, rambling site and their informal tenancy enabled Gerstl to increase its space as the firm quickly grew. The location within the Annandale Timber and Moulding Co. was an important one. The owner, Janek Landau, a Ukrainian refugee, was well established and knew many Europeans in Sydney through his business dealings and art collecting. Landau’s mill supplied timber to Harry Seidler, who designed their Whale Beach weekender in 1951.[136]

93 Michael Gerstl 1974, Sydney, photographer unknown

Gerstl factory. In the later 1950s the firm expanded to include a range of trades and crafts, including upholstery, often using locally made fabrics.

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A hallmark of the company was its ability to make functional modern designs using richly figured timbers, as seen in this trade exhibition display, a combination popular with their continental clientele.

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By 1949, M. Gerstl Cabinet Works was making cabinetry to Seidler’s designs. Paul Kafka, a friend of Harry’s parents, Rose and Max, is traditionally associated with the bespoke furniture at Rose Seidler House, Wahroonga (1948–50). In a 1987 interview, Harry Seidler noted Kafka as the maker of the coffee table, dining table and sideboard at the house, though not all the furniture that had been custom-made to Seidler’s designs.[137] Gerstl also made furniture for Seidler’s first project; Heinz recalls helping the cabinetmakers install furniture at the house as a schoolboy in the late 1940s, and in the mid 1950s, repaired the runners on the built-in radiogram unit. Certainly by 1950, Gerstl was Seidler’s preferred cabinetmaker providing all the cabinetry and custom-made furniture for the Marcus Seidler house (1950–51) and the Hutter house (1952), which followed not long after.[138] The association was a long one with Gerstl closely involved in numerous Seidler projects, including Seidler’s own house at Killara in 1967. The modernist ethos, requiring quantities of built-in furniture, was an important influence on the expansion of the postwar custom cabinetry trade. The commissions from Seidler dating back to 1949–50 establish that Gerstl Furniture was, from its inception, a custom cabinetmaker able to produce high-quality furniture to architects’ designs. The Gerstl family’s papers record a range of architects and designers among their clientele, including Samuel Lipson, Gordon Andrews, Artes Studios, Ancher Mortlock Woolley, Stephen Gergely, Hans Peter Oser, Don Gazzard, Henry Rossler, Henry Pollack, Neville Gruzman, Harry Divola, and later, Glenn Murcutt, Howard Tanner, Dudley Ward, Andre Porebski and Michael Bures. Australian-designed modern furniture by Clement Meadmore, Grant Featherston, Fred Ward, Gordon Andrews and Marion Best was available in the late 1940s and early 1950s, even if European imports were virtually unobtainable. Yet there was a significant portion of the market that wanted custom-made furniture: they looked to companies such as Gerstl, who catered for a range of customers’ needs and tastes, within the custom-made furniture market. A 1952 Sydney Morning Herald classified ad promised ‘bedroom, dining suites, all furniture made to order’ at the Gerstl Furniture Factory on Commercial Road, Rozelle. Michael and Heinz designed furniture with each client’s needs and preferences in mind: brochures emphasised that ‘no stocklines’ were kept, distinguishing them from mass-produced modern furniture. The individual nature of the company’s designs was stressed, ‘built to your own specifications and your personal taste’ and in 1954 Michael Gerstl protected his ownership of three such designs – for a chair, a table and a day bed – by registering them with the Patents Office.[139] Publicity was couched to reassure an Australian public cautious about cost and loss of control to a designer. Sample items were, however, kept to show the client. There was an additional advantage to commissioning built-in furniture in the 1950s: sales tax of up to 10 per cent was applied to ‘loose’ furniture, but not to furniture screwed to the wall. Wherever possible, Gerstl designed built-ins to save passing on the sales tax to the client.

Architects Harry Seidler and Alex Kann, head designers for Rex Hotels, both strongly linked to the European community of clients, developers and business owners, provided Gerstl with the greatest volume of work, but the firm also undertook numerous small domestic commissions. Europeans did not have a monopoly on custom-made furniture in the 1950s, as Gerstl’s client list shows. They included wallpaper designer Florence Broadhurst, society matron Mrs Marcel Dekyvere, photographer Max Dupain, entertainer Don Lane, Kings Cross identity Abe Saffron and politician Clive Evatt. Although Europeans such as Dick Dusseldorp, whose house, offices and ski lodge they furnished, were influential, Gerstl was equally popular among the racing fraternity, notably jockeys George Moore and Billy Camer (whose referrals brought Gerstl many clients) and trainer TJ Smith: a diversity of consumers valued unique and individually tailored interior schemes. ‘Who is that exquisite piece of crepe de chine?’ Smith reportedly said of his wifeto-be Valerie Finlayson. He promised her three things. ‘Firstly, I’m going to marry you. Then I’m going to own a luxury home in the best part of Sydney and own and drive a Rolls-Royce.’ When they married in 1952, Smith’s dream home was fulfilled in Mosman, with interiors by Gerstl.[140] Gerstl’s strength was its ability to produce well-crafted furniture – from more opulent pieces to sleek designs by progressive architects – for a general public looking for quality and individuality in the market. Gerstl’s popular styles, while glamorous and luxurious, were largely mainstream, owing more to the craftsmanship of continental moderne furniture of the 1930s than to International-style minimalism.

Janek and Joyce Landau around the time they commissioned Harry Seidler and Michael Gerstl for their Whale Beach weekender.

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Like many Seidler bedrooms, the Landaus’ featured built-in side and dressing tables in timber veneers and black and white laminates made by M. Gerstl Cabinet Works. Previous left: A custom order for Sydney store Artes Studios noted the client’s selected finishes for this hi-fi unit designed by Harry Seidler and promoted in architecture magazines. Previous right: The Modular hi-fi unit designed by Harry Seidler and manufactured by Gerstl Cabinet Works.

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Seidler and the Landau House Janek Landau, Gerstl’s landlord at the Rozelle timber mill, also became his client. Janek, a Carpathian wood-cutter’s son, graduate of the University of Brno, and a successful timber merchant in Trieste, arrived in Sydney in 1939. His mill processed Oregon timber for the postwar housing boom. With his wife, Joyce, raised in Macksville on the NSW mid-north coast, Janek built a collection of Australian and European art and design at their St Ives home, a social hub for artists and dealers.[141] Seidler was already placing orders for Oregon joists with Landau when the timber merchant commissioned the architect on projects both domestic and commercial – a weekender in early 1951 and a Crows Nest terrace development in 1952.[142] Construction began at the site in Bynya Road, Whale Beach, in late 1952 and the garden was landscaped in 1953. Like many of Seidler’s houses, the Landaus’ was photographed for magazine features and advertising, showing the house apparently furnished with chairs from the Knoll catalogue, by Eames, Saarinen and Hardoy – it is likely these were replicas made by Descon Laminates at Brookvale, set up in 1951 by architect Peter Makeig to fill a gap in the market for overseas designs. Seidler designed integrated furniture for every room: timber beds, side tables, dressing tables, desks, shelving, dining and coffee tables made by Gerstl to Seidler’s specifications. Despite its ‘card alcove’, so well suited to the Landaus’ famous Sunday lunches where European friends gathered to enjoy their hospitality, the house was not a success for the family. Joyce thought the design unsuited to the site on the ridge and claimed there was a raging gale every time she opened the window. The same large windows became an irritant as Seidler’s fame grew and with it, public curiosity. By 1955, the chore of packing up four children for weekends became impractical and the Landaus moved to a more traditional home on acreage at St Ives. The family sold the redundant house and furniture, integral to the interior scheme, around 1957; it was demolished in the 1990s. Joyce’s first choice to furnish the St Ives house was a suite of 18th-century Venetian furniture she had seen for sale in The Connoisseur, a London ‘illustrated magazine for collectors’ through whose scholarly articles Joyce may have studied antiques as well as staying in touch with European sale rooms. An introduction to Romanian-born Schulim Krimper, Melbourne’s most prominent émigré cabinetmaker, was made, probably during a trip to the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. This meeting initiated a significant patronage: more than 50 pieces of furniture were ordered for the St Ives house, the largest documented Krimper collection. Joyce had absorbed from their social circle, which included Rose Seidler, a particularly Viennese philosophy of unified, bespoke interior design. That the Landaus’ interests ranged from Seidler to 18th-century Venice and back to a ‘timeless’ contemporary craftsman, is a salutary tale against stereotyping taste of the period. Aspiration, opportunity and convenience play their roles in the decoration of houses.

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‘Phone Gerstl’ A rich collection at the State Library of NSW containing thousands of architectural drawings by Hugh Buhrich demands further analysis for its valuable documentation of decorating styles, clients and city and suburban locations. [143] Made by the German émigrés Hugh and Eva Buhrich from 1940 to 1988, including hundreds of individual furniture designs, this collection is vast and important. Unregistered as an architect until 1971 and only recently revered for his 1968 Castlecrag house, Buhrich initially earned his living designing interiors and furniture, predominantly commissioned by continental migrant clients in Sydney’s eastern suburbs and the Lindfield, Roseville and Castlecrag areas. Buhrich socialised at the Austro-Hungarian lunch spot Crouches early in his career, where he met prospective clients, mainly Hungarian and Polish.[144] Commissions also came from fellow Europeans met during a period as a forced labourer in an Allied Works program.

Michael Gerstl sitting in a Gerstl display room exhibition, early 1960s.

M. Gerstl Furniture brochure, early 1960s.

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The drawings for one client – the Spinak house in Bellevue Hill, 1958[145] – reveal the link with Gerstl Furniture – who, with Kafka and Fisher, were among the cabinetmakers who tendered for Buhrich’s jobs. Typical of many similar schemes, Buhrich drew a furniture layout for the

living room with two sitting areas, one featuring a built-in settee with cocktail bar, armchairs and tile-topped coffee table; the second with armchair, magazine rack and long functional sideboard, which hid a swivelling ‘TV, wireless, player, records, speakers’ – the new requirements of the 1950s family. Buhrich specified restrained, deluxe materials throughout the scheme: charcoal velvets, grey sycamore veneers, brass beaded black trim and sliding glass doors. The working drawings include highly detailed specifications for various chair shapes as well as an elaborately made sideboard and combination settee/ cocktail bar: Buhrich left nothing to doubt for the cabinetmakers who tendered for the job. On this occasion, Buhrich’s handwritten note ‘Phone Gerstl about furniture’ records his intention – and Gerstl got the job. Buhrich’s designs resemble photographs and sketches of Gerstl furniture published in a 1950s brochure. They are similar in layout and finishes: figured veneers, reflective and textured surfaces and luxurious upholstery characterise both Buhrich’s and Gerstl’s work. This close resemblance suggests Buhrich designed his furniture knowing the cabinetmakers’ capabilities; Gerstl in turn, illustrated completed schemes in their brochures, which may have included Buhrich-designed projects. Although most of Gerstl’s jobs for Buhrich were relatively small, in 1964 the architect and cabinetmaker embarked on a major commercial collaboration, the Kingsford-Maroubra Synagogue.[146] Its cohesive architecture and interiors expressed a unified design across a multitude of furnishings and decorative elements made by Gerstl, including highly original pews and platform (Bimah) seating. The exotic veneers were supplied to Gerstl by Stark, a member of the congregation and one of several veneer importers supporting the furniture industry. Magda and Laci’s custom-made home The story of the Schwartz house, Rose Bay, is revealing of Gerstl’s European clients’ attitudes to modern interiors in the 1950s.[147] Magda and Laszlo (Laci) Schwartz commissioned a modernist house in 1957 in Rose Bay from their close friend, fellow Hungarian George Reves (née Revesz).[148] One of four houses Reves built in the neighborhood, it was designed on Bauhaus principles, which he studied under Ivan Kotsis at the Budapest Technical University. The modest home illustrates Reves’ sensitivity to the site and the local climatic conditions, strategies refined while working for James Hardie during World War II. Reves was, with Alexander Pongrass, one of many design professionals in the Schwartz social circle. Reves, advised by Magda, designed furniture for every room. The elaborate built-ins and limited colour palette, highlighting the timber furnishings, were typical of his domestic projects. Through Kotsis, Reves absorbed a typically Hungarian ‘bourgeois urban’ balance of tradition, craftsmanship and avantgarde design, apt descriptors for the Sydney postwar continental style.[149] Reves’ furniture also reflects his time in 1934 spent working in Paris for Perret Freres, whose influence is recognisable in Reves’ work – curved figured veneers,

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Laci and Magda Schwartz in their first home, a flat in Links House, Rose Bay, c.1955. Armchair designed by George Reves, made by Gerstl in 1957 for the Schwartz house, Rose Bay.

Living room, Schwartz house, c.2000. The built-in lounge and cabinetry designed by George Reves was custom made by Gerstl in 1957, the armchairs selected from their showroom by Magda Schwartz.

Coffee table designed by George Reves, made by Gerstl in 1957 for the Schwartz house, Rose Bay.

Dining room, Schwartz house, c.1990. With floor to ceiling sliding walls in Persian walnut, it was the setting for many dinner parties.

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tapered legs, luxurious upholstery, clean lines and minimal decoration. Reves had an enduring fascination with the use of the ‘V’ motif in his interiors, evident in many of the pieces in the Schwartz house. Laci, a dentist and Auschwitz survivor, and Magda, a forced armaments worker at Krupps in Budapest, reunited after the war. They married and set up home in a comfortable house in a picturesque Hungarian town, Szekesfehervar. Photos of their house show a carefully arranged interior with rugs and paintings: as successful professionals, they commissioned well-made traditional furniture from Hungarian craftsmen. Pressure to give up their house to a communist party member triggered their flight in 1949, a perilous journey to Vienna across the now closed and mined border. Laci and Magda arrived in Australia in 1951 on the Napoli, sponsored by Laci’s brother Bela, who had lived in Australia since 1937. Laci, who had undertaken additional training in London in 1950, soon opened a dental surgery on Elizabeth Street in the city, with Magda his assistant. Building a contemporary home was a natural step for fashionable Magda. Social markers were as influential in the commission as an affinity with modernism. In Hungary, the practice of having all furniture custommade was the norm for the Schwartzes and their friends, as their cousin and contemporary Alex Bartos related, ‘In Europe if you were a well-placed professional, particularly a doctor, you had furniture made, you didn’t go to a store’. In doing so, the Schwartzes employed a decorating model that was part of their continental heritage and, with other European migrants, was the staple of Sydney’s many cabinetmakers. The Schwartz house was immaculately finished and the attractive, stylish couple entertained frequently, creating a warm, welcoming atmosphere. Reves’ designs for a cocktail bar, radiogram and TV cabinet in living areas with built-in seating and comfortable armchairs, with plenty of coffee tables and side tables to hold food and drink, were integral to formal and casual gatherings. The Schwartzes and their circle played cards and dined using napery, dinnerware and cutlery, which mixed modern with traditional as their own rugs and paintings were slowly returned to them from Hungary. A new portrait of Magda by Judy Cassab was added, payment for the artist’s dental work. The Viennese-born, Hungarian-trained painter, with whom the Schwartzes had shared a cramped Bondi Road boarding house in 1952, later established herself as an eminent portraitist and Archibald Prize winner. The furniture for the Schwartz house was one of many projects Gerstl completed for Reves, whose clients also ordered from their showroom on his advice. This house combines some bespoke furniture with some bought directly from Gerstl. Reves designed the built-ins, such as the sideboards and fitted settee, when drawing up the house plans. Later, he recommended Magda choose further furniture from samples at the Gerstl showroom. She chose bedroom suites, armchairs and the dining-room furniture, including the ET chair, which came in small or large sizes and with or without the grip on the chair back. Reves’ complete house and furniture design remained intact and in excellent condition until 2000, when Magda moved out of the house. Showing a

Schwartz house, 875 New South Head Road, Rose Bay, in 2003, prior to its demolition.

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Living room, Schwartz house, c.2000, showing the arrangement of armchairs and smaller tables for the Schwartz’s style of flexible entertaining. Entry stair detail, Schwartz house, designed by George Reves, 1957, now demolished.

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strong attachment to her furniture, Magda had Hungarian cabinetmaker Gabor Nagy, previously associated with Berryman Furniture’s Gemes and Sheinberg, adapt many of the fitted pieces to her new apartment. After Magda’s death in 2012, many pieces remained in the family, integrated into the homes of the next generation, including those of their cousin Alex Bartos and his children. Magda and Laci Schwartz had a close relationship with Alex Bartos, a veneer importer. By looking beyond well-known designers and architects, the breadth of skills brought to Australia by European migrants becomes apparent. As a schoolboy in the 1920s, Bartos worked in the veneer warehouse at his father’s timber company in Transylvania and, in the 1940s, the family shop in Budapest. Surviving forced labour camps, Alex left a limited future under communism, flying into Sydney on 20 November 1948. A Parisian veneer supplier, Jacques Moufflier, introduced Bartos to Paul Segaert, whose glass import firm was expanding into veneers. Bartos, with business connections in Europe and fluency in five languages, was uniquely suited. The high-quality veneers Alex selected were eagerly snapped up by an Australian industry short on supplies. In 1954, he started his own wholesale veneer business, Albart, which grew to become one of Australia’s largest. Migrant craftsmen and consumers, though important to Bartos, were neither his first nor his most influential customers. Ricketts & Thorpe, an established and discriminating local company, placed large orders for figured veneers, especially burr walnut, popular with their Australian and European clients. Other makers followed, including Chiswell, Mag and Parker, Bartos’ biggest customer, though connections with European migrant clients such as Gerstl, Kafka, Kalmar, Buckwell and Berryman remained vital. The Bartos’ Darling Point flat was decorated by Steven Kalmar’s interior designer sister, Babette, whose once considerable practice among the Hungarian community is now virtually unknown. From the cabinetmaker to the customer While still concentrating on custom furniture, in the 1950s, Gerstl made a number of tentative steps into the retail market. Gerstl produced a market competitor around 1960 that attempted to challenge retailers of ready-made furniture with their ‘Fractional Furniture’ range.[150] This modular system provided a combination of components and finishes that could be formulated as the client required. Including shelving and bedroom sets, Fractional Furniture was designed by Michael to give the custom-built look in solid timber, at a reasonable cost. Fractional Furniture lasted only a few years, though a later adjunct range was exhibited at a home show in the early to mid-1960s. Ultimately, the range was not as successful as was hoped: Gerstl’s traditional market sought high-quality, individual furniture, not modular ranges. Home shows were popular with the public and an effective sales tool. M. Gerstl Cabinet Works exhibited at the 1954 Homes Exhibition, the first in Sydney organised by the Better Homes Bureau. It was predicted that 150,000 visitors would order £250,000 worth of furnishings. The ‘scintillating’

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Upholstered armchair, angled coffee table and curved couch, of unknown provenance and now part of the Hotel Hotel Salon furniture. Photographed at Hotel Hotel in Canberra, 2017.

Wooden armed chair and two-piece yin-yang table, unknown provenance. Photographed at Hotel Hotel in Canberra, 2017.

exhibition promised visitors a ‘Show Window of the Home of Tomorrow’.[151] Progressive designers were, in practice, absent and Gerstl’s was probably the only modern display among the wheelbarrows, refrigerators and step ladders. New designs, such as Heinz Gerstl’s 1960 drinks trolley, were unveiled at these exhibitions to test the market. In the mid-1950s, M. Gerstl Furniture was involved in another experimental foray into the retail market, making a prototype modular radio-phonograph unit designed by Harry Seidler and intended to be sold by Artes Studios.[152] Its minimalist panels of timber, aluminium and laminate appear arguably as refined as similar designs by Knoll, the New York design and manufacturing company that led the world in bringing mass production of modern furniture to the market – though, lacking a local agent, it was virtually unobtainable in Australia at this time. Gerstl brought sophisticated execution to the project, with options for coachwood, walnut, silver ash and red and white Formica. The samples were made speculatively for retail sale, but the project was not commercially successful. In the early 1950s an effort to gain orders and to make good use of restricted materials, Gerstl produced furniture for Mark Foys and Beard Watson on ‘open order’ – making batches of six bedroom and six dining suites for sale in the department stores. As the credit squeeze sent demand down in the early 1960s, this order system disadvantaged the cabinetmaker – the stores refused further deliveries until stock sold and Gerstl would never again partner with a retailer. Gerstl opened a stand-alone showroom in Rushcutters Bay in October 1961, where, they advertised, customers who appreciated ‘the finest’ would find ‘taste, craftsmanship and lasting values’.[153] By 1970, as commercial work expanded, the redundant Rushcutters Bay shop closed, but clients were still able to visit the large showroom at Gerstl’s expanded Paddington factory.

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‘An air of continental glamour’ Heinz Gerstl’s growing involvement in the business in the late 1950s brought about a significant change that prepared the way for commercial expansion. In 1955–56, Heinz had spent a disappointing 18 months studying design at evening classes at East Sydney Technical College. Despite the course’s pedigree under Phyllis Shillito, who expanded it to include interior and industrial design, Heinz, guided by his father, preferred to continue his training under the skilled craftsmen in the factory, and in time began to influence the direction of the business. Australian consumers had been hard to reach; Gerstl was difficult to pronounce and spell. Michael spoke with an accent and, with Heinz, considered changing the company name. While Michael maintained close ties with European customers, Heinz realised that a new market of non-European consumers was available and gradually built business in this direction. Father and son continued to work cooperatively, each with their own strengths in the business.

Around this time, a second ‘gateway’ client stepped into the Gerstl factory with a fortuitous order – a day bed for a client’s home. Architect Alexander Kann had just been commissioned by LJ Hooker to refurbish Sydney’s Carlton Rex Hotel: the day bed client was a senior Rex executive. Heinz Gerstl began a long and fruitful relationship with both Rex Hotels and Kann, their corporate architect. The chain’s ‘progressive hotels … with an emphasis on architecture, commissioned art works and cocktail bars’ have been well documented.[154] Gerstl’s role has previously been unrecognised. The design skills and large-scale custom manufacturing required by themed interiors of the new international hotels then appearing in Australia stimulated the furniture business in Sydney, with many designers and cabinetmakers active in the hotel boom. The Carlton Rex’s themed spaces, such as the intimate Jet Club Cocktail bar and the Oriental Room, proclaimed the hotel’s sophistication and modernity. A second collaboration between Kann and Gerstl, the Canberra Rex, also opened in 1960. The centrepiece was the horseshoe-shaped Club Bar and the ‘brilliantly lighted and bustling’ lounge bar.[155] The now desirable European cabinetmaker’s furniture added ‘an air of continental glamour’.[156] Features such as ‘Bringing the continent to our doorstep’ in Hotel and Café News in 1957, illustrating Gerstl’s new decor at Georges Double Bay, designed by Hungarian Imre Soos, show a shift in favour of migrant designers was underway. It was not only the trade journals, but magazines such as Architecture and Arts and the Modern Home that promoted the new wave, documenting many of the hotel interiors completed by Gerstl. Unlike architects and builders, cabinetmakers were seldom credited.

The M. Gerstl showroom in Bayswater Road, Rushcutters Bay, opened in 1961. Furniture was arranged in room settings, creating demand for carpets, curtains and light fittings.

Next: An early 1960s catalogue for ‘Fractional Furniture’ illustrated a selection of modular combinations whose optional finishes created unique pieces for individual clients.

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Rex’s strategic corporate design policy linking architect Alexander Kann and Gerstl on multiple suburban hotel projects proved a turning point for the cabinetmaker, and the commercial contract furniture business grew – despite the credit squeeze – to include LJ Hooker, the Commonwealth Bank, Lion Insurance, the Reserve Bank of Australia in Sydney, Olivetti, government departments and travel companies. Seidler continued to be an important client, thanks to contracted specification of interior fittings for Lend Lease’s Australia Square, where most of the tenants’ furniture was made by Gerstl to drawings signed off by Seidler himself. In 1964, having outgrown the Rozelle premises, M. Gerstl Furniture Pty Ltd moved to a remodelled builders’ yard in Sudan Lane, Paddington. Within ten years, mechanised processes reduced staff numbers and Gerstl relocated to Botany. Charlotte Gerstl, trained as a bookkeeper in Vienna, worked in the business, eventually joined by Heinz’s wife Yvonne, who managed accounts. Following ten years of deteriorating health, in 1975, Michael died. After decades in Australia designing bespoke interiors, balancing a rich Viennese legacy and a dynamic capacity to cater for commercial contract clients and modernist architects, Heinz shifted the company’s focus to the installation of built-in wardrobes, kitchens and bathroom cabinets in home unit developments.[157] Custom-furniture production, the firm’s heritage, nevertheless continued until M. Gerstl Furniture Pty Ltd closed in 1985. The forgotten cabinetmakers Gerstl is not the only cabinet maker whose history has been obscured by our fascination with individual designers – the history of competitor, Hungarian Leslie Buckwell, has also been eclipsed by the better known Paul Kafka. When we think of modernist design coming to Australia in the postwar era, we think first of Harry Seidler, schooled in Canada and the US by the refugee Bauhaus teachers; the broad scope of ‘modern design’ brought here by Europeans is, however, much more diverse. Selective historical narratives are not limited to Europeans or the postwar era, leaving considerable scope to investigate many companies and designers throughout the century. Australian furniture published in The Home in 1936 has received little attention and makes a telling comparison with postwar migrant furniture, which filled a supposed void in the market. The stylish pieces show a familiarity with modernism more progressive than Gerstl or Kafka. Yet little is known of these interwar designers’ clients or their manufacturers. Kirsty Grant lamented in 2014’s Mid-Century Modern that for every Meadmore, Featherston or Snelling, there were many more names ‘largely lost to history … whose designs are now difficult, if not impossible to identify’.[158] This study of Gerstl Furniture has uncovered new knowledge about architects, designers and clients and the networks that linked them. With many of these designers still alive and company records still available, the Gerstl story was Opposite: An early 1960s advertisement shows modern furniture being finished at the expanded Rozelle factory.

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only lost because no-one had looked. But what is the history of their fellow refugee furniture makers Berryman, Fisher and Buckwell? The names of many more furniture makers – local and migrant – filled the home-show exhibits and the advertising columns of the 1950s. Their then-familiar names have since been neglected by historians: Jacksons, Ready-cut, Gressly Furniture, JV Clancy, Syd Harbour, Newlands Steel, among many others. This raises the question: how much can we know about the diversity of 20th-century furniture production unless we broaden our study beyond individual designers? The overarching influence of émigré architects, designers and their clients in this crucial period can now be more fully recognised and appreciated, expanding our knowledge of their contribution to Australian culture. Museums previously content with repeating the canon of Australian modernism will surely be inspired to see a little more of the iceberg of design history exposed.

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5

Design for happiness: George Kóródy and Artes Studios by Jeromie Maver

The year is 1953, and well-dressed French woman Madame Sidon is making her way along Sydney’s Castlereagh Street in search of Artes Studios, an atelier providing a complete range of furniture, lighting, fabric and artworks for the modern home. In the few years after its opening in 1945, Artes Studios had become an important fixture in Sydney with a reputation for modern home furnishings unlike anything else being produced at the time; a little piece of European modernism in the heart of Sydney. As she approaches the small three-storey building, Sidon is focused on decorating her new flat in Bellevue Hill tastefully, in the modern style. Sidon, having arrived from France in 1952 values lightweight, unornamented timber furniture following the style she is familiar with. On entering the studio, Sidon’s attention is captured by a series of innovative displays recreating rooms that one might find in a home. Each is a complete vignette; a lounge room featuring a simply framed sofa, lounge chair with cane inserts, and a standard lamp positioned around a coffee table on a brightly coloured rug particularly catches her eye. Bordering this collection are small modular units grouped together to form a sideboard, and a drinks trolley with curious wooden wheels and black Vitrolite glass. Utilitarian and functional, the furniture is not decorative, but there is a beauty in it nonetheless. ‘Can I help you?’ asks shop assistant Gwen Finlayson, who on hearing Sidon’s accent excuses herself to go in search of Elsie Segaert, the founder and co-owner of the studio.[159] Having travelled extensively in her role as a luxury European-tour operator, Segaert is fluent in French among other languages, and is soon by Madame Sidon’s side directing her attention to a display that she feels would meet her needs. The pair converse in French before Segaert glides off to make Sidon a coffee, leaving her to try a chair that has caught her attention. On Segaert’s return, she explains the Artes Studios’ philosophy: the production of functional, multipurpose, lightweight furniture designed especially for an Australian climate. From the locally sourced coachwood, modular units through to cushions made of the finest linen, each product is designed by Artes’ own in-house designer, Hungarian Professor George Kóródy. In postwar Australia, where new homes were often no more than 12 squares, the modular and space-saving Artes products enable customers

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to make the most of every inch of space. Segaert also informs Madame Sidon that Artes offers a complete interior-design service for those who would like an experienced hand to take care of everything. Segaert introduces Kóródy and the conversation flows easily as they chat about design and architecture. It soon becomes apparent that Madame Sidon’s passion for European design is shared by all parties. She opts for the interior service, confident that all the items selected by Artes Studios will complement each other and suit her home. She is right; Kóródy provides smart and functional furnishings for the entire flat. This works well for Sidon but also for Artes, by providing a good promotional tool for their range; in 1953, Sidon’s flat is featured in the Sydney Morning Herald[160], and a year later in the taste-making magazine Australian House and Garden.[161]

Interior of Madame Sidon’s flat with couch, modern cabinet units and traymobile, by George Kóródy

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György Kóródy in Europe György (George) Kóródy was born in Tiszaujlak, Hungary, on 11 July 1890.[162] Educated in Budapest, Kóródy was accepted into the prestigious Royal Joseph Technical University, graduating in 1911 with a Diploma of Architecture.[163] After his graduation, and before World War I, Kóródy worked for architect Ödön Lechner (1845–1914)[164] a leading proponent of Secessionism in Hungary. Already an established architectural figure, Lechner had designed some of Hungary’s most avant-garde buildings, incorporating motifs from both Hungarian folk art and eastern cultures, fusing them into Hungary’s distinct ‘National Romanticism’ style.[165] Kóródy’s time with Lechner was interrupted by World War I, however, it seems that during this short period, the experience of working for Lechner arguably gave Kóródy the confidence required to later experiment with blending design styles in his own applied arts practice. Returning to Budapest after the war, Kóródy found himself in a country facing an uncertain future and rather than return to architecture, he pursued tapestry weaving. After initially accepting private commissions for small tapestries and carpets of his own design, by 1921 Kóródy had established an atelier in two small rented rooms located in one of the alleyways off the Budapest City Park (Városligeti) that employed 20 to 25 female tapestry

weavers.[166] In need of capital to further expand his business Kóródy formed a partnership with Sámuel Révész (née Rosenfeld; 1877–1928) a fellow architect and editor of the Hungarian Engineers and Architects Association Gazette.[167] With the financial support of Révész, the small atelier was transformed into GRECO Tapestry Pty Ltd. GRECO’s first undertaking was a group exhibition at the National Salon, Budapest, in September 1921, where they exhibited wall carpets and furniture upholstered in the company’s tapestry fabric. Conservative, but elegant and artistic in style, the work was well received. The business enjoyed immediate financial success, and within three years, GRECO expanded to include two workshops, employing 320 staff, many of whom were impoverished women in need of secure employment. During the early 20th century, tapestry was used extensively for soft furnishings and upholstery fabric, drawing on folk motifs and contemporary designs. GRECO’s tapestries and upholstered furniture were exhibited widely in Europe, and the company received many high-profile commissions, including the creation of tapestries for the Hungarian Parliament’s ‘tapestry hall’. Experiencing strong sales throughout Europe and England, GRECO’s designs also caught the eye of travelling Americans and soon the company began exporting to the US. Capitalising on this success, in 1923, Kóródy travelled to New York where he spent three months tailoring GRECO’s production to better suit an American market.[168] Kóródy’s research paid off, with orders from America making up the bulk of GRECO’s production. Despite significant success, the economic depression of the 1920s took its toll and in 1927, GRECO was sold to the Budapest City Council where it continued under Kóródy’s leadership, as the Municipal Tapestry Weaving Workshop.[169] During this period, Kóródy supervised the renovation of the reception room of the President of the Hungarian Parliament (1928–29). Images of the scheme show entry doors of carved walnut inset with figures, ceramics by the artist Istvan Gado and chairs upholstered in velvet and fine tapestries. The room housed GRECO’s large wall tapestry depicting the town of Pusztaszer; the origin of modern Hungary.[170] Highly decorative with historical Hungarian motifs, Kóródy’s designs echoed the formality and grandeur of parliament’s 17th-century architecture, and the constraints of Hungarian nationalism of the 1920s. By 1931, the workshop had become part of the Municipal Technical Drawing School, Budapest, with Kóródy as Head of Tapestry. Kóródy showcased the talents of the students with an exhibition of furniture and tapestries made to his designs.[171] The works were well received by the public and featured in the prestigious London 1933 volume of Decorative Art: The Studio Yearbook.[172] Over the next three years, Kóródy also taught classes in painting, woodworking and technical drawing.[173] While a German-influenced functionalist modernism had been discouraged in Hungary during the 1920s, in the 1930s it was more permissible and this was reflected in the applied arts that were produced by the students under Kóródy’s tutelage. By virtue of his position at the school, Kóródy was given the title of Professor,

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126 Armchair in walnut with woven upholstery, 1930, designed by George Kóródy. Now held in the collection of the Hungarian Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest.

127 ‘Swedish’ rug, designed by George Kóródy, 1930, part of the collection of the Hungarian Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest.

Professor George Kóródy (left) pictured in 1953 with Don Johnston, president of the Society of Interior Designers, and Margaret Lord, selecting a lamp to be exhibited at the society’s show at Woollahra Arts Centre.

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a title that he carried with him when he later arrived in Australia. Kóródy’s work at the school generated great interest, and in the years following, he received numerous commissions for the design of exhibitions, pavilions, shop and house interiors and furniture. A relationship with the Hungarian Society for Applied Arts also proved fruitful, and in 1936, Kóródy curated the society’s 50th Jubilee exhibition Beautiful Home – Happy Life held at the Hungarian Museum of Applied Arts[174], a building designed by architect Ödön Lechner, Kóródy’s first employer. During this period, Kóródy also formed a practice with Architect Alajos Ribáry. It’s not clear how the architectural work was divided between the pair, but it is assumed that Kóródy designed the interior schemes for their projects. The practice completed many residential and commercial projects in Budapest, including the Berend House (1933), a modernist concrete and brick building with steel-framed windows that referenced the design principles of the Bauhaus. Featured in the Decorative Art: The Studio Yearbook in 1938, the Berend House clearly established Kóródy’s credentials as a modernist. The project’s thoughtful and functional planning and fitted furniture, set the tone for Kóródy’s later design work for Artes Studios in Australia. In 1937, Kóródy exhibited in the category of ‘Interior decoration and furnishings’ at the famed 1937 Paris International Exhibition, Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Arts and Techniques Exhibition in Modern Life), winning a gold medal for entries in the ‘Fabrics, upholstery, carpets and tapestries’ section and a silver medal for entries in the ‘Furniture and furniture sets’ section.[175] The following year, Kóródy exhibited at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition in London.[176] In 1939, Kóródy completed his final and most well-known work, the Lipcsei Vilmos Fashion Salon. Located in a fashionable area of Budapest, the modernist design featured a street frontage of double-height glass panes set into lightweight steel frames. The store entry was marked by a distinct circular awning on a central column. The interior of the salon was elegant

and opulent, with a metal and glass staircase the focal point of the interior. The design’s adventurous use of the latest in technology was so noteworthy that it was well covered in the architectural media, even featuring in the 1939 July edition of Australian magazine Decoration and Glass.[177] In 1939, Kóródy was engaged by the Hungarian Society of Applied Arts to hold an exhibition in Sydney to introduce Australians to Hungarian goods and culture, with the aim of exporting these goods to Australia.[178] Amid the backdrop of World War II, Germany’s invasion of Poland, Austria and Czechoslovakia, and a growing wave of anti-Semitism, it’s unknown whether Kóródy’s Jewish heritage was a factor in his decision to board the Esquilano in Genoa bound for Australia. Despite the turmoil in Europe, it seems Kóródy always intended to return to Budapest.[179]

The Berend House (1933), designed by Kóródy and Ribáry, as featured in the British annual Decorative Art: The Studio Yearbook, 1938

Kóródy’s design of the Lipcsei Vilmos Salon, Budapest, 1939, as featured in Decoration and Glass.

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George Kóródy’s distinctive scissor leg dining chairs, c.1955. Photographed at Hotel Hotel in Canberra, 2017.

Lounge chair, from George Kóródy’s Modern Unit range, sold at Artes Studio from 1947. Photographed at Hotel Hotel in Canberra, 2017.

Kóródy in Australia On 4 April 1940, the Esquilano arrived at Fremantle, then sailed on to to Sydney where Kóródy disembarked. It wasn’t long before Kóródy was embroiled in controversy. When asked by the press about his first impressions of Sydney, ‘Professor Kóródy’ had praised the Harbour and small weatherboard cottages, but described the rows of Bondi bungalows as monotonous, and the Sydney Town Hall as ‘cheap and vulgar’.[180] Making headlines in newspapers across the country, Kóródy had walked into the well-used trap laid for foreigners that might dare to criticise Australia. Kóródy’s point, a need for contemporary designs that were uniquely Australian, was one shared by many. The official purpose of Kóródy’s trip to Sydney would never be realised, with the outbreak of war. Hungary joined the Axis Alliance with Germany, and the Hungarian Society of Applied Arts exhibition did not take place.[181] At the age of 50, and after a distinguished career in Hungary, Kóródy found himself in Sydney starting over again. A capable artist, he initially made sculptures, paintings and lamp bases that he could sell to make a living. Kóródy found a friend in Margot Bing, a Sydney-based designer whom he would later marry. The two worked together, with Bing supplying shades for Kóródy’s driftwood lamp bases, and Kóródy painting for Bing’s lamp-shade business. Kóródy also experimented with a range of hand-painted tiles featuring modern interpretations of historical figures and peasant motifs. Sold under the name Fayence Ceramics[182], the tiles, like Kóródy’s other designs, were perhaps an inexpensive way of capitalising on a public curiosity with continental crafts due to the influx of European refugees coming into Australia. Kóródy’s first public work in Australia was the design of the Spirit of France exhibition in 1944 at the Blaxland Galleries.[183] Organised by Andre Brenac to raise funds for the Free French Forces movement, the exhibition showcased the work of a number of prominent artists and photographers, and was intended to honour the valour and culture of France and ‘show the people of Australia the spirit in which the French people were working to defeat the Germans’.[184] Also working on the Spirit of France as a member of the Executive Committee organising the exhibition was Sydney socialite and businesswoman Elsie Segaert. For Kóródy, meeting Segaert would signal the beginning of an enduring friendship and his subsequent involvement in Artes Studios.

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Elsie Segaert and Artes, the experimental studio Born in Sydney on 29 April 1896,[185] Elsie Segaert was a dynamic and confident woman with a passion for European style. Originally training as a teacher, and then obtaining a science degree, Segaert’s early life provides little indication of the unique contribution she would make to the Sydney design scene. It was the appointment of Segaert’s cousin Henri as Belgian Consul to Australia in 1919 that enabled her to move in high society, attending events such as the League of Nations Union International Ball in 1926 as a guest of her cousin.[186] Segaert’s love of travel and her gift for languages,

led to an opportunity to take tours through Europe with the Australian and Overseas Travel Service and she quickly made the change from teacher to tour guide.[187] Later, in 1935, Segaert set up her own business, Carefree Travel, which promised clients a first-class European experience. It was through these regular trips, and close connections with Europe, that Segaert became something of a respected voice on overseas matters. She was equally at home giving advice to travellers, talking regularly on local radio about destinations in Europe, attending significant social engagements or interviewing the former Czech president Masaryk.[188] With her strong opposition to Hitler and a belief that Australia needed to better support overseas troops, it is no surprise that she was involved in the Spirit of France exhibition where she worked alongside Kóródy. While Kóródy settled into Australian life making a modest living, Segaert was considering a more ambitious project. With her travel business on hold while Europe was rebuilding after World War II, Segaert saw in Kóródy an opportunity to bring a European sophistication to Sydney.[189] On 20 November 1945, Segaert launched the small atelier Artes Studio from her Darling Point flat. Segaert’s small apartment-based operation stocked Kóródy’s wroughtiron candlesticks, lamps, ceramics and art, while also retailing his products through department stores John Martins in Adelaide, and Margaret Kennedy in Brisbane. Edmondsons in Wagga Wagga also mounted a display of Hungarian peasant art designed by Kóródy, which included small furniture items, linen baskets, drinking sets and cocktail cabinets.

‘Peasants’ curtain fabric design, 1947, one of George Kóródy’s early designs for Artes Studio. In tribute to his new business partner Elsie Segaert, the smoke from the cottage chimney forms her initials, ES.

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Segaert’s enterprise proved successful, and within two years, Artes Studio moved to Castlereagh Street in the Sydney central business district. The increased floor space in the new store enabled Segaert and Kóródy to expand the studio’s offerings to include a complete range of furnishings for the Australian home. While Darling Point had been entirely of Segaert’s making, the move to Castlereagh Street formalised a partnership between the pair, and Kóródy marked the occasion with a fabric design that featured Segaert’s initials in the swirl of smoke coming from the chimney of a peasant house.[190] The official opening of the city store on 26 November 1947 was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, with the writer declaring, ‘at last you will find lightweight furniture designed for Australian living’.[191]

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Designs for Australian living By the time Castlereagh Street had opened, Artes Studio’s first range of furniture had begun to take shape. Kóródy spent time visiting local wood suppliers to conduct research on Australian timbers and veneers, and also sought out manufacturers whom he trusted to help him realise his designs.[192] Finding people to work with was not easy as few craftsmen could understand the way that Kóródy drew up his designs. ‘Kóródy designed everything in three dimensions by overlaying the diagrams. This meant that upholstery work could be “read” in one go and that cabinets were put down three dimensionally. Not many people understood his method as it had not been done in Australia before.’[193] By 1947, Artes had found a group of likeminded makers to subcontract the manufacturing of the shop range: Syd Harbour and Co. made the cabinetry, Mitrovits and Co. the upholstery, and Czechoslovakian Vesely produced the metal wares.[194] Functionalism was a driving force behind Kóródy’s design work, and although designing furniture was a focus, he was concerned with the total interior. He believed interiors should be designed and not decorated.[195] In a 1949 article titled ‘Design for Happiness’, Kóródy stressed that furniture should take into account practicality and flexibility, saving valuable space, and be of a simple design that took into consideration economies of scale in manufacturing and respect for the materials used. Kóródy believed that homes and the furniture they contained should be designed to conform to the habits of the occupants and the particular conditions of a country. Just as architecture should be functional, furniture should also satisfy our requirements; ‘furniture should serve you and not be served by you’.[196] Artes Studio offered a design service whereby Kóródy would produce built-in furniture for architect-designed homes and design custom furniture pieces for clients. Kóródy helped promote Artes by offering customers a complete design service; from furniture through to lighting, art and soft furnishings, with every detail considered and produced to a high standard. Kóródy’s philosophy was demonstrated by Artes’ Modern Unit range, begun in 1947 and the first directly functionalist modernist furniture produced by the studio. A series of utilitarian furniture pieces that could be used separately or grouped together, they were designed with flexibility and space saving in mind.

Produced in solid coachwood or with coachwood veneer over hardwood, the range included lamps, footstools, dining and lounge chair frames with cane inserts supporting removable cushions of natural rubber covered in Irish or Belgian linen, simple box cabinets, and black vitrolite-topped coffee and dining tables with compass legs (a motif that would feature on many of the Artes pieces). Kóródy’s designs were lightweight, raised off the floor on thin legs and without the bulky overstuffed upholstery of much that was on the market. For Kóródy, it was important that furniture was suited to the climate of a country; Australia’s hot climate led him to design lightweight chairs and breathable fabrics.[197] By the time Sidon visited the studio in 1953, Artes had added further variations, including cabinet units with splayed legs (some at 45 degrees to the boxes they supported) and long thin handles running the full length of the drawers, and slatted shelf units that could be used on top of cabinet units to form a larger sideboard. There were other multipurpose furniture pieces such as a simple frame unit that could be used as a couch, day bed or bed frame, and an ‘A-framed’ bookshelf with a removable folding leaf that turned the unit into a desk. Many of the pieces in the Modern Unit range were designed with the same component pieces for ease of manufacture. Ever practical Artes sold a coffee-table design that Kóródy added two small boxes to, making it a dressing table. By the 1950s, Kóródy had developed a distinctive Artes range. Dominated by simple shapes and using strongly linear angled legs, it could be argued that much of this furniture shared a similar design language to the work of Swiss designer Pierre Jeanneret (1896–1967), but it must be said that in some cases, Kóródy’s designs predate Jeanneret’s, for example, the Kóródy Repose chair was being sold at Artes by 1953 before Jeanneret’s 1955 Chandigarh chair, which it closely resembles. Kóródy’s work was unique in Sydney and highly regarded. In 1948, wellknown interior designer Marion Hall Best selected a number of his pieces for the 7 Designers exhibition at the David Jones Art Gallery. The David Jones Art Gallery exhibition What Is Good Modern Design? followed in 1951. This time, an extensive range of Artes Studios’ coachwood furniture available at the Castlereagh Street studios was included. Kóródy’s work sat alongside that of Kalmar Interiors, also designed and operated by a Hungarian; theirs was the only furniture selected. Kóródy’s place as a modernist designer in Australia was summarised in a three-page spread, complete with styled photographs, in Melbourne-based publication Home Beautiful in 1951. Titled ‘Tradition re-styled’, the article declared that Kóródy’s furniture provided an ideal compromise for those who felt a need to choose between traditional design and modern furniture. Featuring the SOS cabinetry, the author described it as utilitarian, taking its inspiration from a ‘Tyrolean hunting lodge’, both traditionally European and modern in its realisation to create a unique style that was simple, strong and honest in its construction.[198] Despite critical success, turnover of stock was modest and times were tough for the studio. Despite loyal clients such as Patrick White and his partner

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Kóródy patented a number of his early designs. This one is for versions 1 and 2 of the SOS unit. A flexible furniture piece identified as a coffee table or flowerpot stand, it was registered in 1948.

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Manoly Lascaris, and Madame Sidon, many potential clients simply did not have a disposable income that allowed them to purchase a home full of Artes furniture. In 1950, Segaert and Kóródy sought new partners to secure the finances of the business.

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Artes Studio expands It was at this time that Dutchman Dick van Leer joined the firm. Introduced to Artes by their courier Arnold ‘Nol’ Coltoff, van Leer owned the import/ export company Dinimpex. Born in the Dutch West Indies, van Leer grew up in Holland and, like Kóródy, shared a background in weaving. His parents were part-owners in Goudsmit-Hoff, a wallpaper company that had been seized by the Nazis during World War II. Losing his parents in the war, van Leer made his way to Australia, arriving in 1947 at age 25, to start a new life. After the return of the company postwar to its rightful owners, the company was sold and using his share, van Leer, along with Coltoff, each purchased a quarter-share in Artes.[199] The arrangement was formalised with Artes becoming a registered company and its name changed to Artes Studios, reflecting the operation of the studio’s second store in Edgecliff, which had opened in 1950. Upon securing help in the store, Segaert returned to her first love, travel, and was only in the store a few months of the year. While abroad, Segaert continued her interest in design, providing a report on Italian trends in furniture with Marion Hall Best in a 1954 feature in the Sydney Morning Herald.[200] Van Leer recalled that, due to its lack of in-house manufacturing, and its precise and stringent quality control, Artes Studios was an expensive operation, but he saw potential in the business. Having a small turnover, margins were tight, and in his role as General Manager, van Leer knew that long-term relationships were required to service loyal customers. Van Leer had a business acumen and brought to Artes innovative ways to market and sell their range of products. He was also a great showman, it was not uncommon for him to stand on the furniture in front of clients to demonstrate its strength and stability. The ‘Make a home of your house’ promotion[201], an ingenious concept of van Leer’s, took advantage of Artes Studios extensive range and provided customers with a unique opportunity to live with a full suite of Artes Studios furniture in their home for three months as a trial with no obligation to purchase. At the end of the three months, van Leer would call to organise the return of the furniture, but by then customers had already fallen in love with Kóródy’s designs and would simply request an invoice. According to van Leer, very few packages, if any, were returned, making the promotion a huge success. By this time, Artes Studios was a one-stop shop providing everything a customer might need to furnish their home, from furniture to curtains, to imported ceramics and glassware. Unlike department stores of the period, which arranged furniture by type (chairs, lamps etc.), Artes Studios arranged their furniture by room (lounge, dining etc.) giving the customer a sense of how the designs might look in their homes. Customers were encouraged to spend

Artes Studios commissioned Max Dupain to photograph the showroom on a number of occasions, with the images used in the store’s advertising. This image captured the studio range in 1956. By 1960 Artes Studios had adopted the by-line ‘Home and Office Interiors’ and their range of sophisticated office furniture formed a considerable part of the business.

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The Artes Studios showroom in 1958, photographed by Max Dupain.

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time relaxing in chairs, while the sounds of classical music floated through the store.[202] Sensing the need to expand, in 1954, Artes Studios moved to a larger store at 539 George Street, Sydney. With a prominent CBD street frontage and a large basement storeroom, the new George Street location provided more storage and arguably more foot traffic. The store’s interior was designed by architect Hugh Buhrich, who according to van Leer, also designed Segaert’s house in Castlecrag.[203] While Kóródy continued to remain the exclusive and sole designer of the Artes furniture, by this time Artes Studios’ offerings included other popular Australian designs by the likes of Featherston, Framac and FLER. Kóródy designed many of Artes’ key pieces, and in response to the studio’s decision to pursue the commercial market (as Artes Homes and Office Interiors) he extended their range to office furniture. In 1957, Kóródy designed the Boomerang desk, a massive monolith of rosewood timber with timber drawer units floating on a wooden sleigh base (later produced with chrome). This would be his last design. On Christmas Day, 1957, while on holiday with his wife Margot, Kóródy suffered a heart attack and died. The man who had originally trained as an architect would be remembered as the driving force behind Artes Studios’ signature style. Described by van Leer as a kind, witty, humble and intelligent man, as well as ‘a brilliant designer of complete modern interiors’, he is credited as one of the pioneers of modern design in Sydney.[204] Despite the loss of Kóródy, the remaining partners moved forward with van Leer at the helm. Van Leer’s time at Artes saw it expand into a furniture importer and retailer for exclusive international design brands such as Artifort, B&B Italia, Fritz Hanson and Herman Miller, now considered by many as icons of 20thcentury design. Artes buyer Anne-Marie Kalischer was responsible for bringing the likes of European art glass and potters such as Lucie Rie to Artes.[205] Pieces were displayed in the ‘gift store’ window of the George Street store, an area curated by Phyllis Shillito. Artes offered the latest modern designs that were not available anywhere else in Australia and as a result, it became a mecca for interior designers and architects. It was also seen as a source of inspiration for others in the trade. As a young apprentice with Ricketts & Thorpe, Alan Perry recalls he was encouraged to visit Artes to update his design skills, ‘Their showroom was a delight in European furniture design’.[206] In what was still an isolated country, Artes became a portal to the world of design and a key landmark of modern style in Sydney. Over time, van Leer employed new designers such as Terry Jonklaas and Lyndal Evatt to continue Artes Studios’ custom-design service. Eventually van Leer would purchase Coltoff and Segaert’s shares in the business, becoming sole owner, and in 1974, Artes Studios made one last move, to premises at 539 Sussex Street in the Sydney CBD. Kóródy’s final design before his death, the Boomerang desk, proved to be his most enduring, holding its own among the international brands stocked by the studio and remaining in production until the sale of Artes Studios in 1979 to Kevin Jarrett, whom van Leer had employed to manage

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the store. Later, Artes merged with competitor Arredorama and shortly after, Jarrett rebranded the business Space Furniture, feeling that Artes Studios sounded too exclusive. Space built upon Artes’ legacy and continues to be one of Australia’s leading retailers of international designer furniture, maintaining ties with old Artes brands such as B&B Italia, and introducing new brands such as Kartell. From humble beginnings in Segaert’s flat, through to a series of impressive stores in Sydney’s CBD, for over 30 years Artes Studios was responsible for introducing good modern design to a conservative Australian market. Artes was innovative in their design and marketing strategies, and created a retail experience that was unlike any other furniture store. But none of it would have happened without Elsie Segaert and George Kóródy, and the patronage of loyal clients such as Madame Sidon.

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6

The Bonyhady desks by Tim Bonyhady

‘We have just had some bookshelves and desks made and the place is looking very nice now,’ wrote my mother, Anne, in May 1949. The place was at 48 Anglo Street, Chatswood, Sydney. The two bookshelves were identical, as were the two desks. The Hungarian architect George Kóródy designed them for my parents, Anne and Eric Bonyhady, both refugees from Nazi Austria, who met in Sydney in 1945 at the birthday party of a fellow refugee and married in 1948. That year, Anne and Eric lived in Cremorne in the small flat of Anne’s mother, Gretl, and aunt Kathe, though Gretl was away for several months, giving my parents more space. Then my 26-year-old mother and 25-year-old father moved into Anglo Street, making it a little less Anglo. Anne and Eric were working and studying as they set up house. Despite a University Medal in German, Anne was teaching physiology and botany at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Rose Bay, and coaching students who had failed the Leaving exam and wanted to re-sit it. In 1948, she was also studying science at the University of Sydney with a view to transferring into medicine, long her preferred career, but in 1949 she embarked on a Masters degree about the German writer Hermann Hesse. Eric was making up for the much greater disruption to his education by the Nazis. Having started an apprenticeship as a fitter and turner after completing only the second form of high school in Sydney, he began in 1948 as chief draughtsman in a small factory manufacturing gas appliances. By the middle of the year, he had his first job as a works manager at a foundry. Through 1948, he also attended lectures three nights a week at Sydney Technical College, where he was in his fourth year of a mechanical engineering degree, and in 1949 he wrote his thesis. Music, theatre, dance and film loomed large for Anne and Eric, as Anne chronicled almost daily in her diaries. Anne and Eric regularly attended concerts staged by Musica Viva, the chamber music society established by another refugee, Richard Goldner. They enjoyed a bout of opera-going, attending nine of 14 productions by a touring Italian company arranged by the theatrical agency JC Williamson. They saw Sir Laurence Olivier in Old Vic performances of Shakespeare’s Richard III and Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. Their movie-going included the British thriller No Orchids for Miss Blandish, the American blockbuster, The Best Years of our Lives, and another box-office hit, Gentlemen’s Agreement, which was the first Hollywood movie about anti-Semitism in the United States.

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Anne’s grandparents, Moriz and Hermine Gallia, had been major patrons of Gustav Klimt, Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte in turn-of-the-century Vienna. But the Gallias also made new artistic connections in Sydney. When Kathe became a senior technician and assistant biochemist at Royal North Shore Hospital in 1942, she worked under Rudi Lemberg, whose wife Hannah was a significant textile maker. Gretl’s translation of Hauff’s Tales, published in Sydney in 1949, had colour plates and black-and-white drawings by one of Australia’s most accomplished illustrators, Mahdi McCrae. The best portrait of Anne taken in Sydney, in the early 1940s, was by Grete Weissenstein, one of the many women, often Jews, at the forefront of photography in Vienna in the early 20th century. When Weissenstein fled to Sydney in 1939, she opened a studio called Ingret, just as she had in Vienna, and Anne was among her many refugee clients.

Anne Gallia, 1942, in a photograph taken by fellow Austrian refugee Grete Weissenstein of the Ingret studio.

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Eric’s family had much weaker artistic connections in Austria. Their relatives included Oskar Stössel, a printmaker of scant reputation. Eric’s aunt Mira and her husband, Fritz Hafner, who was a successful lawyer in the Styrian capital Graz, were collectors with an eye for the modern. They acquired a group of early pen-and-ink drawings by the Bulgarian artist Pascin, similar in style to his work for the satirical Munich weekly Simplicissimus. Like the Gallias, the Hafners owned one of Michael Powolny’s lidded boxes from about 1908 of the armoured Iron Man embracing the naked Danube Nymph. While the Nazis seized part of the Hafners’ collection, they were able to bring their Powolny with them. For more than 20 years, these two ceramic

versions of Klimt’s Kiss were a few kilometres apart – one in Cremorne, the other in Neutral Bay – owned by both sides of my refugee family. The Bonyhadys acquired more cultural connections as refugees. When the Hafners sailed to Sydney, their fellow passengers included the Russianborn architect Henry Epstein and his wife Ruth, who became close friends. The Bonyhadys’ relatives in Sydney included Franzi Stössel, who was married to Marcus Seidler, the uncle of the architect Harry Seidler. While Franzi appeared in at least one play at Sydney’s Independent Theatre in 1940, her daughter Ruth became a member of the Bodenwieser Ballet, a company at the forefront of modern dance established by yet another Viennese refugee, Gertrud Bodenwieser. While the young refugee photographer Mara Landauer took a compelling portrait of Eric and his brother Fred not long after they arrived, the family’s preferred photographer in Sydney was Margaret Michaelis. She took portraits of the Bonyhady family and Fritz Hafner and, as part of her larger engagement with the Bodenwieser Ballet, photographed Ruth Seidler dancing.

The Bonyhady brothers. Fred, born 1929, is top left. Eric, born 1923, is bottom right. This portrait by Mara Landauer was taken c.1940.

The Hafners’ involvement in art in Australia was strongest. When the Australian legal profession refused to recognise Fritz’s qualifications, he tried journalism, copywriting and coffee grinding without success. Then, he studied art at East Sydney Technical College under Lyndon Dadswell, set up a small studio off Bondi Road and made what he advertised as ‘Art Ceramics’,[207] three of which are now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. His most interesting works were a menagerie of horses,

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Eric Bonyhady’s George Kóródy–designed desk, which he has used since 1949.

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151 Michael Powolny, Danube Nymph and Iron Man, 1908

seals, dogs, ducks and merino sheep, which came in pink, green, and blue as well as naturalistic glazes. Mira, who was one of many refugees to take instruction in handicrafts in Vienna before fleeing Austria, was one of the few who succeeded in turning this training to practical use when, with another refugee, she established a company that made handbags in Elizabeth Street in the city. Just as some of Fritz’s ceramics had a modern feel, so did Mira’s handbags, which sold at some of the same upmarket stores as Fritz’s ceramics, but with much more financial return. Anne’s aesthetic was shaped by the furniture commissioned by her Gallia grandparents in 1912–1913 from the Viennese architect Josef Hoffmann for their apartment in Vienna’s Wohllebengasse.[208] Not long after Eric and she bought their land in Anglo Street, Anne explained her approach to design in one of her regular letters to her childhood friend Georg Schidlof, who occasionally visited the Wohllebengasse as a boy and became George Turner after fleeing Vienna for London. I don’t know whether you remember my grandmother’s furniture which we also had when mother and I had a flat to ourselves. If you do remember you will know that they are gigantic things very hard to keep clean. Well we have all that stuff here and rooms in Sydney are not the biggest. Hence I have the feeling to live in a furniture store or worse and most of the cupboards are filled with … useless things … so that keeping everything tidy is a terrible lot of bother.[209]

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Anne wanted something different, she told George. ‘In my house, should it eventually be constructed, I hope to have few and light pieces of furniture and am at the moment of the probably optimistic opinion that it will be easier to keep a whole house clean than two rooms under the present conditions.’ But Eric and she could not afford a house filled with the new. They needed to use some of the old as Anne’s grandparents had done in the Wohllebengasse, notwithstanding their wealth. While Moriz and Hermine commissioned five new front rooms from Hoffmann, they filled one with their old Biedermeier furniture. As the flat in Cremorne was crammed, Anne would no longer be living there, and as Gretl and Kathe were inclined to give Anne all she wanted, Anne took some of the Hoffmann furniture that best fitted her taste. The Hoffmann furniture from Hermine’s boudoir in the Wohllebengasse – painted white with its carved details in gold – did not. Nor did the Hoffmann furniture from the dining room, the hall and Moriz’s smoking room, which was almost all large, heavy and ebonised. The one room in the Wohllebengasse where Hoffmann had used a light timber in its natural state was the salon. When the Gallia children emptied the family apartment after Hermine died in 1936, Kathe selected most of this furniture from the salon for her new apartment in a modern block in Vienna’s Third District. In 1948, Anne selected some of this Hoffmann furniture for Anglo Street. She chose a marble-topped table, two side chairs, two armchairs and two cupboards. These cupboards were very different from the rest of the Hoffmann commission for the Wohllebengasse – perhaps because they were designed to be placed in marble surrounds, identical to those that encased the salon’s

The salon, Gallia apartment, Wohllebengasse 4, 1914. One of a series of photographs of the Gallia family’s Hoffmann interiors in Vienna, taken by Bruno Reiffenstein, when the rooms were new.

two grille-fronted central heating units. Unlike Hoffmann’s other furniture from this era, these cupboards had no decoration. There was nothing neoclassical about them. They were square forms, Hoffmann at his simplest – as geometric as his most geometric furniture from the turn of the century. Anne and Eric lived in the flat in Cremorne in 1948 because of Australia’s postwar housing shortage. Their brief attempt to rent in January was a failure. When they sought to buy an existing house, they discovered that agents ‘only sell on the black market and that nothing is to be had at the legal price’. Next came the ‘land hunt’, with money coming from Gretl and Kathe. Eric and Anne searched on Sydney’s North Shore by walking through areas ‘which they thought likely and getting the names of the land owners and writing to them or seeing them’. In March, they acquired 48 Anglo Street and, rather than simply employing a builder, also commissioned an architect. ‘I suppose with my family’s background, this was unavoidable’, Anne would observe. Their choice was HV Wollaston, a Pymble architect who designed them a pitched-roofed, terracotta-tiled, typical piece of period Australian suburbia. Their next challenges were to secure finance and to find a builder, only for nothing to happen. ‘There are so many shortages to be overcome’, Anne lamented in May 1948 to George Turner. ‘We still have not got the builder to the point of starting’, despite ‘ringing him practically daily’, she railed in June. But work started in July and the walls were up and the roof had been pitched by August, only to be delayed again by more shortages. ‘I have started to sew curtains for our new house but this is sheer optimism’, she reported in September. ‘The house is progressing only very slowly … as we have been unable as yet to obtain roof tiles.’ Two months later, she remained despondent. ‘The house is progressing as slowly as ever. For a

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whole fortnight nobody did any work at all but the men came back on the job on Friday. At present the carpenters are there fixing doors and windows.’ In December, the house was complete. Other refugees acquired custom-made furniture when they married – usually commissioned by the bride’s parents, sometimes made by Paul Kafka, a refugee cabinetmaker from Vienna, who arrived in Sydney in 1939. George Kamsler and Erika Schaffa, known to her friends as Ricki, were an example. When they married in 1948, Ricki’s mother had their house in Wahroonga fitted out by Kafka: a dining table that could be extended to seat ten; a buffet with a glass display cabinet; two three-quarter beds with bedheads and bed ends, bedside tables and a dressing table; a cocktail bar, a three-seater settee, a number of lounge-room chairs, a coffee table and dressing table. Leslie Buchwald, a Hungarian cabinetmaker with a small factory in Redfern, was another source. Born in Győr in north-west Hungary, he learnt his craft with a string of distinguished European furniture makers before moving to Sydney in 1929 where he continued making furniture. From February 1947, having renamed himself Buckwell during the war, he advertised regularly in the monthly New Citizen, published by Viennese refugees, which provided a platform for an array of enterprises hoping to find a refugee market. Buckwell publicised his pedigree working for Lingel in Budapest, Portois & Fix in Vienna (renowned for Adolf Loos’s American Bar), and Eugenio Quarti in Milan. His first advertisement offered, ‘Modern and individual designs’, but after that always ‘Craftsman-built modern furniture’.[210] When Anne’s closest friend Gerty Angel married Czech refugee Francis Lord in 1949, they commissioned tables and sideboards from Buckwell. As Gerty and Francis remembered it in the early 2000s, Buckwell’s furniture was cheaper than that of Paul Kafka, who ran a much bigger regular advertisement in the New Citizen for his ‘Modern exclusive furniture’ and, more confident of his status, did not list his credentials.[211] My Czechborn stepmother Vera, who spent several years in Vienna before escaping to Australia in 1939, was a sharp observer of such commissions, and particularly close to Ricki Kamsler. While Vera’s own parents commissioned furniture from Buckwell, she recalls Kafka being ‘the upmarket furniture maker’. If you got Kafka furniture, ‘you had arrived’. Gallia tradition loomed large when it came to Anglo Street. Two generations had commissioned furniture. Anne became the third. While some of the money again came from Gretl and Kathe, Anne did more teaching in mid-1948 ‘to earn some extra money which for furnishing and other expenses we can certainly use’. Whereas Eric could only look at potential purchases on Saturday mornings, Anne’s teaching jobs allowed her to look also on weekdays. George Kóródy was her choice. His work for Artes Studios matched her aesthetic ideal outlined to George Turner in April 1948. Apart from the desks and bookshelves, Kóródy designed a small dining table and four corded .

Ruth Seidler by Margaret Michaelis. As with many of Michaelis’s photographs of the Bodenwieser Ballet, Seidler is dancing barefoot in a park.

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chairs, a divan, a small sideboard, and, it appears, an array of built-in furniture. But Anne was eager for more. When Eric’s parents offered to give Anne and Eric a wedding present, having so opposed their marriage that Anne and Eric married without telling them, Anne suggested a Kóródy bedroom suite. What followed was typical of Anne’s shocking relationship with her fatherin-law, Edward. The Bonyhady parents ignored Anne’s suggestion and, instead, employed Paul Kafka who, like Leslie Buckwell, sometimes made furniture to the design of architects and sometimes worked without. The completed suite – two single beds placed together, two bedside tables and two wardrobes – was a dark timber, perhaps walnut, the opposite of what Anne wanted. She would recall being ‘most disappointed’ that her parents-in-law ‘would not agree with having the furniture designed by Kóródy. I had offered to pay for the design but the answer was no. I was always disappointed both with the design and above all else the colour – the dark stain when I had always wanted lightcoloured furniture’. One of Anne’s links with Kóródy and Artes Studios was through Gerty Angel’s husband-to-be, Francis Lord, who happened to share a cabin with Kóródy when sailing to Australia in 1940 – though that did not lead Gerty and Francis to employ Kóródy. Another connection was with Elsie Segaert, who founded Artes Studios in November 1945 at her Darling Point flat, then opened a much more substantial studio with Kóródy in Castlereagh Street in the city. The cousin of the Belgian Consul in Sydney, Segaert’s first business venture was to establish a travel agency which arranged for parties of Australians to tour Europe through the 1930s guided by Segaert. After returning from Italy in 1940, she became passionately involved in the war effort, working from 1941 for Andre Brenac, leader of the Free French Movement in Australia, as did Gretl for a few months in 1943. As Australia’s Security Service kept a close watch on ‘enemy aliens’ such as Gretl, an agent reported in mid-1943 that Gretl had resigned from her job with the Free French because it was ‘involved in some dishonest venture’. When the Service investigated and called in Gretl for questioning, it found her resignation was due to Gretl being ‘out of place’ among her workmates, young girls 30 years her junior, because of her ‘superior knowledge and culture’. Segaert, who initially was also one of Brenac’s secretaries but then became his publicity officer, and helped to organise a French exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1944, was an exception. ‘Few Australians know Europe as well as Segaert’, the Sydney Morning Herald observed.[212] Her regular radio talks in Sydney, delivered while running her travel business, included ‘Vienna’, and ‘By car from Austria to Germany’. Most likely, Gretl and Segaert, both multilingual and well travelled, enjoyed each other’s company at the Free French and remained in touch thereafter. Segaert and Kóródy, who was initially Artes Studios’ sole designer, were a perfect match for Anne. In 1947, Segaert declared that Artes Studios was hoping ‘to create things for Australian homes and the Australian way of living – lightweight furniture and washable textiles that were not beyond

the means of the average discerning person’.[213] In 1949, Segaert told the Sydney newspaper The Sun she ‘always advises use of a touch of black’, not only ‘black-enamelled wrought-iron lamp standards and wall brackets’, which Anne did not embrace, but also ‘black-topped glass … dining-room tables’,[214] which Anne did. At the same time, Kóródy pronounced: ‘Furniture should be light-weight, of simple construction and without any meaningless ornamentation. Materials should be treated according to their characteristics … Putting dark stains on beautiful Australian grained timber for the sake of imitating Continental dark wood furniture is a crime’.[215] Anne’s commission largely corresponded with these prescriptions. The light-coloured timber was left unstained, devoid of ornament. The dining table, the free-standing sideboard and the desks were all topped with the pigmented structural glass usually known as Vitrolite after one of its main forms, though Eric thinks of it as Carrara, after another of its brands. The divan was also relatively light-weight but the other furniture was not. While the chairs were elegant, they were quite heavy and cumbersome to move. The Vitrolite, for all its stylishness, would show every speck of dust, contrary to Anne’s desire for a house easy to keep clean. Anne probably also bought fabrics designed by Kóródy who, in a feature on Australian art in the opening issue of the New Citizen in April 1946, declared most Australian interiors ‘far from satisfactory’, partly because they were ‘far from Australian in character’. Kóródy identified that character with the landscape. ‘The outdoor life is very colourful and the sunny beach, the birds, the Blue Mountains, and the flowers should be an inspiration to interior decorators. A cheerful scheme of primary colours should be introduced in curtains and furniture coverings.’[216] But while he took up his own injunction to be colourful, the Australian landscape was not an obvious influence. ‘Hungarian artistic work’ was the characterisation of Kóródy in an advertisement placed by Artes Studios in the New Citizen in 1946.[217] A spread in the Australian Women’s Weekly in 1947 suggested his ceramics and textiles drew on ‘Central European motifs’ and ‘Hungarian peasant designs’.[218] Kóródy first appears in Anne’s diary in September 1948 when he visited Anglo Street. But Kóródy must have visited the flat in Cremorne at least a few months before to see and measure the fruitwood Hoffmann furniture from Vienna, since his brief was to make furniture that would not just share the same spaces but combine with the Hoffmann furniture in the most immediate fashion. Leslie Buckwell features in Anne’s diary from June 1948, and much more often, because he made the furniture designed by Kóródy – an example of one Hungarian working for another, at least for Anglo Street, and probably more generally – just as Paul Kafka worked for Austrian architects including Harry Seidler and Hans Peter Oser. Kóródy’s partner, Margot Bing, also participated. A German refugee, Bing arrived in Sydney in 1939 with her husband Martin, and began making lampshades, which she asked Kóródy to decorate. As the Sydney scandal sheet Truth delighted in reporting when the Bings divorced in 1946, Margot left Martin in

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Modern Unit single bed in coachwood, c.1947. George Kóródy design for Artes Studios. The Bonyhadys commissioned a similar daybed from Kóródy in 1948. Photographed at Hotel Hotel in Canberra, 2017.

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1945 to live with Kóródy in his flat in Bellevue Hill.[219] On a visit there at the end of August 1948, Anne ordered blue lampshades for the main bedroom in Chatswood from ‘Frau Bing’. The following Saturday, as the tempo for furnishing Anglo Street picked up, both Anne and Eric went to Artes Studios – Anne’s only diary reference to it in 1948, though other entries about her examining and ordering furniture in the city probably involved it. On this visit at the start of September, Anne and Eric ordered the Speiszimmerkasten – most likely, the small, free-standing, vertical, two-doored, Vitrolite-topped sideboard that survives; or perhaps a much bigger Vitrolite-topped piece that appears in photographs of the completed dining room. That evening, typically of their cultural appetites, Anne and Eric went to a Musica Viva concert where the pianist Hephzibah Menuhin, whom Anne idolised, played Beethoven’s Great Fugue and Archduke Trio and Brahms’s Quintet in F Minor. Most of the furniture was slow to be completed because of the demand for Buckwell’s pieces, the difficulties in obtaining materials and the shortage of skilled workers. The classified advertisements in the Sydney Morning Herald provide a glimpse of the difficulties faced by Buckwell, as well as by Paul Kafka, in finding and retaining skilled staff in the late 1940s. They both ‘urgently wanted’ cabinetmakers, and sought to attract them with ‘top wages, excellent conditions’ and ‘permanent positions’. Buckwell also emphasised that he was engaged in ‘first class, individual construction’, ‘no mass production’ and sought ‘first class’ men ‘able to construct modern furniture’.[220] While on holiday in Tasmania at the end of 1948, Anne and Eric learnt that their house was complete, but much of the furniture was not. ‘There has been some hold up with our bedroom furniture’, Anne wrote to George Turner on New Year’s Eve, of her parents-in-laws’ commission to Paul Kakfa. ‘I am not sure what happened but it appears that the carpenter just simply locked it and went on his Christmas holiday till January 10th. So we must wait with moving till that date.’ Part of Anne’s own commission to George Kóródy and Leslie Buckwell lagged even further behind. ‘Some furniture has unfortunately not even been started’, Anne wrote, ‘especially the writing desks so it will be a couple of months yet before things are somewhat in order’. Anne’s first opportunity to hasten the delivery of the Kóródy furniture was at the start of January 1949 when she went to the city to see Elsie Segaert at Artes Studios. Over the following week, after Anne again saw Segaert, Buckwell made two deliveries. The Kafka bedroom furniture also arrived, allowing Anne and Eric to move in ‘at last’, almost exactly a year after their wedding. Anne still wished the house was finished, she exclaimed with exasperation in her diary, and the desks concerned her most. On 14 January, Anne went to see Kóródy about them. Two months later, Anne found them half-ready at Buckwell’s factory. On Saturday, 2 April 1949, Buckwell finally delivered both them and the bookshelves. Anne noted with delight how pretty they were. Just as Eric and she had gone to a Musica Viva concert featuring Hephzibah Menuhin after ordering a sideboard from Artes Studios in September

1948, so they went to another of her concerts after receiving the last of their Kóródy furniture. The following day, Anne filled the bookshelves and wrote with satisfaction of the house’s new order. An arrangement of furniture in the living room was just as it had been when the Gallias moved into the Wohllebengasse in 1913 and when Kathe moved into her own flat in Vienna’s Third District in 1936. Anne placed one of the Hoffmann marble-topped tables from the salon between two of the Hoffmann armchairs and, in keeping with Galllia tradition, covered the table with a lace cloth from Hermine’s vast collection. The key difference was the fabric of the armchairs, by then 35 years old and in their fifth home. Anne had the chairs recovered with a fabric, which she also used for curtains. A photograph – the only one of Anne and Eric as proud new householders – shows them seated at this setting.

Anne and Eric Bonyhady, 1949.

Behind them, between a door and a corner, is a Kóródy bookshelf clearly designed for that space. Both it and the other Kóródy bookshelf were designed to fit with the two Hoffmann cupboards from the salon and potentially to create a bridge between them. When Kathe had moved into her Viennese flat in 1936, she had commissioned a five-shelf bookcase, most likely from the designer Willi Legler, a nephew of Alma Mahler, who helped Kathe to decorate her new apartment. This bookcase, which did not come to Australia, went between the Hoffmann cupboards from 1936, creating a single unit with an entirely flush surface. In Sydney, Anne had Kóródy design two new bookcases, just four-shelved, so they could take bigger books, which would also match the Hoffmann cupboards. These bookcases were the same height, depth and colour as the cupboards, but had slightly

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Josef Hoffmann inkstand, designed in 1909, one the many pieces of Wiener Werkstätte brought by the Gallias to Sydney in 1939

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rounded corners and set-in skirting boards. While these bookcases stood apart from the cupboards in Anglo Street, one eventually went between the cupboards without looking as elegant as Kathe’s ensemble in Vienna. Because the house in Chatswood had a spare room, Anne and Eric could have created a separate study, but that was never their plan. They loved playing ping-pong and, within a week of moving in, bought a table, and gave this room over to it and Anne’s sewing machine. When the Kóródy desks arrived, they went into the living room under a window, along with the two Hoffmann side chairs. Another early photograph not only shows the Hoffmann oval table and two armchairs from the salon, and the Kóródy bookcase, but also parts of the backs of the two Hoffmann side chairs and a little of the desks. One Hoffmann side chair, probably re-covered in the fabric that Anne used on the Hoffmann armchairs and as curtains, was at each Kóródy desk. These chairs had oval seats, straight backs with X-shaped splats typical of Hoffmann’s work for the Wohllebengasse, and slightly arched tops carved into natural forms with a central flower surrounded by leaves, berries and more flowers, which Kóródy may have looked on as ‘meaningless ornamentation’. There is nothing to suggest that Kóródy modified his conception of his compact, almost chunky, desks because they were to go with these Hoffmann chairs rather than his own creations. Anne would not have sought such modifications. She would have wanted the desks to be as modern as could be. The combination of Hoffmann chairs and Kóródy desks may be thought of as a late expression of the Austro-Hungarian – the Viennese Hoffmann and the Budapestian Kóródy – 30 years after the dismemberment of the AustroHungarian Empire. But for all the desks’ international influences, they were ultimately Australian, designed by Kóródy almost a decade after he arrived in Sydney, having grappled at length with how to create an Australian art,

architecture and design. Anne’s commission resulted in a remarkable combination of two forms of the modern, 35 years apart, bridging two hemispheres, within Anglo Street. When Anne, Eric and my brother Bruce moved in 1957 to Upper Fairfax Road, Mosman, where they had built a ‘contemporary cottage’ that excited Anne much more than the Chatswood house, the desks and chairs were again in the living room. This time, however, they were floating in space, having been conceived, as often in Europe, so they could be placed against a wall or in the middle of a room. They remained that way until 1962 when Anne and Eric separated and divided their wedding furniture. Eric took the Kafka furniture, which Anne loathed. Anne kept the Kóródy furniture, except Eric’s desk. Anne also kept the Hoffmann furniture including the side chairs. Anne had most of the Kóródy furniture – and some of her Hoffmann furniture – modified by Bruce who loved carpentry as a boy and became increasingly accomplished at it as a teenager, albeit largely self-taught. Eager for instruction but unable to secure it in Armidale in northern New South Wales where Anne, Bruce and I lived from 1967, Bruce went to Sydney for a one week vacation in 1970 to learn more. Eric had arranged for him to work with Paul Kafka, who continued to operate a small factory on Botany Road, Waterloo, where 20 years before he had made Anne and Eric’s bedroom furniture. In a letter, typed by Eric as usual on his Kóródy desk, he explained to the 16-year-old Bruce: Mr Kafka does not mass produce furniture, he makes furniture to specific requirements and other furniture is being made on a semi-production basis. He will arrange your week that you do some dovetailing, some veneering, some work with laminex, some polishing and some upholstery. Your starting time will be 7.30 and you will knock off at 4 p.m. He will look after your insurance.

Bruce probably modified some of the Kóródy and Hoffmann furniture before he had this opportunity to learn from Sydney’s most renowned Viennese cabinetmaker, but he modified some of it afterwards. The changes that Bruce wrought at Anne’s behest might be thought of as a mark of disregard for Kóródy’s work, but they were more a mark of attachment. Anne, who took pleasure and pride in having commissioned her Kóródy furniture, wanted to retain it, but also wanted it to be more functional. Because the Kóródy dining table had always been unstable, Anne decided to jettison its original structure and have Bruce insert its Vitrolite into a stable frame. As the cord on the dining chairs aged – and the cushions on them always slipped off – Anne had Bruce replace the cord with solid seats and solid backs covered with fabric. Because the handles on her desk were glued on – and sometimes came off – she had Bruce screw on new ones and similarly had him replace the small sideboard’s original knobs. Because the wooden surfaces of the desk were deteriorating, she had him sand and re-varnish them with a slight reddish stain. While Anne eventually came to place the two Hoffmann side chairs around the Hoffmann marble-topped table from the salon, where some of

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them had been during her childhood in the Wohllebengasse, in the 1960s if not already the 1950s, she created a new conjunction of the Viennese modern and the Australian. This conjunction involved the Hoffmann inkstand, acquired by Moriz and Hermine around 1909, which sat on Moriz’s desk in his study in the Wohllebengasse. Anne had no interest in most of the Hoffmann silver acquired by her grandparents, but she loved this inkstand with its highly architectonic form. While nearly all of the Hoffmann silver and furniture stopped being objects of daily use when the National Gallery of Victoria acquired them in 1976, the inkstand remained part of ordinary domestic life, on Anne’s Kóródy desk, filled with pens, pencils and postage stamps, until Anne died in 2003. For more than a decade after Anne died, her desk sat in my house, filled with papers but otherwise unused. I thought of the desk as hers, as I still do. When my son Nicko moved from Canberra to Sydney to study, I even began using his IKEA desk which prompted Nicko, while back in Canberra writing university essays, to begin using Anne’s desk. Now I work on it. Though Eric jettisoned the Kafka bedroom furniture in the late 1960s, he has kept his Kóródy desk unmodified. It has always been with Eric – his most important piece of furniture, central to the ordering of his affairs, across almost 70 years. When he and my stepmother Vera moved into a nursing home in 2016, it was the one piece of furniture that Eric insisted must come with him.

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7 From the margins to the mainstream by Rebecca Hawcroft

In 1958, Polish-born Henry Kurzer designed the Latin Quarter restaurant, including its full furnishings, fitted units and lighting features.[221] Kurzer had arrived in Sydney in 1938 as an 18-year-old, and despite not speaking English, had started his architectural studies at Sydney Technical College, graduating in 1945. Kurzer’s early work included a number of interiors where he designed all the interior features. Kurzer’s fit out of the multi-room Latin Quarter (with espresso coffee lounge, light refreshment area and formal Delphi Room) included layered ceilings, theatrically recessed and spot lighting and a range of furniture upholstered in vinyl to match the highly patterned wallpapers. The project utilised a team of European craftsmen including muralist and fellow Pole Marion Pretzel, and Paul Kafka and Michael Gerstl who made the furniture components.[222] The high-profile project brought him wide acclaim.[223] Many émigrés, often trained in architecture, found work as interior or furniture designers, as educators and as commentators in what can be seen as the margins of the architectural profession. European design training was multifaceted and many architecture graduates were able to adapt their skills to a variety of design fields. The result was that many émigrés, such as Kurzer, reached prominence through channels outside those governed by the mainstream architectural community. Architectural histories of modernism in Australia have tended to focus exclusively on building design, applying a concept of ‘real’ architecture that is very different from the concept of the architect as a designer, commentator and teacher common in Europe prior to World War II. Any study of the presence and influence of émigré designers in Sydney in the postwar period must take into account the large numbers of trained architects who worked in the associated fields of interior design, furniture, education and the media. While some émigrés working in these fields became well known, the influence of this group and their European experience on the wider acceptance of modernism in Australia has not been the subject of study. A close look at the work of European designers working both inside and outside of the architecture profession shows an influential contribution to a diverse range of design-related fields.

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The Latin Quarter restaurant, Pitt Street, with espresso bar and formal Delphi Room dining area, included flamboyant interiors designed by Henry Kurzer. Mural by Marion Pretzel.

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The total work of art Gesamtkunstwerk or the ‘total work of art’ was a term used in Germany from the mid-19th century, and as the century progressed became a central tenet of Bauhaus teaching. It identified the provision of a unified design in furniture, lighting, interior colour scheme, carpets and more, with the aim of providing an overall harmonising effect, and saw architects involved in every aspect of a project’s design and realisation. The ‘total work of art’ approach was well accepted in Europe by the early 20th century. It is demonstrated by Josef Hoffmann’s role in the craftsman collective Wiener Werkstätte, which produced an extensive range of domestic objects that he placed within his designed interiors. European architects such as Peter Behrens and Henri van de Velde’s projects also involved the design of a comprehensive range of products that related to the detailed functions of their buildings.[224] When in 1895 van de Velde designed his own house in Uccle near Brussels, it was a holistic scheme including all furnishings, the cutlery and even extending to the flowing dresses he designed for his wife to wear.[225] This approach was also reflected broadly in European architectural education, which included an emphasis on design training and workshop-based craft skills. An ability to move seamlessly between architecture, interiors and furniture design is characteristic of the careers of many émigré architects. This is clearly demonstrated by the creative interior design work émigrés undertook in Sydney’s postwar modern recreation spaces: cafés, restaurants, hotels and bars. This was a period when interior design was fighting to be recognised as a specialised skill and was not regarded as equal to architecture.[226] In many instances, a focus on interiors reflected the work available to émigré designers, however, it is a field where they applied a holistic approach to design to great effect, often collaborating with a network of European cabinetmakers, muralists, sculptors and other trades. Many émigrés found interior work in association with European retailers or café and restaurant owners. Their creative designs helped these new spaces present themselves as modern and exciting; their perceived ‘Europeaness’ was promoted to attract the city’s growing adventurous urbanites. [227] The One, Two, Three Milk Bar, Sydney, opened in 1958, one of the last milk bars before the espresso bar format came to dominate. The pink and black interior had been designed by Franz Johann Zipfinger. Born in Vienna, Zipfinger had studied at the University of Technology, Heerlen, in the Netherlands. Between 1946 and 1948 he had worked in the office of Dirk Roosenburg, a prominent Dutch modernist and contemporary of Willem Dudok.[228] Zipfinger’s time with Roosenburg coincided with one of his most famous projects; the KLM Head Office in The Hague. Zipfinger’s role in the project led to a position as KLM Head of Buildings, East Indies, which he held for three years, during which he designed countless structures across the company’s 32 Asian locations. Arriving in Sydney in 1951, Zipfinger registered as an architect in NSW in 1953 after passing Board exams in hygiene, professional practice and design.[229] Both Kurzer’s Latin Quarter and Zipfinger’s milk bar were included in Clive Carney’s 1959 international

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survey of interiors Impact of Design, with Kurzer providing one of the few written chapter sections, detailing his approach to restaurant design.[230] During the 1950s, Zipfinger completed a number of residential projects and was a panel member of the Small Home Service (NSW) run by Home Beautiful and the NSW Chapter of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects. A 1956 article on the service notes Zipfinger’s European architectural experience as a particular asset in advising new Australians on economical approaches to home construction.[231] Zipfinger designed a number of larger projects for Catholic organisations during the 1960s, including numerous school buildings such as the Santa Sabina, Strathfield, Dominican Hall and Science Block (1961). Working in a field that began to reach prominence in the 1960s, Zipfinger also designed a number of shopping complexes including the Seven Hills Regional Shopping Centre (1960) and The Walk, Hornsby, an early multilevel shopping complex built for the Wenkart family. The Wenkarts, migrating from Vienna, had established a successful textile factory in Hornsby and, using their large home and garden in Wahroonga as a venue, were at the centre of numerous Austrian-focused cultural activities and fundraising events during the 1950s.[232] Sadly, Zipfinger died in 1969 aged just 46. Another prominent modern urban interior was Rowe Street’s Galleria Expresso. Owned by Mervyn Horton, founding editor of Art and Australia, the chic ‘lounge’ doubled as an art gallery. Galleria Expresso was designed by Hungarian architect Laszlo Ernst. It opened in 1956, four years after the 43-year-old graduated from Sydney Technical College. Ernst, a prominent member of the artistic circle that populated Rowe Street, had arrived in 1949 and it seems likely had returned to study in Australia despite previous training in Europe. Ernst was active as an architect, designing a range of commercial projects during the 1960s. The somewhat mysterious Soos brothers were also prominent interior designers in the period.[233] Hungarians Imre and Gyula Soos, with Imre’s wife Hedda, collaborated on a number of well-publicised and idiosyncratic modernist interior schemes during the 1950s. Having first settled in Adelaide in 1950, Imre and Gyula were prominently featured in the Adelaide media as the designers of the 1952 Royal Adelaide Exhibition ‘the most striking the state has seen’.[234] Imre, 27, was noted as an architect; Gyula, 25, was a designer. In 1954, the pair’s design for the interior of a Sydney bachelor flat, with creatively integrated furniture, was featured in Australian House & Garden.[235] The same year the brothers’ ‘three way wonder’ adjustable recliner ‘Soos’ chair, was retailed at Grace Brothers.[236] Their 1957 design for Mars Espresso on Pitt Street fulfilled the client’s brief by replicating the interior of a spaceship, with curved fibrocement walls and hexagonal floor tiles. Lighting was recessed into cactus-filled planter boxes and housed within the custom-made tables.[237] Although not registered, it seems Imre designed a number of houses including one for fellow Hungarians, the Shefstiks, in Frenchs Forest, which the Shefstiks built themselves. Featured in Australian House & Garden in

Laszlo Ernst provided a dramatic design for the Rowe Street café and art gallery Galleria Expresso.

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Chair and lamp designed by Steven Kalmar and sold at Kalmar Interiors during the 1950s. Photographed at Hotel Hotel in Canberra, 2017.

October 1959, its interiors included Hedda’s ceramic light fittings, and creatively integrated seating and dining units, and a colourful facade mural painted by Imre.[238] By the 1960s, the Soos partnership dissolved, with Gyula moving into construction and Imre working on the Snowy Mountains Scheme before leaving for an international career in hydropower and dam construction.[239] The Soos’ most extensive interior was the 1958 re-fit of Georges Restaurant in Double Bay. Their design work included the furniture, light fittings, fountain, sculptures and murals for the 100-seat restaurant. It was opened by Rosalia Kurowska and Frank Bourman, principals of the Borovanski Ballet Company. With a French chef and a Greek proprietor, Georges represented the coming of age of Sydney’s European community in a recognised centre of urban Jewish identity in Double Bay. These interior projects illustrate the versatility of European-trained designers across the field of interior design and their significant influence in shaping the city’s modern restaurant spaces. The Buhrichs’ 1940s furniture designs German émigrés Hugh and Eva Buhrich began their Sydney practice working, for the most part, within the émigré community while adapting to the challenges of settling in a new country, the disruption of the war years and raising twin boys (born in 1940). The Buhrichs’ 1940s work included designs for apartments, houses and shop fit-outs (which were not built), as well as a remarkably large quantity of furniture. In an interview in 1998, Hugh Buhrich noted: In the beginning I designed furniture because that was the only thing I could get. Its funny but you get sort of pushed into a category. I never intended to design furniture as an architect but I got clients who would get another architect to design their houses and then come to me to do their furniture.[240]

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In this work, the Buhrichs were designing the custom-made furniture that was central to established European concepts of modern living. Virtually all émigré architects designed built-in furniture as an integral part of their projects and in many cases the free-standing pieces as well. Prior to the late 1950s, ready-made furniture that suited European customs and expectations of modern efficiency was not widely available, and middle-class Europeans expected to commission furniture rather than buy it ready-made. From the 1940s and into the 1950s, many European émigrés commissioned the full furnishings of their new Sydney homes with specialist cabinetmakers (Paul Kafka, Michael Gerstl and others) regularly making chairs and tables to the design of architects such as Seidler, Oser, Stossel, Epstein and Buhrich. The careers of Hungarian architecture graduates George Kóródy and Steven Kalmar indicate that furniture design was a field available to European designers, without the obstacles involved in architectural practice. Kóródy had applied for registration as an architect, and after initial refusal did not proceed.[241] Steven Kalmar arrived in Sydney soon after graduating from architecture in Europe; by 1948, he had focused on furniture and interior design with no subsequent formal involvement in architecture. With his European degree also not recognised in Australia, Hugh Buhrich, a modest man, despite considerable talents, maintained a small practice

Hugh and Eva Buhrich designed a set of furniture for the Nebenzahl family in 1940. Drawing on their experience of the furniture of Marcel Breuer and Alvar Aalto they produced remarkably modern pieces at a time when European imports were not available.

as a Planning Consultant for most of his career. Wife Eva Buhrich (née Bernard), also an architect, despite earning a living through other work, played an important role in the practice; her signature is shown on many of the practice’s drawings into the 1950s.[242] Accolades came late to Buhrich; his and Eva’s second house, at 375 Edinburgh Road, Castlecrag (1968–72), has been heralded as one of the best examples of modern architecture in Australia, the culmination of Hugh Buhrich’s idiosyncratic architectural career.[243] Although not what they had envisaged as a career, it seems the Buhrichs applied considerable skill to their furniture designs and used the opportunities available to forward their interest in modernism and the properties of modern materials. In November 1940, the Buhrichs prepared plans for a remarkable set of furniture for the Bell Street, Vaucluse, flat of Polish émigrés Sigmund and Helena Nebenzahl. All constructed using plywood, the collection included chairs, sideboard, tea trolley, coffee table and recliners.[244] The recliners were closely modelled on Marcel Breuer’s Long Chair, designed in 1935–36 for Isokon Furniture Company in the United Kingdom. The bentwood chairs and tea trolley almost entirely replicated Alvar Aalto’s Artek pieces, first made in 1936–37 in Finland, and sold in the UK under the Finmar brand. In 1940, these were designs that were only just receiving recognition in Europe, let alone far-flung Australia.[245] The furniture was made by Paul Kafka, and was photographed by émigré photographer Nanette Kuehn as a record of the couple’s early design work.[246] The Buhrichs met in 1932 while architecture students at the Royal Technical High School, Munich, before transferring to the Royal Technical Academy, Berlin, and taking one of the last masterclass groups led by Hans Poelzig.[247]

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The Buhrichs’ first house, in Castlecrag. Hugh Buhrich constructed much of the house by hand, including the moulded plywood spiral staircase. This image by Max Dupain was widely published and helped promote Buhrich’s architectural work. A Buhrich family album documents the slow construction of the house. With Hugh building on weekends, by 1952, its strongly linear form is taking shape.

Hugh Buhrich, 1953, with architectural model. The Buhrichs had additional Breuer-inspired recliners made for their own home, pictured here in the incomplete lounge room of the house around 1951.

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Following that, they transferred to the Federal Technical University, Zurich, run by Otto Salvisberg.[248] Hugh then worked briefly for Alfred Roth in Zurich, before his leftist political activity and Eva’s Jewish heritage forced them to flee Germany, coming to Australia in 1939. The couple seems likely to have obtained a good knowledge of Aalto’s furniture via exposure to Roth’s own collection, and of Breuer’s Long Chair through publications such as Leslie Martin’s Circle (1937), which they purchased in London and brought with them to Australia.[249] With imported furniture unavailable in Australia, the Nebenzahl designs represent a direct line of continuity between European modernism and its application in Sydney. The Buhrichs were so pleased with the recliner, they later commissioned another two for their first house at 315 Edinburgh Road, Castlecrag. The house, a modernist composition of cantilevered forms hugging a steep site, took many years to complete, with all components designed by the Buhrichs, and essentially built by Hugh. Sculptural and individual, the house was an experiment in organic modernism that would have been difficult to achieve in a private commission. Max Dupain’s 1958 photograph of the house’s handmade laminated timber spiral staircase has become iconic. Although initially restricted to furniture, Buhrich’s first completed house dates from 1947; the Amos residence, a modest holiday house in Bayview, reflects both the material shortages of the era and the client’s limited budget. This success is followed by the completion in 1949 of the Raubitschek and Berg Houses, both in Castlecrag. A steady stream of domestic commissions followed. Buhrich’s practice is assisted by Eva, whose design writing, often using pseudonyms, regularly promotes his work.[250] In January 1950, the Amos residence was featured on the cover of Australian House & Garden, apparently through Eva’s professional contacts. A feature showcasing a number of completed Buhrich projects was then included in the well-respected Architecture and Arts in 1954 (Eva was a contributing editor).[251] Although more than a decade after the Buhrichs began practice, this marks the beginning of Hugh’s architectural career and regular media presence. Hugh Buhrich progressively built a practice despite he, and long-term employee Bill Chambers, never registering. The design of furniture and the detailing of interior fittings remained a feature of his work. Synagogues at Cremorne (1954) and Maroubra (1965), and the Quaker Meeting Hall, Boundary Road, Wahroonga (1964) were complex later projects that included extensive detailed interior furnishings. Hugh’s son, Neil Buhrich recalls a number of occasions when Hugh sat but failed the registration exam, failing the design component.[252] The NSW Board of Architects registration exams gained a reputation for being unpassable during this period, but it remains hard to understand why some architects failed and others passed. In 1971 the NSW Chapter brought Buhrich in from the cold, granting him the status of Associate of the RAIA. In 2014 the NSW Chapter of the Institute of Architects established the Eva and Hugh Buhrich award for Residential Architecture-Alterations and Additions, in recognition of the pair’s contribution to architecture in NSW.

Institutional influence University architectural education was a relatively new field in Australia in the 1940s. The architecture faculty of Sydney University had been established in 1920. It was the first system to challenge the articled clerk apprenticeships and training provided at the Sydney Technical College. In 1950, the Faculty of Architecture at the University of New South Wales followed. The experience of émigrés across a range of design, planning, engineering and technological areas was quickly taken up by these tertiary institutions as they enriched their curriculum and expanded student numbers during the 1950s and 1960s. Émigré educators brought direct experience of modern construction methods and design approaches, and played an important role in developing the next generation of Australian architects, both those born in Australia and those born overseas. Hungarian George Molnar began teaching at Sydney University in 1945 and was the Studio Master for Final Year Design for many years. Reportedly introduced to students by Wilkinson as ‘the modernist’, Molnar brought direct experience of European design and construction and used the Bauhaus teaching method of assigning group research tasks based on real-world architectural and planning problems.[253] In 1966, Molnar transferred to the University of NSW (UNSW) where he took the Honours Year of Design and remained Associate Professor of Architecture until his retirement in 1975.[254] Molnar was born in Nagyvarad, Hungary, in 1910. In 1919, the town was ceded to Romania and renamed Oradea following the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I. Molnar studied architecture and engineering at the Royal Joseph Technical University, Budapest, graduating in 1932. Influenced by the work of modernists Adolf Loos and Otto Wagner, Molnar began practice in his home town of Oradea, winning competitions for the design of housing and Oradea’s cultural centre. He described his work as having ‘uncompromising shades of Bauhaus’, his early designs demonstrating principles of structural clarity, careful planning and honesty in expression.[255] Molnar left Romania in 1938, and arrived in Sydney in 1939. Molnar’s architectural design activity was limited to submissions for a number of high-profile competitions during the 1950s. These included those for the Melbourne Olympic Swimming Pool and the Sydney Opera House. Molnar formed a friendship with Melbourne architects Robin Boyd and Roy Grounds, briefly entertaining the idea of joining the Grounds, Romberg and Boyd firm.[256] An influential figure, Molnar maintained a consistent engagement with civic issues that was often integrated into his teaching, as well as his cartooning, which is discussed in further detail below. In 1965, Molnar was joined at UNSW by Emery Balint, a fellow graduate of the Royal Joseph Technical University, Budapest (Balint had studied civil engineering), who became the first Professor of Building at the university. Having arrived in Australia in 1939, Balint had first occupied a role as lecturer in the Melbourne Technical College, playing a key role in elevating the course to an engineering degree when it became the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. In his time in Sydney, Balint played a major part in

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Teaching architecture from 1945 to 1975, George Molnar held positions at Sydney University and later at the University of New South Wales.

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pioneering building as an academic discipline in Australia, establishing the building degree course at UNSW, the UNSW building research laboratory and the building science forum, before his retirement in 1976.[257] Another prominent figure at Sydney University, Professor Alfred S Hook, played an active role in the early support of migrant architects. Hans Peter Oser was reportedly greatly assisted by Hook’s unofficial training course for émigrés in the specifics of the local conditions required to practice.[258] In a 1998 interview, Hugh Buhrich noted Hook was one of his own first contacts in the Sydney architecture scene, driving him and Eva to Canberra having arranged their first job in the practice of Moir and Sutherland.[259] Also at Sydney University was Henry Cowan (née Hans Jacob Cohn-Salisch) from the Silesia region of Germany, now part of Poland. Cowan had fled Germany for England in 1935 aged 15.[260] Despite having excelled in his civil and mechanical engineering education in the UK, with the outbreak of war he was deemed an enemy alien and, like Harry Seidler, sent to an internment camp in Canada. Returning to the UK, Cowan spent more than a decade teaching in UK universities, which exposed him to the rapidly expanding field of building technology. Cowan accepted the newly created post of Chair of Architectural Science at Sydney University in 1953. A recognised authority on concrete construction, Cowan also lectured on structural issues associated with tall buildings and curtain walls. His arrival in the early 1950s, just as the city’s building height limit was lifted, was a significant one. For decades, Cowan played a key role in building technology both in the faculty and outside it; as well as publishing 25 books, he provided a strong foundation in building science and technology to hundreds of graduates. Associate Professor of Architecture Peter Kollar was a prominent figure at UNSW from 1959 until his retirement in 2000. Kollar, an émigré from a slightly later period, had fled Hungary’s increasingly oppressive communist government in the 1950s. Leaving aged 23, and with his Hungarian architectural education incomplete, he returned to study, graduating from Sydney Technical College in 1953.[261] Kollar received the distinction of coming fourth in the 1956 Sydney Opera House competition with a scheme he had prepared with

Balthazar Korab, a former classmate from Budapest. Korab (best known as long-time photographer for Eero Saarinen) had settled in the US but came to Sydney briefly to work on the design with Kollar. The judges commended the pair’s circular design, with lightweight roof planes, for its skilful planning.[262] Kollar continued to design, with his House at Koowong Avenue, Mosman (1962) included in the 1971 Royal Australian Institute of Architects survey 444 Sydney Buildings.[263] Émigré designers in the media George Molnar, as well as a long career as an academic, occupied a unique position of commentary as a cartoonist for more than four decades, beginning at the Daily Telegraph in 1945, and from 1954 at the Sydney Morning Herald. Molnar, ambivalent to technology and modernity, offered often highly critical observations of bureaucracy, urban design and architecture. His influence was substantial, and when he died in 1998 he was declared the finest newspaper cartoonist of his generation.[264] Molnar noted that cartoons were a way of expressing himself as an architect, and although his twice-weekly editorial cartoons for the Sydney Morning Herald covered current events, he maintained a consistent focus on planning and the changing cityscape.[265] In late 1955, the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald gave Molnar a platform for his comments on Sydney’s planning with a weekly cartoon under the title Insubstantial Pageant. Drawn in the context of Sydney’s increased building height limit and the arrival of the first true high-rise from 1958, construction of the Cahill Expressway across Circular Quay in 1955 and the Sydney Opera House’s slow development at Bennelong Point from 1957, Molnar’s cartoons witnessed the powerlessness of the public, the city council and architects in planning decisions. The Insubstantial Pageant cartoons were published as a collection in 1959, cementing Molnar’s voice as one of humanism over the commercial sterility that was gaining dominance in the rapidly changing city. Molnar used his academic authority in numerous articles, lecturing and as an intellectual actively engaged in civic issues. Elegant and urbane, often with bowtie, Molnar, who spoke four languages and quoted Latin, was one of a number of prominent ‘New Australians’ who brought a distinctive European sensibility to Sydney’s cultural life.

‘Statue showing good traditional use of Classic Motif’, in the George Molnar collection Statues Next: An article from Australian House & Garden, 1953, by Eva Buhrich which included a range of designs for flexible space-saving furniture.

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Another prominent Hungarian, Steven Kalmar, commented on design issues in the popular media for more than 15 years. Kalmar trained as an architect in Budapest, before immigrating to Sydney in 1937.[266] When he and wife Carlotta arrived, they planned to stay ‘for a year or two’, however, the situation in Europe escalated and they settled in Australia. [267] Kalmar’s first piece of design commentary appears in 1938 when he champions the concept of an open-air café and public baths for The Domain; the ‘coffee house’ was to include an area for dancers, cabaret and concerts.[268] After working in optical munitions during the war, it appears Kalmar made a start in architecture before focusing on designing commissioned furniture for established retailers.[269] From 1949 to 1955, Kalmar operated Kalmar Interiors, a high-profile and successful furniture and interior design studio located in Rowe Street, a centre for the city’s bohemian activity. Influenced by Scandinavian trends, Kalmar designed lightweight, space-conscious furniture in light timbers for the compact modern home. Under the by-line, ‘Do you need modern furniture?’ Kalmar Interiors advertised a range that included chairs, convertible divans, table nests, lamps and tray mobiles. Kalmar’s design service included individual pieces from his range, whole room suites and a design your own service catering to customers’ specific requirements.[270] Kalmar furniture was featured in the David Jones Art Gallery exhibitions 7 Designers (1948) and What is Modern Design? (1951); along with pieces by George Kóródy, his was the only furniture included.[271] Kalmar, working with his wife, Carlotta, successfully transitioned to an interior design career, and by 1960 was recognised as an authority on the latest innovations in interiors, addressing the Hotel and Catering Exposition in 1960 on modern hotel design ideas.[272] Key projects included the 1964 Indian Tea Centre, Sydney, as well as a number of hotel projects.

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From 1961 Steven Kalmar wrote a weekly column in the Sunday Telegraph and in 1964 published the book You and Your Home, a survey of the interior decor of a number of Sydney celebrities’ houses.

Eva Buhrich, writing across both popular and professional architectural publications, had a sustained influence in the Sydney media. Pictured here with twin sons Clive and Neil c.1953.

From 1961, Kalmar began a weekly column ‘You and your home with Steven Kalmar’ in the Sunday Telegraph which, along with ‘You and your car’ and ‘You and your garden’, provided lifestyle-oriented information about interiors and design.[273] Indicative articles include practical advice regarding heating, rust, ventilation and insulation as well as features on plywood, open planning and flat roofs. A popular feature of the column invited readers’ letters, of which more than 380,000 were received in just the first five months of 1963.[274] Kalmar published the book You and Your Home, a survey of interior decoration across the homes of a number of notable Sydney figures including architects Douglas Snelling, Ken Woolley and Neville Gruzman. When his regular column wound up in December 1972, Kalmar contributed to Women’s World magazine including the 1975 feature ‘What’s new in furniture’.[275] Kalmar died in 1989 after almost four decades as a prominent member of the Sydney design community. Eva Buhrich, writing across both popular and professional media, is perhaps the émigré who made the greatest impact. Buhrich began her writing career soon after settling in Sydney, her first appearance a 1940 article on air-raid shelters in The Home.[276] She also wrote for overseas journals and in 1942 published, in her native German, in the Swiss monthly Das ideale Heim. Contributing a feature on ‘Week-end hauser’ complete with the author’s own sketches and plans, the article included speculative Australian holiday homes in Leura, Castle Hill and on the Hawkesbury River. Her 1946 article in Australian Women’s Weekly, ‘Clever woman designs a house’, included plans for a rationally planned, affordable suburban house, reflecting a still active role in her architectural partnership with husband Hugh.[277] Postwar publishing was characterised by a mix of homemaker publications, professional architectural magazines and trade journals. Buhrich, a

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In 1942 Eva Buhrich published an article on ‘weekenders’ in the Swiss monthly Das ideale Heim, which included her own sketches and plans. The same article was published in English in The Home, August 1942.

freelance writer, worked across all these forms, drawing on her architectural training and experience of building construction. One of Eva’s early jobs was in the Commonwealth Experimental Building Station and throughout her career she remained closely involved with building products and technical innovations, editing the industry journal Building Ideas (1959–1973) and Furniture Trends (1964–1975) for CSR Building Materials.[278] From 1957 to 1968, she wrote a regular column under her own name in the Sydney Morning Herald, presenting innovations in architecture, building materials and technology. She also remained interested in modern design and advocated for its use in home planning and identifying key designer trends from overseas. As contributing editor to Melbourne-based Architecture and Arts, Buhrich played a smaller role in the architectural media. During the 1950s, Eva Buhrich contributed a number of articles per issue to Australian House & Garden, including under her maiden name as EM Bernard. She was also a regular contributor to female-oriented homemaker or lifestyle magazines Our Home, Australian Women’s Weekly, Woman and Walkabout. As has been noted by Catherine Lassen, Buhrich and her other female colleagues used a variety of pseudonyms to obscure the number of items they were contributing and their gender (using gender neutral first initials).[279] As a result it is difficult to identify all Buhrich wrote. When acknowledged as the author, it is often with a credit to her European descent and training, such as Eva Buhrich Dip. Arch (Zurich). Buhrich’s work in Australian House & Garden demonstrates another aspect of her published work: the regular and detailed provision of furniture plans. Along with the lifestyle-focused articles such as ‘How to enjoy a camping holiday’, Buhrich provided a series of detailed build-your-own furniture projects, which were well illustrated with what we can assume were her own designs. The cover of the February 1950 edition declared that a simple do-it-yourself series ‘Build a house full of furniture’ would be commencing in that issue; over the next months, Buhrich provided plans and instructions for the construction of furniture for every room of the house.[280] Alongside Eva Buhrich’s Australian House & Garden articles were a series of contributions from Hungarian Gyula Soos. Located in the handicrafts section of the magazine, Soos provided designs and instructions for self-build projects for the home handyman audience. A set of Soos’ instructions begin, ‘These are the days of compact living … days of smaller homes and pocket-sized flats, where every inch of space counts and can be expected to do more than one job’.[281] In February 1955, his pattern for a webbed chair was available via post from Australian House & Garden. In 1954, the magazine launched a subsidiary title, Australian Homemaker and Handyman, a monthly published until 1957. Gyula Soos was a regular contributor providing the same format of plans and instructions for readers to construct a variety of furniture or practical home devices. Imre Soos, with a more architectural focus, was also a presence in Australian House & Garden and later in Homemaker. In June 1955, Imre contributed articles to Australian House & Garden including, ‘Worthwhile

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Above: Eva Buhrich edited the industry publication Furniture Trends for CSR Building Materials from 1964 to 1975. Opposite: Gyula Soos’ design and instructions for a webbed chair, published in Australian House & Garden, February 1955.

additions to any bathroom’ and ‘Storage walls mean a real savings’.[282] In May 1955, Imre provided an open-plan house design under the title ‘Ten squares of modern planning’ with circular bathroom. The feature, with sketch elevation and plan, includes the note ‘designed by I.G.K Soos, who gained his Architectural degree in Hungary’.[283] Foreign experience was highly valued in this form of media. Eva Buhrich’s only contribution to Homemaker came with the introduction, ‘by designer Eva Buhrich, who has had wide experience in practical home planning overseas and in this country’.[284] While few émigrés were regular contributors to architectural publications, their European experience and its associated sophistication was highly valued in the popular press. Other architectural contributors to Homemaker during its three years of publication include Czechoslovakian-born architect Alexander Kann, Hugh Buhrich, Austrian Hans Peter Oser and an émigré from an earlier period, Aaron Bolot. Outside influence The contribution of émigré architects in the fields of design, interiors and furniture, teaching and commentary in the media was significant. The upheaval of emigration, the multifaceted nature of European design training and the bureaucracy related to practising architecture meant many émigrés found work in these fields. As a result, émigré designers were a strong presence in a range of design fields as they developed in postwar Sydney. With their ‘Europeanness’ celebrated, they occupied prominent positions as designers, retailers, educators and writers with access to an audience wider than the architectural community. Although working on the margins of the architectural profession, this group made a significant contribution to the popular acceptance of modernism and the multicultural identity of postwar Sydney.

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8

A hidden legacy: Margaret Michaelis’s photography by Helen Ennis

Margaret Michaelis was a refugee. She was also variously termed an alien, an enemy alien, an immigrant and an émigré. She arrived in Sydney in September 1939, only a few days after World War II had been declared. By then she had already endured years of uncertainty and anxiety following her arrest in Berlin in 1933 and major dislocations as she moved from Germany to Spain, to France, to Poland, to England and finally to Australia. What she held on to throughout these traumatic disruptions, which occurred in increasingly compressed spans of time, was her photography. At the most pragmatic level, photography provided a means of earning an income, but because of the volatile socioeconomic and political circumstances in which she pursued her profession, this was only ever modest at best. More significantly, photography was her medium, one that captivated and engrossed her for decades. It was through photography that she could express her personal, social, political and aesthetic concerns and channel her abundant creative energy. The tragedy, however, was that in the face of everything she had to bear, photography would never – and could never – be enough. To Sydney, Michaelis brought with her an intimate knowledge of the workings of prominent European studios; a command of modernist photography especially in relation to portraiture, documentary and architectural photography; well-developed technical skills honed in multiple darkrooms; and a belief in the efficacy and usefulness of photography in contemporary society. But because of her forced movement across countries and continents, her impact on other practitioners in Sydney or on the history of photography in Australia was negligible during her lifetime. It was only after the donation of her extraordinary archive to the National Gallery of Australia in 1986, and subsequent exhibitions and publications, that a larger public became aware of the significance of her contribution to modernist photography both in Australia and in Europe.[285] A European legacy When Michaelis (née Margarete Gross) arrived in Sydney at the age of 37, she already had a wealth of professional experience in photography. Born into a Jewish family in Dzieditz, Austria, in 1902, her interests in the arts, and photography in particular were encouraged by her liberally minded parents Fanni and Henryk Gross. At the age of 16, Michaelis began studying at the Graphische

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Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt (Graphic Training Institute) in Vienna, graduating with a diploma in 1921. This was a time when young Jewish women in Austria and Germany were making their mark on photography before anti-Semitism, Nazism and war changed everything. Unusually for the period, and in marked contrast to her Australian counterparts, Michaelis received a thorough training that combined tertiary study and practical experience. After completing her studies, she worked in two leading Viennese studios, Atelier d’Ora and Grete Kolliner’s portrait studio, both of which were run by independently minded women.[286] There she gained a solid grounding in portraiture, which was to be central to her own photographic practice in Sydney. In order to advance her career, Michaelis moved to Berlin in 1929 after spending a few months working in Prague – the aim being to learn how different studios operated before establishing her own. Berlin was an obvious choice for a photographer with ambition. In the years of the Weimar Republic, it was a vibrant centre for the arts, and photographers based there – Germaine Krull, László Moholy-Nagy, Lucia Moholy, Florence Henri, Albert Renger-Patzsch and numerous others – were well on the way to changing the course of photographic history. They championed modernist styles that they believed better reflected the times in which they lived and were part of what is now commonly known as the New Photography movement. This movement encompassed straight photography, various forms of manipulation and other experimental approaches. Commercial photography was also flourishing during the 1920s due to the advertising industry’s increasing demand for photography illustration and the proliferation of magazines and other publications. Michaelis joined a succession of high-profile studios located in the fashionable heart of Berlin on the famous Kurfürstendamm and neighbouring streets. They included Atelier Binder, one of the largest in Europe, which was known for its social and celebrity portraiture and advertising photography; Atelier Karl Schenker which was patronised by actors, models and members of high society; and Suse Byk Studio which also specialised in portraiture.[287] Many of these studios were established by Jewish photographers who were forced to flee during the 1930s. Suse Byk, for example, left Germany in 1938. Yva (Else Neuländer), who was also Jewish, ran a studio near Kurfürstendamm that would have a direct link to Australia through her employment of a young Jewish photographer Helmut Neustädter (Helmut Newton).[288] Michaelis’s ambitious plans for her career in photography were buffeted by the onset of the Great Depression, which saw massive rates of unemployment (up to six million in Germany by early 1933) and widespread poverty. She was out of work several times between 1930 and 1933 and experienced considerable financial difficulties. Far more consequential was having to contend with the increasingly unstable political situation as the National Socialists expanded their power. It was during her years in Berlin that Margaret appears to have become politicised, probably through her introduction to a young activist, Rudolf Michaelis (nicknamed ‘Michel’), whom she married in October 1933. He was

Margaret Michaelis, Left Berlin November 1933 (the artist’s living room looking towards kitchen) 1933 gelatin silver photograph
printed image 16.4 x 23 cm
sheet 16.7 x 23.3 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Gift of the estate of Margaret Michaelis-Sachs 1986.

an archaeological restorer who worked at the Berlin state museum, and was a member of the Anarcho-Syndicalist movement, which vigorously opposed the Nazis. Within the first few weeks and months of Hitler’s ascendancy, both Margaret and Rudolf were subjected to its violent, terrifying ramifications as the Gestapo turned their attention to rounding up political dissidents, suspects and artists. On 30 April 1933, Margaret was arrested during a raid on a left-wing bookshop and was held for three and a half weeks at the Alexanderplatz prison in Berlin. After her release, she found herself unemployed again, as Atelier Stettenheim, where she had been working since the previous September, was run by a Jewish photographer who could no longer keep his business operating. And then in mid-November, Rudolf was arrested. This precipitated radical action: as she worked to secure Rudolf’s release, Margaret made arrangements for them to take refuge in Barcelona where friends in the German Anarcho-Syndicalist movement had already settled. Before fleeing, she photographed the living room in their Wilmersdorf flat, an attractive, orderly environment full of furniture and belongings they were forced to leave behind. Thirty years later, as part of her application for reparation from the West German government as a victim of Nazi persecution, she itemised the flat’s contents. It is a telling document in its detail, suggesting that her memory of all that was irrevocably lost remained vivid and specific.[289] Little photography survives from Margaret Michaelis’s Berlin years – bar some personal snapshots and an impressive group of photographs taken in the Jewish marketplace in Cracow – but its importance cannot be overestimated. When she arrived in Berlin, on the face of it she had a promising future in front of her but, as her sister Lotte Stener later stated, ‘In 1933 she lost her career in Germany because of the Nazis’.[290] What she had gained, however, was knowledge of the latest developments in studio photography,

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Margaret Michaelis, Slum children, Barcelona c.1934 gelatin silver photograph
image 17 x 23 cm
sheet 17.8 x 23.8 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Gift of the estate of Margaret Michaelis-Sachs 1986. Opposite: Margaret Michaelis, Torre Eugenia. Architect: Ribas Seva 1936 gelatin silver photograph
image 22 x 28.2 cm
sheet 22.9 x 28.2 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Gift of the estate of Margaret Michaelis-Sachs 1986.

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especially portraiture, and advanced printing skills, which she was eventually able to apply to the work she undertook in Sydney. Moving to Barcelona took the Michaelises out of harm’s way, but only for a brief period, as Spain too would soon be engulfed in its own struggles between fascists and leftists, or Nationalists and Republicans. In January 1934, Margaret established her business Fotostudio, later renamed Foto-elis, and during the next two years produced some of her finest work on which her international reputation is now based. It includes portraits of leading women activists – American anarchist Emma Goldman and German Anarcho-Syndicalist Etta Federn among them – and an exceptional series of documentary photographs undertaken for a progressive group of Spanish architects known as GATCPAC, whose utopian form of architecture aimed to revolutionise the lives of Barcelona’s most disadvantaged residents. On GATCPAC’s behalf, Margaret photographed a slum area of the old city that was slated for demolition and reconstruction (the Spanish Civil War brought an end to the project). This was an assignment Margaret relished, taking her Leica camera into the narrow, crowded streets to document the interactions between people, their everyday activities and their living conditions. The photographs are wonderfully engaged and in their range of vantage points, compositional clarity and graphic power effectively deploy the language of modernist photography. One sees in them, for example, the use of the radical close-up, and up and down views, known as ‘worm’s-eye’ and ‘bird’s-eye’ views. The GATCPAC published Michaelis’s photographs in several issues of their ground-breaking journal A.C. and in public displays promoting their projects. Individual architects, including Josep L Sert, also commissioned her to photograph their domestic buildings, and she produced stunning exterior and interior views, which rival anything produced in Australia at this time.[291] While Michaelis’s time in Spain had its high points, it also presented what she later described as ‘a great deal of financial and domestic difficulties’.[292] Distressingly, her marriage to Rudolf began to collapse within months of their arrival in Barcelona. Theirs was a volatile and fateful relationship – their separation in 1934 came after only a year of marriage – but was enormously consequential for them both.[293] The reasons Margaret gave for their divorce, which was formalised in Spain in January 1937, included religious and political differences and what she summed up as different outlooks on life.[294] Following the outbreak of Civil War, Michaelis’s financial difficulties became insurmountable (her income from photography halved and from July 1936 onwards was virtually non-existent). Nonetheless, she kept taking photographs whenever she could, sometimes for the Generalitat Propaganda Commissariat of Catalonia, and for various left-wing publications. These photographs now comprise an invaluable historical record of the period. They depict the daily lives of Catalonians and are particularly sympathetic to the role of women as workers and as carers of family members. Key historical events she covered include the funeral procession for the Anarcho-Syndicalist militant Buenaventura Durruti, and the arrival of the international Red Cross on the Spanish

border. The upheavals in Spanish society wrought by the war were reflected in the style of these photographs: they convey a sense of urgency through their less formal compositions and casual poses; the prints were made hastily and are small (perhaps because paper was scarce or expensive).

Margaret Michaelis, English Red Cross convoy in Portbou, 5 am, 6 June 1936 1936 gelatin silver photograph
image 12 x 17 cm
sheet 12.4 x 17.4 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Gift of the estate of Margaret Michaelis-Sachs 1986.

With no prospect of a safe and secure future, and anticipating that the Republicans would be defeated, Michaelis decided to leave Spain. However, her experiences over the next 20 months proved even more harrowing because of the virulent anti-Semitism she confronted and the Nazi’s forceful expansion of power in countries where she had once been at home. This havoc determined that photography could no longer be part of her life and she put her equipment and photographic archive (cleared by the Spanish censors) into storage in Marseilles not knowing when, or even if, she would be able to retrieve them again. In Paris, where she went first, she found herself ‘completely destitute’ and was dependent on assistance from a Jewish aid agency for survival. In the town of Bielitz in Poland, where her parents were living, and then in Vienna, she could not find work. Following Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938, the danger for Jews increased exponentially as their economic assets were aryanised and they were expelled from their homes. She was in Poland during Kristallnacht on 9–10 November when hundreds of synagogues across Germany and Austria were burned down, Jewish businesses and residences were destroyed, and Jews were harassed, arrested and killed. Fortunately, in the midst of this chaos she secured a visa to work as a domestic in London and a path to safety. She arrived in London in December 1938 and spent the next seven months working as a domestic servant, earning a pound a week. In August 1939, she sailed for Australia. Michaelis’s family was now scattered across continents; her two siblings Lotte and Eric had already migrated to Brazil and her parents remained in Poland where her father died before her mother was deported to Auschwitz and killed.

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The Sydney years A few years older than other European-born photographers, such as Wolfgang Sievers, Helmut Newton and Henry Talbot, who came to Australia in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Michaelis arrived with a substantial career behind her.[295] However, she could not immediately establish her own business. The terms of her visa required her to work as a domestic, which she did so, mostly unhappily, during late 1939–40. At the same time she was cleaning houses and preparing meals for well-to-do clients, she was privately, perhaps even secretly, advancing plans to resume her practice as a photographer. This she managed to achieve in late 1940, demonstrating her remarkable tenacity and drive in difficult circumstances.[296] Her resources were minimal but a gift of six pounds from an aunt in London and financial assistance from the European Emergency Church Committee gave her enough money to rent suitable premises on the seventh floor of a building at 114 Castlereagh Street in downtown Sydney. She divided the small space of the business she named Photo-studio into three work areas, housing a basic studio set-up with lighting, a darkroom and a reception desk. The photography equipment she used was her own, having managed to ship it intact from Marseilles via London. She adorned the walls of Photo-studio with a few examples of her most prized Spanish photographs; this was their first and last display in Australia until the ground-breaking work of feminists Barbara Hall, Jenni Mather and Christine Gillespie brought them into public view in the Australian Women Photographers Research Project 1890–1950 exhibition in 1981. As Michaelis’s business card indicated, she sensibly and strategically focused on the domestic sphere, declaring specialisations in ‘home portraits, gardens and interiors’. However, portraiture was the heart of her business and kept it afloat for the next 12 years. Portraiture enabled her to explore her interest in psychology in addition to the dynamics between couples and within families.

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Margaret Michaelis, Self portrait in coat at Sydney studio 1950 gelatin silver photograph
printed image 9 x 8.2 cm
sheet 13.8 x 8.8 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Gift of the Estate of Margaret Michaelis-Sachs.

She worked in the studio and outdoors, but the extant photographs suggest that she was most successful in a studio setting where she could control all the elements involved in picture making, honing an austere style that eliminated the use of studio props and accessories.[297] This can be seen in her very memorable portrait of writer Cynthia Reed, which is distinguished by its pared-back composition, striking tonal contrasts and intense focus on the subject. Michaelis was never frivolous or light-hearted and her work has none of the theatricality of Max Dupain’s or sensuousness of Olive Cotton’s of the same period. In Sydney, Michaelis moved in émigré circles, initially sharing a flat with other young women who had fled fascism and were starting their lives anew. She advertised her services in New Citizen and attracted a clientele that was often European and Jewish, people like her who had only recently escaped to Sydney. The Bonyhady family, for example, were Austrian Jews who arrived in 1939 and were the subject of one of her most successful portraits with its distinctive diamond-shaped composition. To ensure the viability of her business, Michaelis worked from nine in the morning until seven at night. She felt there was no choice but to accept every order she could, because she had ‘no relatives or other connections – neither in Australia nor anywhere else’ who could help support her.[298] Although Michaelis may have planned to diversify once she had consolidated her business, the contraction in the intertwined photography and publishing industries during the war years made that impossible and must have been a source of disappointment given her varied and high level of expertise. Demand fell across the sector in fashion, social and celebrity photography, illustrative and advertising photography, and architectural and industrial photography. Both The Home magazine and Art in Australia, which Sydney Ure Smith sold to Australian Consolidated Press in 1939, ceased publication in 1942 following a decline in circulation numbers. They had always given a high profile to photography and were sorely missed. Ure Smith’s new venture Australia National Journal (1938–47), which was devoted to art, architecture and industry, continued his support of photography, but the journal was much smaller in format and individual photographs didn’t have the same visual impact as in his earlier publications. Michaelis was delighted when two of her European photographs were reproduced in the February 1942 issue of the journal. Having worked in so many studios in Europe that were run by prominent women, the situation in Sydney, where women were few in number, must have struck Michaelis as curious. However, the war did cause a temporary distortion as the men who dominated the field went into other areas of photographic practice connected to the war effort, both at home and abroad. This applied to Max Dupain, Damien Parer, Geoffrey Powell, Edward Cranstone and others, with the Commonwealth Government’s Department of Information becoming a major employer of male photographers and filmmakers (the DOI was established a few days after the outbreak of the war to coordinate the production of visual material for government use). Around the corner from Michaelis in the Max Dupain Studio in Clarence Street, Olive Cotton, another leading modernist

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photographer, was managing the studio in her former husband’s absence.[299] Cotton was aware of Michaelis’s presence in Sydney and admired the sensitivity of the photographs she presented in her showcase on Castlereagh Street, but the two women never met (Cotton left the studio in late 1945). This is indicative of another obstacle Michaelis had to deal with: the relatively closed circles in which people moved and the difficulties a new arrival experienced in meeting those with a serious interest in photography. It is not known whether she was acquainted with other European émigrés Grete Weissenstein, from Vienna, or Mara Landauer whose photography businesses were also in the city.[300] As part of an effort to establish a useful network, Michaelis joined the Professional Photographers’ Association of New South Wales in April 1941, but its activities tailed off during the war, as did those of the Photographic Society of NSW and the Sydney Camera Circle, which had been at the centre of art and amateur photography for several decades. The societies’ monthly meetings formerly provided an unrivalled means of getting together to share information and critique each other’s work. Aside from initial fundraising exhibitions[301], art photography dropped from view and it was 1945 before it began to reappear on any significant scale.[302] She also joined the Institute of Photographic Illustrators and was their first and only female member. Michaelis’s freedom and standing in Australian society were circumscribed by virtue of her origins and her status was far from stable. As the war progressed, she came under suspicion because of her German passport. Reclassified as an enemy alien, she was subjected to a raft of regulations that impacted on her professional life and personal wellbeing. The first police report on her was conducted in April 1940 and, as documents on her ASIO file reveal, others followed. She did not have the freedom to practise photography her Australian colleagues had. Her cameras could be confiscated at any point and in 1940 she was prohibited from taking any photographs of naval, military or air-force personnel or establishments. She contested this decision and The Right Reverend Bishop C Venn Pilcher supported her case, arguing that she was not a security risk: My personal view is that Miss Michaelis is worthy of the removal of this restriction. She is an Austrian citizen and escaped from her country after suffering painful treatment at the hands of the Nazis. I have known her for some time and am fully convinced of her loyalty to the British Empire. Her country was, as you know, Hitler’s first victim, while Mr. Winston Churchill has assured us that one of our first war aims is the re-constitution of Austria. One who has suffered as Miss Michaelis has at the hands of the Nazis could never desire their triumph in this war.[303]

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The location of her studio also caused concern to the authorities. Police noted that the seventh-floor vantage point gave her a good view of the harbour and movement of large military vessels. On the personal front, Michaelis was affected by regulations governing place of residence, personal mobility and ownership of sensitive items such as radios and binoculars. She couldn’t even sing in the acapella choir she had joined without first obtaining a travel permit to attend practice sessions from her home in

Margaret Michaelis, No title (Margaret Michaelis leaning against park bench) c.1940–45 gelatin silver photograph
printed image 8.8 x 13 cm
sheet 8.8 x 13.6 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Gift of the estate of Margaret Michaelis-Sachs 1986. Previous left: Margaret Michaelis, Cynthia Reed - writer, Sidney Nolan’s wife 1945 gelatin silver photograph
image 29.8 x 23.9 cm,
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Gift of the estate of Margaret Michaelis-Sachs 1986. Previous right: Margaret Michaelis, Portrait of the Bonyhady family, c.1944–45, Private collection.

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Francis Street, East Sydney, to Lindfield on Sydney’s North Shore. She guarded her privacy and tried not to draw attention to herself, avoiding speaking German in public. She did not pursue any radical political agendas that had been an important part of her previous life. Her mail was monitored and one report stated that her correspondent ‘writes vaguely in a pro-Russian strain … The letter would not appear to be evidence that the writer is pro-Communist but is held in case further examination is desired’.[304] When Michaelis recounted her experiences during the war, one incident in particular outraged her. It was a surprise visit from the police who, early one morning, came to the flat she shared with other women refugees in Francis Street. Michaelis was still in her nightgown and she remembered a policeman entering her bedroom (he may have even sat down on her bed).[305] This violation of her private space, which she was powerless to resist or oppose, was something she never forgot. Although in many ways the situation was different from her shock arrest in Berlin a decade earlier, it resonated with her earlier experience. The raid yielded nothing of interest to authorities, with a document on her ASIO file noting: ‘No literature or other matter found which would indicate that the alien is engaged in any anti-British or subversive activities’.[306] In the years immediately after the war, when the men returned to civilian life, the photography industry in Australia underwent significant reorganisation. In Melbourne, European émigrés Helmut Newton, Henry Talbot and Wolfgang Sievers became leaders in the fields of fashion, industrial and architectural photography respectively, and in Sydney, Max Dupain began to focus on architectural photography. Olive Cotton ceased her professional practice and moved to central western New South Wales, eventually opening a studio in Cowra in 1964. Michaelis continued running Photo-studio, but there was little opportunity for her to move into more prestigious areas such as architectural photography in which she had previously excelled and still interested her.[307] The most significant publication in which her work appeared was Australian Photography (1947); of the five selected photographs, ‘In the barnyard’, taken in Europe, was awarded a bronze plaque. Michaelis’s specialisation in portraiture, mostly for private rather than commercial clients, meant her photographs were not widely circulated in print media and she had a low public profile. Even fellow émigrés, like Sievers, who might have supported her, did not.[308] She and her work were therefore barely visible. She did, however, make a significant and very positive addition to her practice during her Sydney years – dance photography. She was not a specialist as such, as her efforts were mostly limited to the Bodenwieser Ballet, which was based in Australia from late 1939, but the small group of photographs of the company she took between 1940 and 1952 are outstanding. She was an engaged and sympathetic photographer of the expressionist style of dance championed by choreographer and dancer Gertrud Bodenwieser and her talented dancers such as Margaret Chapple, Shona Dunlop and Hilary Napier. There is a possibility that Gertrud (born 1890)

and Michaelis had met in Vienna, as Gertrud was photographed by the d’Ora studios where Michaelis began her career. The two women had a great deal in common; aside from their Austrian heritage they had firsthand experience of anti-Semitism and its appalling outcomes and found themselves exiled in Sydney not knowing what had happened to their closest family and friends. Bodenwieser was married to a Jewish theatre director, Jacques Rosenthal; he was arrested by the Gestapo in France in 1942 and died at Auschwitz. Michaelis may also have become friends with the musicians associated with the Bodenwieser Ballet, many of whom came from similar backgrounds; musical director Dory Stern, for example, was Viennese and, like Bodenwieser, fled Austria after the Anschluss.[309] It is not surprising that Bodenwieser’s New Dance struck a chord with Michaelis, a very cultured woman with a deep love of all the arts. [310] Bodenwieser challenged the conventions of classical ballet; her dancers performed barefoot in loose costumes and often adopted physically challenging poses. In her dance photography, Michaelis successfully martialled her creative energy and directed it towards an enterprise she believed in and identified with. She developed an innovative, informal approach, choosing to photograph the dancers outdoors, in parkland and at the beach rather than in the artificial environment of the studio. In these natural settings, dancers could express themselves fully and freely with no limitations on the space available and no audience to make them self-conscious. What Michaelis depicted so powerfully is total self-absorption in the pose and in the dance, in other words, in the creative act itself. Some dancers are caught at an extreme, improbable point, and others are shown momentarily and exultantly airborne.[311] Shona Dunlop thought highly of Michaelis’s abilities, writing that she ‘possessed a keen eye’ and what she described as ‘that uncanny gift of perceiving a moment of truth … she had the patience and the sensitivity to catch the picture at its rightful climax’.[312] The end of Photo-studio Michaelis made every effort to dedicate herself to her photography in Sydney, but she remained isolated from the professional photography community. Personally, she experienced overwhelming feelings of loneliness that are expressed in her powerful self-portrait that can be read in more general terms as emblematic of the dislocation many refugees experienced. However, the full extent of her acute emotional and psychological distress has only recently become clear through documentation held in the archive Landesamt für Bürger- und Ordnungsangelegenheiten archive (LABO) in Berlin. She submitted the documents, including detailed medical records, as part of her successful application for compensation from the West German government in 1964. Michaelis had to prove not only that she was a victim of Nazi persecution but also the impact of that persecution. The case she mounted was based on the poor state of her mental health. Doctors’ and psychiatrists’ reports established that she suffered from anxiety neurosis and depression and had been battling its symptoms – including ‘insomnia, headaches, indecision, fear of

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Margaret Michaelis, No title (Back view, Francis Street, Sydney)
gelatin silver photograph
printed image 32.6 x 30.4 cm,
 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Gift of the estate of Margaret Michaelis-Sachs 1986.

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Opposite: Margaret Michaelis, No title (Female dancer leaning back) 1940–52 gelatin silver photograph
image 20.6 x 16.5 cm sheet 22 x 16.5 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Gift of the estate of Margaret Michaelis-Sachs 1986.

Margaret Michaelis, 14 June 1948, Parramatta River, Sydney (self-portrait) 1948 gelatin silver photograph
image 29.5 x 36.8 cm
sheet 30.4 x 37.4 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Gift of the estate of Margaret Michaelis-Sachs 1986.

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going blind, lack of concentration etc.’ – from 1941 onwards, exacerbated by the suicide of her brother in 1948. The intensive treatment she had received included sedation, psychotherapy, occupational therapy and, at some point in 1948, electro-convulsive therapy (ECT). Given Michaelis’s protracted struggle with mental illness, it is remarkable that she was able to achieve as much as she did. In 1952, however, she made the difficult decision to close Photo-studio. The reasons she later gave for the closure were practical: rising competition, lack of resources to upgrade her equipment and the studio’s facilities, and not being able to afford a car. Now it is clear that her poor mental health and issues with her memory made it impossible for her to continue. In August 1959, her condition deteriorated further and ‘fighting a nervous breakdown and fear’ she was admitted to Broughton Hall Psychiatric Clinic for treatment[313]; other admissions to mental health institutions followed. Her financial situation was also dire after closing the studio; unable to find employment as a photographer, she worked intermittently in low-paid clerical jobs. It was only following her marriage in 1960 to Albert Sachs, a Viennese-born émigré and Jew who owned a profitable second-hand furniture and framing business in Melbourne, that she became relatively well off. But, as the LABO documents reveal, her second marriage and improved material circumstances did not mean she gained peace of mind. Some doctors were convinced of a causal link between the Nazi’s persecution and Michaelis’s mental illness. One expert, Dr Benedek, fully supported her case for compensation, stating: Much of the anxiety, and the symptoms which go to make up the syndrome go back to her experiences in Germany, and the subsequent break-up of her marriage. Although she struggled to build a business for herself in Sydney, her emotional health was already affected, and she was unable to stand up to the ordinary stresses of business life. The business collapsed because of her disturbed emotions, her intellectual insight remaining intact and thereby causing greater depression.[314]

Another doctor assessed ‘the effect of persecution’ amounted to ‘a maximum of 25% of her disability’ and identified three reasons for her ‘severe anxiety neurosis with periods of acute depression’. These were: 1. Due to her two unsatisfactory marriages. [Her marriage to Albert Sachs was also beset with difficulties.] 2. Due to her many years of loneliness and insecurity. 3. Related to persecution by the Nazis in Berlin prior to 1933 and the later fear of German invasion while she was in Poland with her parents before the war.[315]

A legacy in photography What it means to be uprooted from home and forced into exile is no less relevant now than it was in Michaelis’s day on the cusp of World War II. Her experience of migration was a profoundly melancholy one shaped by a complex amalgam of factors relating to her personality and temperament,

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and to circumstances and situations far beyond her, or indeed any individual’s control. As a refugee who had lost almost everything, she was enormously grateful to the years of peace and the opportunity to build up a new existence that Australia gave her, but the trauma of her European life never left her. The years running Photo-studio in Sydney were relatively brief but were significant. Although she did not live to see it, her photographic oeuvre, combining her European and Australian work, continues to grow in importance. It now has a flourishing international reputation as a result both of major exhibitions in art museums and galleries in Canberra, Valencia and Barcelona and substantial publications. It was photography that was Margaret Michaelis’s legacy.

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9

Zsuzsa Kozma and the drinks trolley by Rebecca Hawcroft

In 1997, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) was gifted a drinks trolley. Skilfully detailed, the walnut and chrome trolley is a neat cube on small black rubber wheels. When its numerous compartments open it transforms to provide a generous work surface, shelves, trays and compartments. Linear, utilitarian and unornamented, yet made of high-quality timber, and displaying a high degree of workmanship, it is a fine example of the kind of functional modernist furniture that came to represent the new way of living demanded by the 20th century. The trolley was quickly added to the museum’s 20th-century design gallery, where it was displayed alongside the furniture of some of the key figures in modernism: Marcel Breuer, Alvar Aalto and Mies van der Rohe. Like those pieces of furniture, it had been designed by a European. Unlike the other pieces on display, the trolley was the work of an unknown. The donor revealed it had been designed in Budapest, in 1938–39 by a young Hungarian woman, Zsuzsa Kozma (later known as Susan Kozma-Orlay).[316] The trolley’s provenance made it particularly important to the V&A collection. Women designers were under-represented and the museum had no interwar pieces from Hungary, the period when Budapest was home to a number of important modernist designers. The trolley had survived by being transported by an immigrant family, the Simors, as they fled Budapest for England in 1947.[317] The remainder of the interior to which it belonged no longer survived. It had been held by the family, a remnant of their past life, before its donation to the V&A 50 years later. Once the trolley became part of its collection, the V&A curatorial team worked on identifying the story of its designer. Zsuzsa Kozma was the youngest daughter of famous Hungarian architect, artist and teacher Lajos Kozma (1884–1948). The V&A curators found Kozma living in Sydney, Australia. The then 84-year-old, a modest and reserved individual, replied to the V&A confirming that she had designed the trolley as part of a suite of furniture for the Simors' Budapest apartment when she was just 25 and working in her father’s practice.[318] She noted too that she had been a designer all her adult life and was, in fact, still working. Despite her famous father and long career, Kozma was unknown in Australia. The story of Zsuzsa Kozma and the drinks trolley provides an insight into the transportation of European modernism across the globe by the flight of

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The drinks trolley Zsuzsa Kozma designed for the Simors’ apartment in Budapest c.1938, now in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Europe’s émigrés. The distinctive Central European modernism of the 1930s and 1940s was transferred, not only by the many designers who emigrated, but also the middle-class, often Jewish, patrons of modernism who also relocated. The spread of modernism from the centres of European design (Vienna, Berlin, Bratislava and Budapest) to the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia was to have a lasting impact on those countries.[319] Kozma’s career is one marked by mobility and disconnections. In many ways, Kozma’s career in Australia is unremarkable. Although a talented designer and closely involved in a number of important design projects through the 1940s and 1950s, for the majority of her career she worked anonymously within Sydney’s European community. Zsuzsa Kozma’s background and training are, however, unique among both European-born and Australian designers. Her work in Australia, of which now only traces remain, deserves attention. Kozma serves as an example of the many postwar migrants who brought unique skills, experiences and insights, and yet whose work remained anonymous. This research into Kozma’s forgotten career represents a renewed focus on the lesser-known practitioners of European modernism and the nature of its transportation through postwar migration.

Zsuzsa Kozma, working in the Budapest office of her father, Lajos Kozma, c.1935. Next: Sketch of the drinks trolley design, from the Kozma office papers, c.1930, held by the Applied Arts Museum Budapest.

Early life, Budapest Born in 1913, Zsuzsa Kozma grew up in the somewhat sheltered world of Budapest’s radical and well-educated, middle class.[320] Despite its small size within an economically and politically constrained Hungary, this community produced key figures in European modernism. Bauhaus protégés Farkas Molnár, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy, musician Béla Bartók, philosopher Georg Lukács and artists The Group of Eight all made considerable contributions to modernist debates across Europe.

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Lajos Kozma was a prominent figure in Budapest. Of Jewish origin, he embraced a number of facets of the creative arts in his career, including graphic design, interior and furniture design, teaching and writing. After studying architecture, around 1910, he followed the flow of Hungarian artists and intellectuals to Paris where, with long-term friend and associate, artist Desiderius Orbán, he mixed in avant-garde circles; studying painting with Matisse and socialising with Gertrude Stein.[321] The movement of artists and intellectuals between Paris and Budapest in this period played an important role in the exchange of modernist ideas.[322] In 1913, 10 years after the establishment of the Wiener Werkbund, Lajos established the Budapesti Műhely, Budapest’s version of the famous design collective, with the aim of producing objects of fine modern design for the general public.[323] Working with a small group of manufacturing craftsmen, Lajos designed all the objects for a small but appreciative clientele among Budapest’s wealthy bourgeoisie.[324]

Lajos Kozma at his desk, c.1940s

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In 1913, in the year of Zsuzsa’s birth, Lajos took up a position in the Department of Interior Decorating and Metalwork at the School of Applied Arts Budapest. He lost this position in 1919 with the fall of the short-lived Hungarian Socialist Republic. Like many of Budapest’s modernist architects, his association with the leftist regime excluded him from official commissions during his career. It did, however, provide strong links within Budapest’s largely left-wing bourgeoisie, which were Lajos’s main clients and important patrons of modernism. Lajos’s early architectural work shows a progression from a folk-influenced art-nouveau, or ‘National Romantic’ style, towards the more functionalist modernism emerging in Germany in the early 20th century. His unique furniture designs mixed baroque influences, folk motifs, Chinoiserie and rich finishes such as lacquer and timber inlays in surprising ways. These celebrated items of modern design have featured in a number of museum exhibitions including at the Applied Arts Museum, Budapest.[325] From the early 1920s, the family spent the summer months in their summerhouse on Lupa Island, just outside Budapest. The house is featured

Lajos Kozma’s design vocabulary included folk motifs and orientalist decoration, as shown in this chair from 1928, despite also working in a strongly modernist style. Collection of the Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest.

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The most commonly used image of the widely published house on the Danube features the young Zsuzsa and her sister, Erzsébet, on the cantilevered balcony.

in FRS Yorke’s influential publication The Modern House as Ludwig Kozma’s ‘House on the Danube’.[326] Constructed of reinforced-concrete frame, floors and roof, with brick infill walls, the careful planning enabled the single room to function in a number of ways, with long built-in sofas and fold-away beds. Characterised by Lajos Kozma as a tree house,it is perched above the flood prone waters of the Danube, its concrete legs creating a shaded terrace beneath and with a wide balcony cantilevered boldly out over the river below.[327] University and early work Zsuzsa appears to have been particularly influenced by the work of her father and the world of design that surrounded her. While older sister Erzsebet achieved excellence as a musician, becoming Deputy Director of the Franz Liszt Academy, Budapest, Zsuzsa focused on design and illustration. By 1931, Zsuzsa Kozma had begun studies in furniture design and graphic arts at the School of Applied Arts in Budapest. At this time, Lajos Kozma played a key part in the influential modernist residential development of Napraforgó Street in suburban Pasarét, in the hills of Bud, West Budapest. The Napraforgó development followed the 1927 Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart, where 17 of the key modernist architects of the day worked under the direction of Mies van der Rohe to develop a residential building exhibition of exemplary design and planning. Budapest city governors allowed a similar experimental development in the newly planned part of the city, with 24 single-family houses designed by Hungary’s best modernist architects. Lajos is the only designer to provide more than one design, contributing three houses for the project (Numbers 5, 6 and 8).[328] Lajos Kozma became the architect most highly sought-after by the Hungarian haute bourgeoisie.[329] An expensive luxury, his technologically advanced and highly finished houses were visible symbols of achievement for the middle class.[330] With the luxury of wealthy clients who provided large sites and funded extensive interior schemes, these houses represented the chief body of Lajos’s architectural achievement. These projects also generated a range of modern furniture pieces that were produced for the market by the Josef Heisler furniture company. Both this range and the more expensive, custom-made items Lajos designed for clients had a lasting impact on Hungarian design and were well represented in houses of the fashionable middle class. In 1931, Lajos was central to another key moment in Hungarian modernism when he joined with artist Desiderius Orbán to form the Atelier school. Following the Bauhaus model, it was a private ‘Arts-Design and Workshop School’, teaching both fine and industrial arts with courses covering architecture, furniture design, ceramics and graphic arts.[331] Established in response to the increasingly oppressive conservatism of the Hungarian government, and restrictions on the enrolment of Jews in Hungarian universities, the modest Atelier had a large impact on sustaining modern design debate and practice in Hungary.[332]

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The small Danube house, essentially a single room, included numerous space-saving devices such as sofas that doubled as beds. Lajos Kozma’s desk at the Danube house, with eldest daughter Erzsébet at the window, c.1930.

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A young Zsuzsa Kozma in the Danube house, c.1930.

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The open spaces of the Danube house interiors were kept clear by the use of foldaway beds.

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Despite Lajos’s involvement in the Atelier, in 1931, Zsuzsa transferred to the School of Applied Arts in Stuttgart and then completed her training in the Kunstgewerbeschule (School for Applied Arts) Vienna. The influence of her time in Vienna and Stuttgart was likely a strong one. In the 1930s, Stuttgart was at the centre of German experiments in modernism. The staff at the Kunstgewerbeschule included Oskar Strnad, Oskar Wlach and Josef Frank, designers well known to Lajos Kozma.

Desiderius ‘Dezsö’ Orbán, centre, with students at the Atelier school. Lasting from 1931 to 1938 the school was an important source of modern design teaching in Budapest. Orbán emigrated to Sydney in 1939 and continued teaching at his own influential private art school.

Zsuzsa Kozma is shown here, top left, at Stuttgart in 1931, a seemingly innocent looking 18 year old somewhat lost in the bohemia of the university.

After her studies, Zsuzsa returned to Budapest and worked in her father’s office. Her personal papers include a number of graphic design projects also undertaken at this time reflecting the more diverse role of designer as it was known in Europe. By 1938, when the Simors commissioned furniture for their drawing room, they recognised Zsuzsa as the author of the design, rather than her famous father.[333] Although always hostile to Hungary’s Jewish population, by the late 1930s, the Horthy government was applying increasingly anti-Semitic and restrictive laws; in 1938, Lajos Kozma was stripped of his membership in the Chamber of Architects and his licence to work. By 1939, Desiderious

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Orbán, also unable to continue his work, had left Hungary for Australia. These restrictions also affected Lajos’s clients, who with such uncertainty, all but stopped commissioning new projects. Lajos Kozma used this enforced hiatus to write a book of his architectural principles, detailing both realised projects and speculative designs. An influential record of European modernism Das Neue Haus (The New House) was published in Switzerland in 1941.[334] Although Kozma’s work has been the focus of numerous publications, few have been translated to English, diminishing his influence in the English-speaking world.[335] In continental Europe, Lajos Kozma is cited as one of the most talented modernist architects in Hungary between the wars.[336] Remarkably, in this context of increasing uncertainty, the Simors commissioned Kozma to redesign their drawing room.

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The drinks trolley The trolley was one part of a suite of furniture that Zsuzsa Kozma, working in her father’s office, designed for the drawing room of the Budapest apartment of Eugene (Jenö) and Elizabeth Simor. Jenö Simor, the managing director of a timber company, lived with his wife and three children in Pasarét, near the Bauhaus-inspired villas of Napraforgó Street.[337] Theirs was one of four flats within a 1930s building that overlooked what was then the grassy valley of the Pasarét and the wooded hills beyond. The apartment included a formal dining room, furnished in a traditional 19th-century style, with grand piano and large dining table. The kitchen was the realm of their maid and a space they dared not enter. The drawing room, adjacent to the dining room, was for more relaxed entertaining. It is this room that they chose to modernise with Lajos Kozma’s distinctive furniture. Jenö Simor’s niece was married to Pal Szegi, the art critic of the major Hungarian newspaper Pesti Hirlap. Szegi advised the family on matters of design and art and when it came to remodelling their drawing room, Szegi introduced them to Lajos Kozma. Peter Simor, the Simors’ son, who lived in the apartment until he was 14, recalls it clearly. The room had full-height fixed cabinets filling one wall. The cabinets had walnut veneer on the exterior with sycamore interiors. Although unornamented they were finely detailed and highly finished. A sofa (possibly a day bed), easy chairs and the trolley provided light-weight flexible furnishings. This arrangement left the large windows on the facing wall open to appreciate the area’s fine views. The trolley was a key functional element when the Simors were entertaining. As was the convention in Hungary, drinks were prepared in the drawing room, without intruding on the maid in the kitchen. The room also included some of the Simors’ art collection: works by Group of Eight modernists Róbert Berény and Ödön Márffy. The Simor family left Budapest in 1947, travelling by train to London. Jenö Simor had started a business in England before the war, which he then resumed and the family settled in Chichester. When packing their possessions into a container to be taken by train and truck to London, the trolley was one of

the few items of furniture they took with them. The mobility of the trolley would prove to be a key aspect of its survival. In England, first with the family, and then with son Peter, it remained a valued remnant of their previous life in Budapest. Wartime Both the Kozma and Simor families were lucky to survive the year from 1944 to 1945. Although life had been increasing difficult for Jews in Budapest, many having been conscripted into unarmed labour corps, it was not until 1944, when Germany invaded and assumed power, that an active policy of ghettoisation and deportation to the death camps was pursued. In the short period until Russia liberated the city in January 1945, more than 500,000 of Hungary’s Jews had been killed.[338] The Kozmas, like many Jews, had few options other than remaining in Budapest, even at such a dangerous time. The invasion of Russian troops following the defeat of the Germans was, for some, even more terrifying. At one point, Zsuzsa, hiding in a cellar, was singled out by a Russian soldier. It is not known if she was one of the thousands of Budapest’s rape victims, but her few valued possessions, including her torch, were stolen in a moment of fear and humiliation she was to recount the rest of her life. In 1946, 26-year-old Zsuzsa Kozma met chemist Janös Orlay. They married in October, two days before Janös’s visa was issued from the British consul in Budapest. Orlay and his parents travelled to London before receiving a visa for Australia and took the seven-day flying boat trip, arriving 8 December 1946. After a brief period of separation, Orlay’s attempts to sponsor his wife were successful, and Zsuzsa flew into Sydney on 28 April 1947. For Zsuzsa, apparently devoted to her parents, the relocation was a brave decision. It may have been that her family also had plans to emigrate. Certainly Lajos Kozma’s long-term friend and colleague Desiderius Orbán had tried to convince Lajos to follow him to Australia. Tragically for Zsuzsa, she would never see her parents again. In 1948, having barely recovered from the upheaval of the war, Lajos died, aged 64. The devastated Zsuzsa was unable to return for the funeral; in fact, despite later trips to Europe, Zsuzsa and Janös never returned to Hungary.[339] In 1957, Zsuzsa’s mother, Elsa, died. After a successful career as a pianist and teacher, in 1964, Erzsebet migrated to join her sister; the two Kozma women lived the rest of their lives in Sydney. Dezső Orbán and textile design In 1947, Kozma found herself in a country whose language she did not speak, one that knew nothing of her father or her training, and whose aesthetic and cultural heritage was very different from her own. Kozma’s career prospects were uncertain. In a letter, she wrote that she was starting over: ‘The notion of furniture designer – my main craft – is unknown there’.[340] Despite this, her letters home and her remarkable illustrations paint a picture of optimism. The small flat in Watson’s Bay on the peninsula, where the newly married couple settled, is shown as one filled with sun and happy routines.

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The couple became Susan and John Orlay, two of the many Hungarians settling in Sydney’s eastern suburbs in the postwar years. John Orlay joined the Australian Chemical Institute and was naturalised in 1952, aged 32. Both John’s and Susan’s naturalisation papers were witnessed by Desiderius Orbán. As well as friends, the Orbáns provided important connections to Sydney’s design community. Orbán arrived in Sydney in 1939 and was immediately active, holding his first solo exhibition in 1943 and occupying the role of president of the Contemporary Arts Society from 1943 to 1949. Orbán also continued to teach at his own private art school in central Sydney, where he had a strong influence on a number of artists including John Olsen, Margo Lewers and later fellow Hungarian émigré Judy Cassab. In 1947, Orbán was teaching designers from the small textile operation Silk & Textile Printers (STP). It would seem that through Orbán’s connections, shortly after her arrival, Susan Kozma-Orlay also became involved with the firm and one of the defining moments in the development of modern Australian design: the Modernage Fabrics range. The STP factory had opened in Barcom Avenue in Rushcutters Bay in 1939. Its Italian founders were interned in 1940, with the employees maintaining the business during the war years. In 1946 Claudio Alcorso, STP owner and the creative force in the operation, returned keen to make his mark in Australia. After initial experiments using local designers, Claudio drove an ambitious project to engage a large group of contemporary artists to provide designs that STP would print onto a range of fabrics, to be offered to retailers.[341] The 46 artists selected included Orbán, and other well-known artists including Douglas Annand, Russell Drysdale, Justin O’Brien and Margo Lewers.[342] The range was launched in 1947 accompanied by a Sydney Ure Smith publication, A New Approach to Textile Designing.[343] Orbán provided a background essay, detailing the project’s development, which was illustrated by Susan Kozma-Orlay. The publication did much to promote the project, which was also widely covered in the press and showcased in exhibitions in both Sydney and Melbourne.[344] Kozma-Orlay , along with other members of the company, attended the Melbourne event at the Hotel Windsor wearing ‘a frock in Gleeson’s totem design in black and white’.[345] A second Modernage range followed in 1948, although without contributions from contemporary artists, instead using designers including Kozma-Orlay. In October 1948, Kozma-Orlay was again at the Melbourne promotion with her own design of stylised magazine covers one of the featured projects.[346] The Modernage range was an important moment in Australian design, with examples of the designs now in most collections of Australian decorative arts. An early attempt to integrate artists into industrial production, it also focused on making designs relevant to the local context, utilising motifs from the Australian landscape rather than imported designs. Sales were, however, not enough to justify continuing the project, and Silk & Textile Printers returned to the established practice of recolouring overseas designs.

Furniture designs for University House, ANU Not long after Kozma-Orlay’s involvement in Silk & Textile Printers, an opportunity arose to establish herself as a furniture designer. In 1949, the first building for the new Australian National University in Canberra, its residential college University House, was being planned. The architect employed for the scheme was the established modernist Brian Lewis. Chair of Architecture at Melbourne University, he represented the well-mannered, but conservative form of modernism already established in Australia by the 1940s. Unusually at the time, equal attention was accorded to the interiors. A committee was formed to select a scheme that would suitably integrate with the building’s architecture; its members included Lewis, Professor JT Burke and state gallery directors Hal Missingham from NSW and Daryl Lindsay from Victoria. Years later, Derek Wrigley would note, ‘University House was not just another building in which furniture was placed – it was a unique historical event in which architect and furniture designer collaborated closely with synergistic effect’.[347] The furniture commission was advertised for public tender. Five designers submitted schemes, which the committee considered. They included Fred Ward, already an established furniture designer with pieces in production through Melbourne retailer Myer, the yet to be established Grant Featherston and Susan Kozma-Orlay.[348] Ward, well known to all on the panel, was selected as the successful designer. The partnership between Lewis and Ward was to be a lasting one. By 1953, Ward was appointed head of the ANU design unit within the university where, as construction progressed, more than four thousand pieces of furniture to his design are eventually installed. Kozma-Orlay’s scheme for University House does not survive. Ward’s successful designs provided an extensive range of simple, practical utilitarian pieces that complement the architecture. That the synthesis of architecture and furniture in University House was so celebrated demonstrates how foreign the architectural practices of Hungary were to Australia in the immediate postwar years. Although the local climate for the kind of design Kozma-Orlay was familiar with was growing, she had few opportunities to practise her craft. Graphic design, David Jones With the opportunity for a major commission missed, by the 1950s, Kozma-Orlay was working for David Jones in the store display and design area. David Jones was one of Sydney’s most dynamic, successful and stable commercial presences, having been the dominant force in the city’s retail world since the 1800s. This was a particularly creative period for the store. In 1946, the store’s logo and visual branding was overhauled by designer Gordon Andrews. [349] The David Jones archives are sadly no longer available for research, Next left: The ‘Modernage’ design ‘Cross Section’ by Shelia Gray is admired by model Joan (sic) Dally Watkins in The Australian Women’s Weekly, August 1947. Next right: During the 1950s, Kozma-Orlay worked for David Jones. It appears she provided many of the in-store and advertising graphics during the period, including this wrapping paper design.

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however, Kozma-Orlay’s personal papers include a wide range of designs for David Jones including wrapping paper, Christmas cards, store posters and advertisements, all carried out in her characteristic illustration style. Andrews left David Jones in 1948 to continue his career as a product and industrial designer in America. Although Andrews signed most of his designs, Kozma-Orlay’s work within this large organisation remains anonymous. Examples of what would seem to be her work are reproduced without attribution in Helen O’Neill’s David Jones: 175 Years. Her strong graphic style, developed in Hungary and bearing traces of her father’s linear art-nouveau legacy, updated by a contemporary 1950s boldness, deserves further research. Independent interior and furniture design It seems that by the 1960s, Kozma-Orlay’s networks had developed to the extent that she was able to begin a solo practice in interior and furniture design. Her clients were predominantly Hungarian or eastern Europeans in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, a community whose language and culture she shared, and who were comfortable in her ability to understand their needs, which she fulfilled through interior schemes for domestic and commercial projects with both fixed and free-standing custom-made furniture for the next 30 years. Records of Kozma-Orlay’s commercial interior design work include the shopfront and interior fit-out for the Doris Unger Lingerie store, the GLO International showroom (makers of Glomesh bags, founded by Hungarian immigrants Louis and Alice Kennedy) and the Nina Ricci store in Double Bay. The majority of Kozma-Orlay’s work was, however, residential. Surviving projects and what remains of her drawings show a consistent use of featured timbers, walnut and American oak; a focus on efficient use of space; bedside tables, shelves and bedheads are regularly combined; desks and shelf units hug the wall leaving the rest of the room open; and shelves are fixed to walls leaving the floor clear. All schemes include free-standing furniture; whether manufactured to her design or not, furniture was a key aspect of how she planned spaces and her drawings include detailed plans for numerous chairs and settees.

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Berryman furniture In the 1960s, aged in her 50s, Kozma-Orlay worked for a period as a designer for the Berryman Furniture Company. Berryman had been started by two Hungarians in the early 1940s. One was a boat builder by trade, and seeing a commercial opportunity in furniture manufacturing, asked an associate Alex Gemes to join him in Sydney. Alex Gemes (née Goldfischer) came from a furniture-manufacturing family; the Goldfischer Sándor factory, located outside Budapest, employed some hundred craftsmen and sold furniture across Europe and beyond, even to Harrods in London. [350] A trained designer, having studied furniture design in Brussels, Gemes also had valuable experience managing a manufacturing operation. In 1949, then 39 and having survived time in a labour camp, Gemes, along with his wife and young child, left Budapest for a new life in Sydney.

Gemes successfully established Berryman as a leading manufacturer of bedroom and dining furniture and expanded the business into retailing with the Bonds and Kirby and Frisco chains. Like business partner Albert Scheinberg, founder of Stocks and Holdings (later Stockland), Gemes assisted many other migrants in establishing successful businesses, providing finance or technical advice and guidance as they required it. No records of Susan Kozma-Orlay’s specific involvement in Berryman remain, although the company’s ‘Scandinavian’ line from 1960 resembles her other work from the period. It was produced during a time when Scandinavian design was having an impact on the mass market and Berryman had a strong focus on simple lines and natural timbers. A commercially oriented company their work responded to consumer demand and by the 1970s they were advertising a ‘Georgian’ range of a very different style. Berryman remained a key supplier to Harvey Norman into the 1990s when its ‘Colonial’ range was the chain’s top-selling style.[351] In 1963, Kozma-Orlay designed the interior of the Gemes’ house in March Street, Bellevue Hill. Working with Hungarian architect Stephen Gergely and using timber specially imported by Gemes, Kozma-Orlay designed a flexible living space with shelf and desk units fixed to the wall, as well as the full kitchen and the bedroom storage units. A key feature of the design was a library area that doubled as daughter Juno’s bedroom. The library wall units included day beds and the room opened to the living area through full-height timber doors. Two of Kozma-Orlay’s surviving projects demonstrate the nature of her work. Located in Vaucluse in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, a short distance from her own home, both were undertaken for her relatives within the extended Hungarian community. All also share connections within the furniture, architecture and wider design world. In the early 1960s, Kozma-Orlay designed built-in furniture for the living room, study, kitchen and bedrooms of the Vari house at Kings Road, cousins of John Orlay. George Vari ran the Bonds and Kirby retail furniture business in partnership with Alex Gemes. Kozma-Orlay’s scheme for the house largely consisted of simple and practical storage and shelving systems with built-in desks, vanities and single beds. The living room, however, included a more sophisticated timber wall unit, using strong verticals cut across by three narrow bookcases with a full-width cupboard unit suspended below. Another client, around the corner in Olphert Avenue, was Czechoslovakian -born Eva Clarke (née Jedlin), whose husband George Clarke was principal at the architectural firm Clarke Gazzard Yeomans; they were also relatives. The house was extensively remodelled in 1962, with Clarke and Kozma-Orlay working closely to design built-in furniture for the living room, dining room and kitchen.[352] Kozma-Orlay’s undecorated horizontal suspended units, with solid teak bench tops and teak veneer doors, fit harmoniously with the room’s timber ceiling linings and wall panelling. Each unit featured functional storage spaces and drawers specifically made to suit the Clarkes’ purposes. Kozma-Orlay’s pieces remain in Clarke’s house, along with a table the couple

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commissioned from Hungarian cabinetmaker Fisher’s Modern Homes and Finnish chairs purchased from Artes Studios. This range of custom-made and imported furniture demonstrates the significant impact Hungarian immigrants had on the manufacture and supply of modern furniture in Sydney in the years after the war. Kozma-Orlay continued to work within the Hungarian community, primarily referred by word of mouth until she was in her late 80s. For many years, her designs were fabricated by Dominic Catanzariti in his Marrickville warehouse. This relationship ceased with Catanzariti’s death in 1998 and it seems Kozma-Orlay retired not long after. Her collection of papers shows extensive schemes for clients into the 1990s that include the furniture for almost every room of their houses or apartments. One project demonstrates her lasting relationships; her designs for the Fishers of Wollaroy Road, Double Bay, includes designs from 1975 to 1998.

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Out of place John Orlay died in 1997, but Susan remained active and independent. When the V&A wrote to her in 1997, she was quick to credit any achievement she might have made in the design of the drinks trolley to the legacy of her father.[353] When asked about the trolley recently, its owner Peter Simor could not quite believe that after some 50 years, he remembered the name of its designer so readily; it was not something he and his family regularly discussed. Simor, who in 1978 acquired the English furniture company Isoplan and was both managing director and designer, associates to some degree his career change with Kozma’s trolley, noting, ‘In that trolley she made something exceptionally good’. Simor also noted that the trolley served no real function in his various English houses. Its design, intimately related to the activities of the Budapest apartment, was unsuitable for English entertaining. Simor noted it was the social custom in England for drinks to be placed on a tray in the drawing room so that guests could help themselves freely; the hidden compartments of the trolley thwarting this transaction. Simor’s wife Anne, of English and Scottish heritage, found it a ‘foreign object’ and didn’t know what to use it for.[354] In many ways, the customs and design idioms of European modernism were also foreign to Australia. The work of designers such as Susan Kozma-Orlay was most readily adopted within the migrant community, a community that was made up of both patrons and practitioners of modernism. The mobility of the drinks trolley allowed it to be transported into a new context. Equally, the mass migration of Europe’s émigrés facilitated the wholesale importation of cultural practices previously rare in Australia. As Kozma-Orlay’s story illustrates, Hungarian émigrés were particularly well represented in the furniture trades, and the role of Hungarian clients in supporting and spreading European forms of modernism was an important one. Although with an exceptional exposure to the development of modernism in Europe, in Sydney Kozma-Orlay was simply one figure within a broad

and influential Hungarian community. Collectively they made a significant contribution across many fields, but in particular to the design, manufacture and retail of modern furniture. Although few individuals have previously been identified, Kozma-Orlay’s furniture and interior design career demonstrates how European modernism was both absorbed into the cultural life of Sydney and remained somewhat separate from it; the names, backgrounds and identities of its practitioners often unknown to the wider public.

Previous: Berryman furniture had a number of ranges and were adept at catering to current fashions. In the 1960s they offered a ‘Scandinavian’ line that uses the clean lines and light timber fashionable in the period. Next: Examples of Kozma-Orlay’s interior design work over the four decades she worked as an interior designer in Sydney. Clients and locations unknown.

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10

The migrants who built modern Sydney by Tone Wheeler

Sydney 1950: 1.5 million people live in a red sea of brick and tile bungalows that spreads out from a modest city centre. Just 25 years later, the population has doubled and Sydneysiders live in a radically transformed city.[355] In the centre, sandstone and brick have been replaced by off-white concrete towers; the skyline that was once dominated by the curve of the Harbour Bridge now has 50-storey skyscrapers; local shopping strips have been overtaken by US-inspired, multilevel shopping malls; the suburbs now have concrete-framed apartment towers of eight storeys or higher; two-lane streets have been replaced by six-lane freeways that cut through the hills and valleys. In urban design terms, it is the city we recognise today. How did this transformation happen from a wishfully imagined Englishstyle ‘Garden City’ to a modern American-style city to rival Atlanta or Toronto? And in just 25 years? The answer lies in large part in the principal cause of the population growth: European migrants. Many were skilled masons, carpenters and labourers from Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Poland and Hungary. From the same countries came the leaders, who developed schemes, made plans, guided the changes and founded companies to build the buildings. Often Jewish, they had escaped war-ravaged Eastern Europe, seeking a new life in the new world. This is the story of those migrant leaders who established companies that changed the face of Sydney: Lend Lease, Westfield, Toga, Mirvac, Stockland and Meriton. Their stories are diverse and individually rich, but seen together they bear out three clear themes: they managed their work in a different, often collaborative, way from the pervading norm; they built typologies rarely seen before in Sydney; and the buildings exploited one material over all others to make Sydney one of the most concrete-based cities in the world. Dick Dusseldorp’s office towers The office tower of wide-open plans was formulated in the early 20th century in Chicago and New York. Structurally assembled in a three-dimensional grid of steel ‘girders’, which is then ‘fire-proofed’ with a variety of resistant materials, the prewar buildings rarely display this rigorous repetitive frame, being clad in stone, brick or ceramic. The heavy exterior, both visually and

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aesthetically, belied the lightness of the interior. Some well-known examples are New York’s Chrysler and Empire State buildings of 1929–30. Rethinking the exterior after World War II led to a new approach: a light glass and aluminium ‘curtain wall’ was stretched over the same steel frame. This was driven by both function and functionalism: for the builders, it was quicker and more waterproof; for the aesthetes, it had the ‘purity’ or ‘honesty’ of modernist thinking, extending the Cartesian grid of the interior, and its accompanying administrative agenda, to the exterior. New York’s Lever House of 1952, and Seagram Building of 1958 epitomise the style. When the Sydney CBD height limit of 150 feet was lifted in 1957[356], and a boom in business demanded office towers, most of Australia followed the US model: steel frames and curtain walls. The earliest Australian skyscrapers, such as MLC North Sydney (1955; Bates Smart & McCutcheon), ICI House Melbourne (1958; Bates Smart & McCutcheon), Unilever House Sydney (1957; Stephenson & Turner, now demolished), and the AMP tower Sydney (1962; Peddle Thorp & Walker) had steel frames and curtain walls, as elegantly detailed as any rival in the US. But then a curious thing happened: almost all the towers built after that in Sydney (but not elsewhere in Australia) were concrete, both the frame and the exterior. Sydney Water Board HQ (1965; McConnel Smith & Johnson), Sydney University Law School (1969; McConnel Smith & Johnson), Australia Square (1963–68; Harry Seidler), the MLC Centre (1978; Harry Seidler), Qantas Centre (1970; Joseland & Gilling), King George Tower (1976; John Andrews International) – all were wholly or mostly concrete, both in-situ and precast. Even the occasional steel-framed building, such as Norwich House in Bligh Street (1970; Stephenson & Turner), was still clad in precast washed aggregate concrete panels to look like a typical Sydney ‘concrete’ building. Sydney’s CBD had the most consistent set of buff-white/yellow-cream, concrete-framed and clad buildings in the world. But why, and how, did modernist Sydney turn so concrete-solid? The answer lies 500 kilometres away in the Snowy Mountains. In 1949, a scheme was proposed to divert water from the east to the west through a series of dams and tunnels, generating hydro-electricity along the way. The Snowy Mountains Scheme remains the largest civil engineering project in Australia’s history and to undertake the work, the government, under both the Labor and Liberal parties, increased the migrant intake to provide workers, especially with skills in large-scale civil-engineering construction, particularly in concrete and in alpine conditions. The Snowy Mountains Scheme transformed Australian built culture, bringing expertise through two threads: the reliance on immigrant workers and their skill in concrete. Another immigrant in the late 1950s also recognised the importance of concrete skills in Australia; Jørn Utzon’s early thin-shell designs for the Sydney Opera House changed to rely on curving wide-span precast beams for the base and the shells, a construction complexity that would not have been possible without the civil engineering skills developed in the Snowy Mountains Scheme. The base was in precast panels of exposed aggregate

in sandstone colours, the shells’ exterior was finished in satin and polished white tiles, while the remainder of the building, and much of the interior, was unadorned off-form concrete. While a hundred other major buildings were built in the 15 years the Opera House took to be completed, its choice of materials inspired many of them, and influenced current Sydney. Workers for the Snowy Mountains Scheme came from Europe and Scandinavia, and they needed to he housed in the undeveloped bush. One of the first contracts in 1951 was for 200 houses at Cabramurra, and the Scheme engaged a young Dutch project manager, Gerardus Jozef Dusseldorp, to build them. Dusseldorp, known from birth as Dik or Dick, arrived with 35 trained employees for a contract of £10,000. No ordinary manager of construction and men, Dusseldorp was highly skilled, articulate and collegiate in style and he could soon see opportunities far beyond building some workers’ housing in the hills. In 1953, he moved to Sydney and formed Civil and Civic, a construction firm with his ambitions in the title: not to build small houses that everyone else was concentrating on, but to focus on the bigger civil projects and civic buildings. His first project was the North Shore Medical Centre (NSMC), designed by Dr Heinrich (Henry) Epstein as an Internationalist-style, rectilinear modernist building of eight storeys, ordered in plan and section, in concrete column and slab. Born in 1909 in Hungary to Russian parents, Epstein, together with his wife, arrived in Sydney in 1939 after studying architecture in Vienna. He established his practice in 1947 and the NSMC was one of his first non-residential buildings to be completed. Epstein’s design shows an assured hand in the proportioning of ribbon windows with sun-breaking louvres on the two long sides and solid variegated brickwork on the ends. Dusseldorp was equal to the task of producing the robust and crisp detailing required. Civil and Civic was successful in building several similar scaled buildings, notably Caltex House and its own HQ Lend Lease House at Circular Quay, with its sun louvres arranged against the western sun. But Dusseldorp could see that the system that is now called the ‘building procurement process’ was lumpy, disorganised and separated into silos of unrelated disciplines. He wanted to create a different management structure, to control the whole process; to gain the level of control needed, he formed a company to finance the projects. Again he gave it a name to suggest its intent: Lend Lease. With no small ambition, the first major project was to change the way office towers were built in Australia.[357]

Next: Sydney’s 1950s suburbs are a sea of red-roofed houses stretching to the horizon. Next (inset): By 1975 the Sydney Central Business District had become characterised by concrete towers, and to the north Blues Point Tower hints at the growth of apartments.

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Dusseldorp had purchased a number of small buildings and sites between George and Pitt Streets in the heart of downtown Sydney. The aim was to build a ‘city block’ project, a smaller version of the Rockefeller Center in New York, with two differently formed buildings rising from a public plaza. In keeping with Dusseldorp’s philosophy of ‘collegiate inclusion’, everyone who would play a role in the project: architects, engineers, consultants, contractors and unions were all to work together. At the first meeting he said: ‘The complexity of modern construction projects is increasing very rapidly, for which there is only one answer. Teamwork … Nothing short of organised teamwork – from decision to build to the handing over of the completed project – will solve the problem’.[358] It was entirely oppositional to the usual hierarchical organisation on most building projects. Dusseldorp had seen these conflicts firsthand, had negotiated the issues with his characteristic verve and charm, and had no desire to continue in that old oppositional way. The architect for Australia Square was Harry Seidler, another émigré from Europe via Canada and the US where he studied architecture at Harvard. Dusseldorp met Seidler and his brother Marcel when they approached Civil and Civic to build their first apartment building in Ithaca Road, Elizabeth Bay. Dusseldorp rebuffed them, saying the apartment layouts were poor, weren’t appropriate and wouldn’t sell, but he was subsequently impressed when Seidler returned shortly thereafter with better plans.[359] He had found an architect with talent who would listen. Australia Square’s shorter rectilinear slab building on Pitt Street was built first to ensure a return on funds and to meet Dusseldorp’s emphasis on speed. Many times he had seen delays on projects, often caused by union-management fights, cause cost blowouts that could ruin a project, and also a fledgling development business. After meeting the time and budget constraints on the smaller building came the tower, round and 50 storeys, with a public plaza at the base and a rotating restaurant at the top. Australia Square used innovative construction techniques that derived from the Snowy Mountains experience. The columns, which taper towards the top, were made from hollow precast concrete panels made in a factory, with the exterior washed away to show white aggregate. These panels, used as permanent formwork, were then filled with concrete on-site to make a continuous column, with the exposed aggregate providing a very high-quality external finish. Australia Square set the approach for most of the office towers for the next 20 years, concrete-framed building with precast or cast in-situ concrete exteriors and ribbon or ‘punched’ windows, recessed into the frame, providing shade from Sydney’s bright sun. The style is unclad, raw and brutal, in contradistinction to the prevailing curtain wall of sheer glass that was prevalent elsewhere in the world, even in Melbourne. This form of ‘build-once’ concrete construction, originally intended as a speedy approach for a culture in a hurry, became a key Sydney style, from cost-conscious towers to public buildings such as the city’s Masonic Centre and the Dee Why Library and Civic Centre.[360] It was further exported to Canberra by

The North Shore Medical Centre, designed by Henry Epstein, was Civil and Civic’s first project, 1953.

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Dusseldorp beside the completed first stage of Australia Square on Pitt Street in 1965; the foundations of the circular tower are just commencing. Not long after the Australia Square tower was under construction. This image shows the concrete formwork of the circular tower.

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Sydney architects Edwards Madigan Torzillo & Briggs to create two of that city’s seminal public buildings: the Australian National Gallery (1970–84), now the NGA, and the High Court of Australia (1972–80). Seidler remained the chief consultant architect to Lend Lease for 40 years, designing their key Sydney buildings such as the MLC building and Darling Park. For Lend Lease, he also designed towers in Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. Even when Seidler designed towers for other clients, such as Grosvenor Place in Sydney, they were built in the same way. Towards the end of his career, Seidler was replaced as architect of Darling Park by Eric Kuhn, an import rather than an émigré. Frank Lowy’s shopping malls Sydney’s coastal topography is one of long sandstone ridges, with valleys running down to harbours and rivers. Car access was laid out along the ridge roads: Oxford Street, Military Road, Darling Street. They became the location of shops in the form of British-style ‘high streets’ as well as having views from the residences above. As the city grew wider into the flatter plains away from the water, the tradition continued: the Pacific Highway, Parramatta and Liverpool Roads where the intermittent shops were a ‘string of pearls’ along the way home. But the rapid increase in the number of cars after World War II, together with the wider expanses and distances between these high streets, became fertile ground for a different form of retail: the shopping mall, with surrounding car parks as pioneered by the US architect Victor Gruen. Now many of those malls in the US are owned and operated by an Australian company, including at Ground Zero at the rebuilt World Trade Center. The answer to how an Australian firm took over some of that quintessential Americana lies in the company name: Westfield. Frank Lowy, the creator of Westfield, both the name and the worldwide corporation, immigrated to Australia in 1952 joining his extended family who had arrived some years earlier from Budapest, Hungary.[361] Born in 1930 in Czechoslovakia, as a 14-year-old he survived living in occupied Budapest during World War II, and then left for Palestine, but was captured and fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War in Galilee and Gaza. Arriving in Sydney with his new wife Shirley, Lowy first found work in the traditional Jewish trade of textiles before becoming a delivery driver of delicatessen goods, another trade in which European immigrants found prosperity in supplying ‘the foods from home’ to immigrants and increasingly to the Anglo Australians whose palates were starting on their path to the most multicultural cuisine found anywhere. Lowy was both clever and energetic and soon developed a reputation for punctuality and efficiency with his invoices, which he wrote up on a clipboard in the truck while waiting at the lights. One of his customers was John Saunders, a Hungarian Jew eight years his senior. Saunders and his wife Eta, both Holocaust survivors, had arrived two years earlier than Lowy and had established a small delicatessen at Town Hall train station. Saunders could see potential in Lowy and suggested a business together

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Cane carver dining chair, with footstool/side table, 1947. Designed by George Kóródy for Artes Studios. Photographed at Hotel Hotel in Canberra, 2017.

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in a delicatessen in Sydney’s west at Blacktown, 35 kilometres from the CBD. The business flourished, they opened a coffee lounge next door, and realised that their profits could be best invested into land nearby, which was farmland being bought and subdivided for housing. Needing a name for the business they were creating from the partnership, they settled on one to represent their new activities: out in Sydney’s west they were developing the former farming fields: Westfield. Then came their next idea: shops instead of houses. Their next project was to build and sell a row of shops around the corner from their Blacktown deli. As retailers themselves, they realised the benefits of owning the premises rather than paying rent. By 1958, they were ready to become commercial property developers full-time and, cashing in their deli, they bought vacant land with the intention to go one better than shops: a mini version of the US mall. Westfield Place in Blacktown opened in 1959 with 12 shops, a small department store (in the English mode) and a supermarket (a US import), all arranged around an open-to-the-sky square and built in the current vogue light brick and concrete slabs. This, only the third mall of the kind in Australia, after Chermside in Brisbane and Top Ryde in Sydney, was smaller but very profitable. They followed this with another in Hornsby, and at the same time they created Westfield Development Corporation Ltd, which found and developed sites throughout Sydney for Sir Edgar Coles, founder of Coles supermarkets. The supermarkets flourished. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, they opened a new shopping centre a year, each built to a well-established pattern of larger ‘anchor tenants’ (often Coles) at either end with a street or crossroads of shops in between, and entrances to the vast car parks, which were now 10 times larger than the original 50 spaces at Westfield Place. The exteriors were bland: concrete columns for structure with panels of brickwork, later evolving into lower-cost, precast concrete panels. Undistinguished, the names of the draftsmen, rather than architects, are now lost. It was the riot of colours and signs of the ever-changing interiors that the customers came for. In 1974, seeing that the Sydney Council wanted to revitalise William Street between the city and Kings Cross, Lowy and Saunders made an ill-fated foray into high-rise commercial building with Westfield Towers (Westfield’s commercial HQ for 40 years), which was left as the only high-rise on the strip when the recession arrived almost upon completion. Soon after, the partners made a move into malls in the US, which they either purchased or built, but they were soon laden with debt. Lowy, seeing Dusseldorp’s creation of GPT (General Property Trust) as an independent funding vehicle, developed a similar idea and created The Westfield Trust. Westfield did not have the shopping mall business in Australia all to itself, but many of their competitors were émigrés as well: in Melbourne, John Gandel had expanded the Sussan range of shops that his Polish parents had founded into a property development business (The Charter Hall Group) through which he purchased Chadstone Shopping Centre and expanded

Nice composition. Maybe just a touch more grey ... Say we add another forty feet to the Expressway. George Molnar in the Sydney Morning Herald, 7 March 1959

it into Australia’s largest. And in Lowy’s backyard of Sydney, Ervin Graf had grown his developments, including several shopping malls, into a business that was soon publicly listed. Lowy’s two interests outside development were the history of the Jewish Holocaust and establishing football (soccer) as a key Australian sport. Soccer became emblematic of Sydney’s European ethnic communities and the Hakoah club, of which Lowy was an instrumental supporter, was linked firmly to Sydney’s eastern suburbs Jewish community. Viennese émigré Hans Klimt had established the club in 1944, based on the original Jewish Sports Club Hakoah in Vienna.[362] The Hakoah soccer team led the Sydney competition for many years before being disbanded in 1987. The sports club’s activities expanded over the decades until a purpose-built clubhouse was financed and finally completed in 1975. Designed by two Polish émigré architects, Henry Kurzer and Henry Haber, the club premises at Bondi emerged as a huge hulking, defensive, windowless building hard up on the street. Its urban blandness eventually made way for a mixed-use retail and hotel building. Ironically this new building, an Adina development, was an exemplar of a new form of hotel that was also pioneered by émigrés, in this case, Ervin and Charlotte Vidor. Hotels, motels and the Vidors Prior to World War II, most hotel accommodation was associated with pubs: rooms for rent above the ground floor bars and the ‘ladies lounge’. Postwar hotels changed dramatically in size and operation, but it was not a seamless process. Hilton, the US chain hotel, tried to establish a hotel in Sydney, and searched for a suitable site, finding a prominent location in Kings Cross (1960). The design style was a direct copy of the early glass-walled holiday hotels in Hawaii. However, there were problems with the hotel, and they struggled to get a viable international chain established. The next two hotels built changed the design approach. Gone was the curtain glass wall, replaced with a solid exterior. The curvilinear Wentworth

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From the dining room of the Travelodge Motel Rushcutters Bay, diners enjoy fine views of the city skyline, 1968.

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Fortunately, way back in 1962, the first development scheme set a new trend away from the monotony of city blocks. George Molnar, in the Sydney Morning Herald, June 1961

on the bend of Phillip Street, designed by Skidmore Owings and Merrill (SOM) brought a particularly New York style with a projecting curved porte cochère. The interiors were by US interior designer Audrey Borkenhagen, and concentrated on ‘international luxury’. The second hotel, a revived Hilton in the city, was the through-block building designed by Kolos and Bryant. Frank Kolos arrived from Hungary in 1950 and after working as an employed architect, started his own practice in 1957, first designing houses but quickly moving on to much larger buildings that were to mark his partnership with JH Bryant (amongst others). The Hilton had an anti-urban base with an emphasis on car access at ground level, and a brutalist exterior of washed aggregate precast panels that provided deep shade to the windows that were smaller than their European and US counterparts, given Sydney’s perceived harsher summer climate. A key early hotel in Sydney was the Sebel Townhouse, a favourite hotel for the rock stars and the glamorous and the paparazzi that followed them. Harry Sebel was an engineer working in his Russian father’s UK-based toy firm. When the firm moved to Sydney, the younger Sebel developed it into the doyenne of moulded plastic chair manufacture. In the 1960s, he expanded his horizons and moved into development with a view to constructing a speculative block of bachelor flats in Elizabeth Bay. When planning approval was not forthcoming, Sebel created the Sebel Townhouse, a hotel. At the same time, a version of the low-rise American motel, with its family-friendly ‘style’, was being built in the suburbs and towns, such as in Artarmon. Travelling salesmen (mostly men, except for Tupperware hostesses), an increasingly common customer for these motels, stayed up to a week in the ‘home away from home’, but it was a style of accommodation that was not found in the city. The mass-market hotel was epitomised by the Travelodge chain, which came to be owned by Toga, founded by Charlotte and Ervin Vidor who had emigrated from Poland and Hungary after the war. That they came to own several chains of conventional hotels, by initiating a competing idea, is another example of émigré inventiveness, based on intuition. Ervin had studied commerce with an accountancy major at UNSW and established EH Vidor & Co as an accountancy practice. In 1963, Charlotte Vidor saw a gap in the market to provide the more family-friendly ‘motel-style’ apartment in a city-based hotel, and the Medina (and later Adina) chain was born. She recognised the need for a hotel that crossed over between the services of an hotel and the comfort of an apartment. Toga, named after the original founder’s two sons, Tony and Gary, expanded into further hotel chains (Vibe and Travelodge) and also into property management, construction, design and funds management, and is now a leading developer of apartments in Sydney. Ervin was awarded an OAM in 1993 in recognition of services to the community and is still in charge of the company 30 years later. Charlotte is a former member of the New South Wales Tourism Board.[363]

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Flats & apartments In the prewar Sydney of single-storey suburbia, there were very few housing alternatives. The inner ring had terraces from the 19th century, which were largely reviled as slums, and some inner suburbs had a few ugly ‘three-storey, red-brick, walk-up flats’. Flats: the very word describes its brevity of functionality, intended for short-term singles or those who couldn’t afford a ‘real’ home. But there were a few exceptions that more closely resembled luxurious houses in the air: Macleay-Regis (1939; EC Pitt & CC Phillips), Kingsclere and Byron Hall, all in Potts Point, Birtley Towers (1934; Emil Sodersten), and Hillside in Elizabeth Bay. The last, designed by Aaron Bolot, can usefully serve as a marker of the radical difference between pre- and postwar flats. Bolot, originally from Crimea, established his practice in Sydney in the 1930s after studying architecture in Brisbane and working with Marion Mahoney and Walter Burley Griffin. Hillside, designed in collaboration with EC Pitt, is a six-storey, rectangular solid block of red texture brick perched near the top of the ridge on Edgecliff Road. With two flats per floor off a central common foyer, there is good cross-ventilation, but the layouts resemble a traditional house, typical of the prewar flats in Sydney.[364] After enlisting for Australia in World War II and serving in Europe, Bolot returned to architectural practice in Sydney, and in 1951 designed his best known building, the Wylde Street apartments in Potts Point. This 10-storey building follows the street curve in facade and plan, with 38 ‘urban co-operative multi-home units’ fanning out towards the north-eastern light. The plan arrangement is similar to Hillside, with two cores providing access to two apartments each per floor, but in every other way the expression is thoroughly modern: stepped horizontal bands of white-painted rendered bricks, ribbons of steel-framed window with projecting heads and sills, grouped ‘wet areas’, and vertical curved-end fire stairs at the rear. It was a pilgrimage site for architects training, or arriving, after the war and its influence was to utterly change the face and design of ‘flats’ in Sydney, turning them towards modern apartments. One of those looking closely was Harry Seidler. Together with Dick Dusseldorp at Civil and Civic, he had developed a construction technique on a number of flats in the late 1950s of expressed concrete floors with light yellow brick infill. When a scheme for several high-rise apartment blocks on the ridge of McMahons Point fell over, Dusseldorp secured land at the end of the point and engaged Seidler to design a bigger tower than anything yet built in Sydney. Blues Point Tower of 1958 was intended as ‘affordable’ apartments but, being the largest block of units to date, the banks resisted giving loans on ‘company title’, the only subdivision mode available. The difficulties led Dusseldorp to have lawyers for Civil and Civic write the Strata Title Act (STA) in 1960, a privately written act that was passed by the NSW Parliament in 1961 and has become the basis for the rapid expansion of sales of apartments, impossible without the STA.[365]

Ervin Graf, the founder of Stockland, was similar to many migrants who saw greater opportunities in Australia than in their native Europe, in his case Budapest where he had trained, and taught, as an architect. Arriving in 1948, he was keen to leave the influence of his father, a well-known businessman. But like many other migrants of that time, his skills were not initially recognised, and he gained entry as a bricklayer, the trade he pursued for several years. In 1952, he built his first development of 19 houses in Sefton, ironically not in brick but in the new low-cost material of fibrous cement sheet: the ubiquitous, and often reviled, fibro. Building projects flourished, and in 1958 he established a development company by buying the existing Stocks and Holdings, the cheapest listed company on the Australian Stock Exchange. During the 1960s Stocks and Holdings diversified beyond housing, developing retail projects including a shopping centre in Wollongong in 1961, and the redeveloped Imperial Arcade in the Sydney CBD in 1965. With the first underground connection to David Jones, it featured four retail levels and six levels of office space. In 1968, the same year as Australia Square, they developed a building just as tall and in many ways just as challenging, but without the same fanfare. At 50 storeys, the Park Regis tower was the tallest residential tower outside the US. Framed in concrete, dressed in yellow brick, with spectacular views from the corner of Park and Castlereagh Streets, it was commercially if not aesthetically successful[366], despite critics who said the suburbanites would never live in the CBD, and certainly not in a giant tower.[367] Soon after, renamed Stockland, they built their own HQ on the corner of Castlereagh and Park Streets and continued their pioneering work in the funding of projects, developing the system of venture capital, particularly with

But if we’ve sprawled so far from the centre aren’t we already decentralised? George Molnar in the Sydney Morning Herald, January 1967

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Stocks and Holdings’ Park Regis, Park Street, Sydney, a 50-storey apartment tower, was the tallest residential tower outside the US when constructed in 1968.

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Henry Pollack–designed Mirvac home unit development, Penkivil Street, Bondi, 1968.

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AMP, that is a cornerstone of the development industry today. They diversified further into offices, shopping malls (more than 40 today) and bulky goods centres. Graf retired in 2000, and Stockland continues today with an emphasis on the three Rs: residential, retail and retirement living.[368] Another of Sydney’s heavyweight developers of high-end apartments, Mirvac, was founded by Bob Hamilton and Henry Pollack in 1972. Hamilton had opened a real estate agency on Sydney’s North Shore in 1961. After marketing and selling apartments and advising developers, he launched his own apartment developments. Pollack, born in 1922, was an immigrant from Poland who had a perilous journey escaping the Nazis during the war on a pushbike, and spent time with the Polish underground. Arriving in Australia, he worked a number of jobs including in the textile trade, before studying architecture as a mature student. Graduating from UNSW at 40, he was in a hurry to get going, and started developing projects as well as designing them. His architecture thesis was on prefabricated concrete panels, a telephone-book-sized tome of the world developments that he was keen to implement. Mirvac (a shelf company purchased as a development vehicle, originally named for ‘miracle vacuum cleaners’) addressed the higher end of apartment designs, setting standards for interiors and especially high-end landscaping and the key driver of Mirvac: design quality.[369] Undoubtedly the best-known name in Sydney apartments is Meriton, founded by Harry Triguboff in the mid 1960s. Triguboff, born in 1933, was the son of Russian Jews who fled to Dalian in north-east China after the rise of Lenin. He moved to Australia in 1947, and graduating from Scots College, studied textiles at the University of Leeds in England before working in Israel and South Africa in textile businesses. He returned to Australia in 1960 and undertook a variety of small jobs including running a taxi fleet and a milk round. Becoming frustrated with a builder not finishing his own house, he took over the project. Finding the work to his liking, he developed a small block of four flats as an investment in Smith Street, Tempe, and in 1963, he developed a larger block of 18 units in Meriton Street, Gladesville, from whence came the name. The blocks were built in an unvarnished process, exposed concrete edges of slabs supporting brick walls and cheap aluminium windows. Working in the suburbs, at the lower end of affordable housing, the blocks were functional but never glamorous. A downturn in the industry in the late 1960s saw Triguboff almost go broke, only to be saved by securing a low-cost site as he made plans to emigrate to the US. From there, Meriton quickly grew. Realising that financing was a major impediment to sales, Triguboff started financing purchasers directly as well as holding a substantial portion of each completed project as apartments for rent. Meriton has an internal architectural office, with design standards focusing on value management, and now uses external architects for major sites such as World Square (Nation Fender), Australia’s tallest residential tower. Today, the more than 60,000 units that Meriton has built have made Triguboff one of the wealthiest men in Australia.[370]

… to now Looking back, the surprise is the rapidity with which these migrants harnessed the postwar boom to challenge the prewar orthodoxy, to build different types, in different ways, and with different materials. This is not to say that they were the only developers in Sydney, nor that their transformation of the city was total. Home building in brick veneer, which had started with firms such as AV Jennings before the war, flourished after the war was over. Subdivision into new suburbs of quarter-acre blocks often led to instant wealth for the former farmers on the fringe. The previous 150 years of land speculation for a carpet of individual houses didn’t stop. But the migrants’ understanding of European urbanity often enabled them to challenge the building typologies they encountered upon arrival; not to replace them, but to build alongside. Curiously, the buildings these European émigrés developed in this antipodean England (high-rise office towers, retail malls with car parks, apartment towers and motel/hotels) are the hallmark types of America of the second half of the 20th century: American inventions, built by Europeans in Australia. The success of the migrants is not so much the total transformation of Sydney, but rather the increased diversity of form and building types, adding layers of different built culture to complement the multicultural society that Australia became in those 25 years. That’s the diversity of Sydney today.

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Q and A: Ken Neale and his furniture Rebecca Hawcroft

The furniture photographed for this book was provided by Sydney-based collector and reluctant retailer Ken Neale. Ken’s friendship with Nectar Efkarpidis, the owner of Hotel Hotel, has meant that much of the furniture he has sourced over decades is now found throughout the hotel. What is even more remarkable in the context of this book is that between them, Ken and Hotel Hotel have a collection of furniture by the designers featured here, including Paul Kafka, George Kóródy and Steven Kalmar, that far exceeds that of any design museum or gallery collection. A key difference between the collector and the state-run museum is the need for a watertight provenance; an irrefutable paper trail linking the piece to a known designer. Ken doesn’t worry about that and instead uses his keen eye and innate curiosity about ceramics, art and furniture to guide his choices towards what he finds interesting. As a result, he has built up a large collection of works by many unknown and unloved designers, including Sydney’s émigrés. Collectors like Ken play a vital role in preserving the work of designers that sit outside the (admittedly small) group that have been the focus of research, exhibitions and publications. Ken is a genuine character with an idiosyncratic approach to his work, a great sense of humour and a contagious passion for collecting. This is part of a chat Ken and I had about his collecting, where he finds things and how he came across the furniture featured here. Rebecca Hawcroft: How do you go about your collecting? What is an average day like for you? Ken Neale: I don’t chase things. I think often the best things come to you. You have a sense for things. Sometimes something goes past you and you think, ‘I should have that’. Not because you know anything about it, but because you have a feeling for it. These days, unfortunately, we know so much about so much, well a lot of people do, that people think, ‘Oh, that’s a such an such’, but in the early days of collecting it wasn’t about that. It was about the appreciation of the pieces. I bought things that people were saying, ‘Oh isn’t it ugly’, and now people go, ‘Oh, you have one of those’. It’s really turned around. You might go to 100 garage sales and find nothing. You go to 101 and find something fantastic; that’s why you keep going. But I’m fairly broad. I always find something. Even if I get

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roses from somebody’s garden. Or if I come home with flowers in a vase from the side of the road, I’m happy. I still look for Australian contemporary furniture, which I think is very neglected. More people need to be educated on the value of what was made here and not just be looking at America or Scandinavia. Let’s look at Australia. Let’s look at what was made here. It doesn’t have to have a name, it just has to have beautiful materials. Look at coachwood and how exquisite coachwood is. Kóródy’s stuff is coachwood and when you refresh it, the colour of it is just exquisite. The designs were often imported or influenced by work in Europe and the United States, which wasn’t really available here, but people had the confidence to carry on what they had been doing before they emigrated. Designers like Kalmar and Kóródy used local woods and modified their styles for their new setting. They were a little more bohemian and thought, ‘Let’s try something new, let’s pull away from that heavy European influence, the climate is different, let’s live differently’. RH: The custom-made furniture of Kafka and Gerstl Furniture with highly worked veneers was quite different. So much of that furniture depends on its context. With estate sales and things, you often see the furniture in the houses, don’t you? KN: Yes, I do see lots in houses. It’s fantastic, but so much of it is neglected, and so much demolished with the houses because it has been built in. People are too quick to take out the internal fittings and joinery. People don’t give them time to live with them. Once it is taken out it is very hard to store it. It can have a use, but it’s expensive to restore and display, and often people don’t have the money to bring it back up to the quality that it should be. People want money for it, but when no one will pay, they put it out on the side of the road. It would be better for them to say, ‘Take it if you want it’. The cost of taking it out, cost of storage, cost of restoration is high. People know what they have but it’s another thing to find a home for it. Chairs and things are easy to buy and restore, but cabinetry is another issue.

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RH: During my research I looked at the Kafka files at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences and they include all these letters from people saying, ‘I have an apartment full of Kafka built-in furniture, I want to give it to the museum’; but the museum can’t take it. It just gets dismantled and if they are lucky, some pieces find a new home. Do you have favourite designers? KN: Australian? I have always collected Kóródy because he was under-appreciated, and still is. I must have 30 pieces of Kóródy, but that doesn’t mean I can’t find another piece. I first saw it in a dealer’s shop in Sydney early on, and became more and more aware of it and bought anything in his style. I have two single beds or day beds, which came out of a most ordinary house. They had these two day beds and I thought, ‘Better have these’, and

Ken Neale photographed in his flat above his shop in Darlinghurst

they are the only two I have ever seen. Kóródy’s furniture has this bohemian feel about it, a casualness, it’s serious without being serious. It’s not fussy and he seems to have been following the furniture style of Swiss designer Pierre Jeanneret, which was very contemporary. The Kalmar furniture was also very individual. The things I have picked up have individuality, they say, ‘Hi’, to you. Often I have had them for a long time and when I have them restored, I appreciate what a nice piece they are. Again it is buying things that are interesting. And they are still out there, you have to look and trust your buying and what you’re looking at. It doesn’t matter if it turns out to be a name or nothing; enjoy it. It also never really deterred me if the sofa had the springs coming out, or chairs with stuffing coming out everywhere. I think, ‘Well, that can look good’. The idea of repair is an interesting one. I think this hinders museums from collecting 20th-century furniture. Often it is in poor condition. Museums focus on things in good, original condition. I think that is foolish because a lot of these pieces, they don’t turn up again. You turn them down and it might take 10 years to see another one. How much of this stuff was produced? Probably not a lot. Hotel Hotel had the foresight to buy Kóródy pieces and lots of the Kafkastyle furniture from me because they appreciated that restoring the pieces would bring them up-to-date and give something to the spaces. Of course, it’s old furniture so it’s not always going to stand up to the amount of wear it gets, but we deal with that when it happens and have things repaired. Modern furniture is not immune to that either. It’s disposable, where as this furniture is not disposable, we are preserving it. Hotel Hotel has built up quite an extensive collection, which is, I think, why it is so popular. I had a brand new roll of 1940s or 1950s Axminster floral print carpet, which is now central to Hotel Hotel’s ground floor in the

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Monster kitchen and bar’s Salon and Dining Rooms. I carried that around with me for years. I didn’t want to cut it up because it was too good. The hotel realised it was going to work with all the Kafka chairs and tables on it and said, ‘Let’s use it’. I have had lots of elderly people come and say, ‘Wow, we had this in our lounge room’. They sit down on the floor and say, ‘Take my photo with this carpet!’. A good thing about the hotel is it has exposed people to a lot of these pieces, but what I find most interesting is that it has such a wide age group that enjoy it. Older and young people are comfortable there. The majority of hotels cater for a certain group and this hotel hasn’t done that; it has been broad with its clientele. It’s for everybody to enjoy. It’s great when people come in and say, ‘We had one of those but ours didn’t look like that, it was worn out’, and I say, ‘That’s probably it, I probably rescued it from you’. RH: Where is it all going? Your warehouse is groaning with precious things. KN: It’s available, it’s for sale, but I think it’s also got to go to the right situation. I think people have to appreciate it as well. I suppose what I do is rescue things and say, ‘Thank you very much. I don’t mind if you have a broken leg, or the cane has a hole in it, I’ll have you thank you very much’. Some of the pieces become friends. I think, ‘I’ll put those friends and all those broken pieces back together’. Some people call me a hoarder, but I call it preserving things rather than hoarding. I recently opened a tea chest I packed 20 years ago and thought, ‘Oh, I have one of those. That’s interesting, I bought that 25 years ago. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was worth keeping.’ Ken, and a small sample of his collection can be found at Twentieth Century Modern, his little shop at 114 Burton Street, Darlinghurst. A lot more can be found at Hotel Hotel, NewActon, Canberra.

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1. Ergo F. Kunz, Displaced Persons: Calwell’s New Australians, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1988, p. 49. 2. Kunz, 1988, p. 185. 3. August Sarnitz (ed.) ‘Twentieth century Viennese architecture’ in Architecture in Vienna, Springer, New York, 1998, p.26. 4. A key example is William Jordy, American Buildings and Their Architects: The Impact of European Modernism on the Mid-twentieth Century, Double Day, New York, 1972. Charlotte Benton, A Different World: Emigre Architects in Britain 1928–1958, RIBA Heinz Gallery, London, 1995, also made a significant contribution to the field. 5. Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1941 p. 495. This legacy continues to be a focus of attention and was the subject of the 2014 exhibition and publication Designing Home: Jews and Midcentury Modernism organised by The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, with guest curator Donald Albrecht. 6. Conrad Hamann, ‘Paths of beauty: The afterlife of Australian colonial architecture’ in Transition, no. 26, Spring, 1988, pp. 27–44. This began to change with the influence of MARS members on the Sulman committee, with a push towards awards for modern architecture. 7. Neil Clerehan, quoted in Hamann, 1988. p. 30. 8. The focus on an authentic European modernism is identified by Conrad Hamann in ‘Frederick Romberg and the problem of European Authenticity’, The Europeans, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997, pp. 37–58. 9. See for example, ‘Seidler flats commenced’, Construction, 23 May 1951, p. 7. 10. See Julie Willis’ examination of the place of Harry Seidler in Australian design writing in ‘The migration of an ideal: Harry Seidler’, Building Dwelling and Drifting Conference Papers, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 372–6. 11. Peter Myers, ‘House/Hugh Buhrich/1972’, exhibition catalogue, Garry Anderson Gallery, Sydney, 1991. 12. Hamann, 1997, p. 57. 13. Ernst Korner, NSW Board of Architects registration file. 14. Korner was known as both Ernst Korner and Arnošt Korner. Czech architectural historian

Martin Strakoš has written about Korner in a number of publications including the Ostrava Architecture Guide, National Heritage Institute, Ostrava 2009. 15. Anne Watson, former curator at the MAAS, who published a number of articles on Paul Kafka, Artes Studios, Hugh Buhrich’s furniture and Stephen Kalmar, stands as one exception. See, for example, A. Watson ‘Kafka and Kalmar’, The Furniture History Society Australasia Journal, no. 2, 2004, pp. 10–13. 16. See Helen Ennis’ ‘Blue Hydrangeas; Four emigré photographers’, The Europeans, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997, pp. 102–18. 17. Kuehn, who photographed Hugh Buhrich’s furniture designs in 1940, was the subject of a piece by Valerie Lawson: http://dancelines. com.au/research/nanette-kuehn-the-forgottenphotographer/. 18. JV Maciuika, Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics and the German State, 1890–1920, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005. 19. Roger Butler, The Europeans: Emigre Artists in Australia 1930–1960, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra p. 15. 20. Wojciech Lesnikowski, ‘Functionalism in Czechoslovakia, Hungarian and Polish Architecture’, in East European Modernism, Architecture in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland Between the Wars 1919–1939, Rizzoli, New York, 1996, p.16. 21. Maciuika, 2005, p. 132. After World War II, Breslau was renamed Wrocław and became a part of Poland. 22. Today, the Akademie der Künste Berlin. 23. Deborah A Barnstone, ‘Not the Bauhaus: The Breslau Academy of Art and Applied Arts’, Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 62, no. 1, 2008, p. 46. 24. Barnstone, 2008, pp. 46–55, 49, 52 (appointment of head, August Endell). 25. Maciuika, 2005, p. 48. 26. Maciuika, 2005, p. 103. 27. Maciuika, 2005, p. 48. 28. Maciuika, 2005, p. 49. 29. John Heskett, ‘Government Policy and German Design 1870–1918’, A John Heskett Reader: Design, History, Economics, Clive Dilnot, ed., Bloomsbury Press, pp.147–148, 2016. See also JV Maciuika, Before the Bauhaus, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p.58. 30. Vincent Clark, ‘A struggle for existence: The professionalisation of German architects’, in German Professions, 1800–1950, Geoffrey Cocks and Konrad H Jarausch Lurcy (eds), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1990, p. 150. 31. Maciuika, 2005, p. 8. 32. Barnstone, 2008, p. 52. 33. Clark, 1990, pp. 151, 154. 34. Bund Deutscher Architekten (BDA), 1903 Proclamation. Reproduced in Clark, 1990, p. 151. 35. József Sisa, Motherland and Progress. Hungarian Architecture and Design, Birkhäuser, Basel, Switzerland, 2016, p. 459. 36. Andras Ferkai, ‘Hungarian architecture between the wars’ in D Wiebenson and József

Sisa (eds), The Architecture of Historic Hungary, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1998, p. 254. 37. Virag Molnar, ‘Cultural politics and modernist architecture: The tulip debate in postwar Hungary’, American Sociological Review, vol. 70.1 , February 2005, pp. 111–35. 38. John Macsai, ‘Architecture as opposition’, Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 38, no. 4, Summer, 1985, pp. 8–14. 39. Anthony Alofsin, When Buildings Speak: Architecture as Language in the Hapsburg Empire and its Aftermath, 1867–1933, University of Chicago Press, 2006, pp. 265–266. 40. Janos Bonta, ‘Functionalism in Hungarian architecture’, Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 38, no. 4, Summer 1985, p. 160. 41. Christopher Long, ‘East Central Europe: National identity and international perspective’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 61, no. 4, December 2002, pp. 519–29. 42. Vladimir Slapeta, ‘The education of architects in the Czech Republic’, Piranesi, 13–14, vol. 9, Spring 2002, pp. 30–1. 43. Jerzy Zywicki, ‘Education of personnel for the needs of the kingdom of Poland in architecture, construction, and civil engineering’, Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Sklodowska, vol. 8.1 , 2010, pp. 21. In 2016, the Lviv Polytechnic National University. 44. Zywicki, 2010, pp. 21, 47–8. 45. Lesnikowski, 1996, p. 29. 46. Despina Stratigakos, ‘“I myself want to build”: Women, architectural education and the integration of Germany’s technical colleges’, Paedagogica Historica, vol. 43, no. 6, December 2007, pp. 727–56. 47. Stratigakos, 2007, pp. 729–30. 48. Clark, 1990, p. 150. 49. Stratigakos, 2007, pp. 727–56. 50. Clark, 1990, p. 145. 51. DA Barnstone, ‘Not the Bauhaus. The Breslau Academy of Art and Applied Arts’, Journal of Architectural Education, 2008, vol. 62, no. 1, p. 49. 52. Clark, 1990, p. 150. See also Katherine Romba, ‘Aesthetics and the professional identity of the modern German engineer’, Proceedings of the Second International Congress on Construction History, Cambridge University, 29 March – 2 April 2006, p. 2731. 53. Barnstone, 2008, p. 47. 54. Alan Windsor, Peter Behrens: Architect and Designer, Architectural Press, London 1981, p. 159. 55. Eve Blau, ‘Isotype and architecture in Red Vienna: The modern projects of Otto Neurath and Josef Frank’, Austrian Studies, vol. 14: Culture and Politics in Red Vienna, 2006, p. 248. 56. Blau, 2006, pp. 23–3. 57. Josef Frank, cited in Blau, 2006, p. 244. 58. Josef Frank, cited in Blau, 2006, p. 256. 59. Emily Robertson, ‘A much misunderstood monster: the German ogre and Australia’s final and forgotten recruiting campaign of the Great War’, History Australia, vol. 13:3, 2016. pp. 351–67. Robertson surveys some of the more ‘sophisticated’ campaigns. 60. Aspects of this cultural dissonance are explored in Mirjana Lozanovska and Julia

McKnight, ‘Émigré architects and the Australian architecture establishment’, in Paul Hogben and Judith O’Callaghan (eds), Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 32, Architecture, Institutions and Change, SAHANZ, Sydney, 2015, pp. 351–65. 61. It is worth recalling the Institute of Architects NSW had argued over the topic of registration since the late 19th century, only agreeing to the process in 1921. JM Freeland, The Making of a Profession, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1971, pp. 235–37. 62. Waterhouse was also the secretary of the NSW Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA). Fascimile of original letter is in the AIA’s file on George Molnar. 63. Board of Architects of NSW memorandum initialled A.R., 15 March 1943, in AIA’s file on George Molnar. 64. ‘Report of the Committee examining application of naturalised persons seeking registration, as adopted by the Board of Architects of NSW’, 28 October 1946. Facsimile of memorandum in NSW AIA personal file of George Hayes. 65. ‘Recommendations of the Committee examining the Application of Naturalised Persons seeking registration, as adopted by the Board of Architects of NSW’, 25 June – 22 October 1945. Letter to PJ Gordon, Facsimile of memorandum in NSW AIA personal file of George Hayes. 66. ‘Recommendations of the Committee examining the Application of Naturalised Persons seeking registration, as adopted by the Board of Architects of NSW’, 25 June – 22 October 1945. 67. ‘Board of Architects of NSW. Examination Results’, Construction, 15 October 1952, p. 4. The Board of Architects documents on Kolos differ in this account, citing further exams. 68. Construction, 18 October 1944, p. 10. These amendments were gazetted in 1944. 69. The Architects Act 1921 and amendments administered by the Board of Architects of New South Wales forbids the use of the title. ‘An individual must not represent himself or herself to be an architect, and must not allow himself or herself to be represented to be an architect unless he or she is an architect.’ NSW Architects Act 2003:89, Sec. 9 (1). 70. Construction, 18 October 1944, p. 10. These amendments were gazetted in 1944. 71. Henry Epstein file, NSW Board of Architects. 72. Henry Epstein file, NSW Board of Architects. 73. Andrew Paul Lowden, ‘Who is Dr Henry Epstein?’, BArchitecture thesis, University of Sydney, 1995. 74. Australian Home Beautiful, November 1948, pp. 26–7. 75. Another Reeves project in Dover Heights was published in Construction, 19 May 1954. 76. Hugo Stossel file, NSW Board of Architects Registration. 77. Australian Women’s Weekly, 9 March 1946, p. 43. 78. Building and Engineering, 24 May 1951, p. 91. 79. Hans Peter Oser file, NSW Board of

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Architects; Teddy Quinton, ‘Postwar modernism in Sydney’, BArchitecture thesis, University of NSW, 1997, p. 81. 80. HP Oser, The Encyclopedia of Australian Architecture, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2012, p. 519. 81. ‘The house of surprises’, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 February 1941, p. 12. 82. Quinton, 1997, p. 85. 83. Held at Farmer’s Blaxland Gallery. Le Courrier Australien, 28 March, 1952, p. 5. 84. George Reves file, NSW Board of Architects. 85. Architecture in Australia, July–September 1955, cover. 86. Architecture in Australia, April–June 1956, pp. 42, 51. 87. Gabor Lukacs file, NSW Board of Architects. 88. Australia Women’s Weekly, 21 October 1953, p. 59; Sydney Morning Herald, 14 December 1953, p. 7. 89. ‘Owner flats at Vaucluse’, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 November 1953, p. 13. 90. Canberra Times, 12 August 1965, p. 15. 91. Construction Review, June 1969, pp. 26–9. 92. Paul Georgiades, ‘Modernism in postwar Sydney: three houses by Hugo Stossel’, BArchitecture thesis, University of Technology, Sydney, 1992. 93. Theodore Fry file, NSW Board of Architects. 94. Cross Section, May 1960. 95. Paul Johnson and Susan Lorne-Johnson (eds), Architects of the Middle Third, vol. 1, University of NSW, Sydney, 1992, p. 143. 96. Remarkably intact, the Pently house has been included in the Caroline Simpson Research Library ‘Recorded for the Future’ project, see www.sydneylivingmuseums.com. 97. ‘Sydney’s first mixed development combines offices, apartments’, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 February, 1968, p. 18. 98. Kolos obituary by JH Bryant, RAIA Bulletin, March–April 2001, p. 12. 99. Trudie Moddel, interview with author, October 2016. 100. Sydney Morning Herald, 3 April 1966, p. 58. 101. Silvan’s Dr M Hodzu Business Academy appeared in The Architect & Building News, 12 August 1938, pp. 138–9, and on the cover of Forum VIII, no. 2, 1938, as well as on pp. 32–4. Silvan’s other Trencin project, the Mestska sporitemna (bank building), features in the same edition on pp. 27–31. 102. The Silvan Story is based on the manuscript autobiography of Ferdinand and Edita Silvan, edited by Susan Silvan, now in the archives of the Museum of Jewish Culture in Bratislava. Klara Kubickova, Osudy Silvanovcov, (The Silvan Story), Slovak National Museum, Museum of Jewish Culture, Bratislava, 2002. 103. Ernest Korner, Board of Architects file, viewed May 2016. 104. ‘Goodbye Architect’, Network: Official Monthly Newspaper of the NSW Electricity Commission, January 1968, p. 7, State Records NSW. 105. Vladimir Slapeta, ‘The education of Architects in the Czech Republic’, Piranesi 13–14 vol. 9, Spring 2002, p. 30.

106. Photographs of Silvan’s student projects are retained in his personal papers. 107. Henrieta Moravčíková, ‘Functionalism in Slovakia: The tool of modernisation and national revival’. Proceedings from the conference ‘Modernism in Europe – Modernism in Gdynia, the Interwar Architecture and its Preservation’, 27–29 September 2007, , p. 38. 108. Moravčíková, 2007, p. 37. 109. Kubickova, 2002, p. 64. 110. Silvan’s personal papers. Silvan’s personal papers are held by Susan Silvan. They include his handwritten 1944–45 diary, a short autobiography written in 1981 in English at the request of his daughter Susan. Other papers include the typed record of Ferdinand’s time in the Electricity Commission, numerous photographs of his Slovakian architectural work and sketches and drawings of his work in Australia. 111. Kubickova, 2002, pp. 65–6. 112. Silvan’s personal papers. 113. Moravčíková, 2007, p. 40. 114. Kubickova, 2002, p. 60. 115. Silvan’s autobiography, 1981. 116. Eva Buhrich never registered and instead designed in partnership with her husband Hugh Buhrich, while maintaining a journalism career. Gert Selheim, a Swisstrained architect, pursued a second career in Australia as a graphic designer. Hungarian George Kóródy enquired about registration, but did not register, remaining an interior and furniture designer. 117. Letter from Walter Gropius, 9 November 1954, Silvan’s personal papers. 118. Albrecht Dümling, The Vanished Musician: Jewish Refugees in Australia, Diana K Weekes (trans.), Peter Lang, Bern, Switzerland, 2016. 119. Network, Official Monthly Newspaper of the NSW Electricity Commission, vol. 1, no. 3, 1958, p. 1. 120. Silvan’s typed record of his time at the Electricity Commission, (no title, no date), p. 1. 121. State Records NSW holds a small collection of original documents related to this period of the Electricity Commission’s operations and power station development. 122. Silvan’s typed record of his time at the Electricity Commission, p. 2. 123. Silvan’s typed record of his time at the Electricity Commission, p. 2. 124. The second-last page of Silvan’s typed notes recording his Electricity Commission work, completed after his retirement, is a detailed breakdown of his (very low) labour costs and the savings incurred by the commission. 125. Christoph Schnoor, ‘Ernst Plischke and the Dixon Street Flats’, in Paul Hogben and Judith O’Callaghan (eds) Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 32, Architecture, Institutions and Change, SAHANZ, Sydney, 2015, p. 561. 126. Linda Tyler, ‘The Architecture of E. A. Plischke in New Zealand: 1939–1962’, Masters thesis, University of Canterbury, 1986, pp. 47, 49. 127. Schnoor, 2015.

128. Harriet Edquist, Ernest Fooks, Architect, School of Architecture & Design, RMIT, Melbourne, 2001. 129. Catherine Townsend, ‘Architects, exiles, ‘new’ Australians’, in Julie Willis, Philip Goad and Andrew Hutson (eds), FIRM(ness) Commodity DE-light?: Questioning the Canons, papers from the 5th Annual Conference of SAHANZ, Melbourne, 1998, p. 328. 130. Roger Benjamin, ‘Fugue in Yellow’, Portrait Magazine, National Portrait Gallery, 7 December 2015, , viewed March 2016. 131. Benjamin, 2015. 132. R Benjamin, ‘Prague on the Sunshine Coast: The Peregian Roadhouse by Alex Jelinek’. Fabrications, vol. 21, no. 2, 2012m pp. 61–82. 133. Kubickova, 2002, p. 82. 134. Author interviews with Heinz Gerstl and the family’s papers provided information on the company known as M. Gerstl Cabinet Works until c.1955, M. Gerstl Furniture until c.1962, then M. Gerstl Furniture Pty Ltd. Heinz Gerstl’s memoir is planned for private publication in 2017. 135. Eva Skvarova, ‘The furniture firm Emil Gerstel Prague and its collaboration with architects’, Bachelor’s Thesis, Faculty of Philosophy, Institute for Art History, Charles University, Prague, 2015. 136. Harry Seidler, Houses, Interiors and Projects, Associated General Publishers, Sydney, 1954. The book records many of Seidler’s suppliers and craftsmen, including Landau and Gerstl. 137. Rose Seidler House: Furniture: Harry Seidler interviewed by Peter Watts and Linda Rector about the furniture at Rose Seidler House [sound recording], May 1987, Caroline Simpson Library and Research Collection, Sydney Living Museums. 138. Information from Penelope Seidler 2016. 139. Now held at the National Archives Australia. 140. Tony Stephens, ‘The woman behind a racing dynasty’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 December 2008. 141. For the Landaus’ design collection and their role in the Sydney art world, see Catriona Quinn, ‘The prism of provenance: the Landau collection of Krimper furniture’, Australiana, vol. 37, no. 4, November 2015. 142. PXD 613 Tube 5 Harry Seidler Collection, State Library of NSW. Job No 51.5 Landau House Lots 20, 21 Bynya Rd Whale Beach CAB 56. Don Gazzard, then a young trainee in Seidler’s office, drew the plans. Seidler also published the terrace design in Architecture and Arts in July 1955. 143. PXD 970 Hugh Buhrich collection of architectural and design plans, State Library of NSW. 144. Hugh Gordon, ‘Hugh Buhrich’, BArch thesis, University of Sydney, 1991. 145. PXD 970 Hugh Buhrich collection of architectural and design plans, State Library of NSW. Job No 264 Drawing 1, ‘Furniture for Mr G Spinak, 42 Bundara Rd Bellevue Hill’, 3 November 1958.

146. PXD 970 Hugh Buhrich collection of architectural and design plans, State Library of NSW, Job No 473 War Memorial and Synagogue, Anzac Parade Kingsford, for the KingsfordMaroubra Hebrew congregation; over 55 separate plan drawings from 16 November 1964 to 10 October 1965. 147. Author interview with Alex and Jessie Bartos, 11 October 2016, and their privately published memoir, No Fixed Address, 2013, provided information on the Schwartz house and Albart Co Pty Ltd. 148. Reves’ work is under-researched and unrepresented in museums. He was born Revesz in Budapest, opened an office in Pitt St, Sydney, in 1951, occasionally worked as ‘George Reeves’ and retired in 1980. Information here is based on Ted Quinton’s 1997 interview with Reves for his paper, ‘Postwar Modernism in Sydney, George Reves and Hans Peter Oser’, BArch thesis, University of NSW, 1997. 149. Dora Wiebenson, József Sisa and Pál Lővei, The Architecture of Historic Hungary, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1998, p. 273. 150. Undated ‘Fractional Furniture’ brochure, Gerstl family papers. 151. ‘Giant Homes Exhibition Opens Today’, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 February 1954, p. 7. 152. ‘Modular Radio-phonograph units by Harry Seidler’, Architecture and Arts, July 1957, p. 26. 153. Advertisement for ‘M. Gerstl Makers of Fine Furniture’, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 October 1963. 154. Michael Bogle, ‘Architecture, coffee and cocktails’, and Paul Hogben, ‘Double modernity: the first international hotels’, in Paul Hogben and Judith O’Callaghan (eds), Leisure Space: The Transformation of Sydney, 1945–1970, NewSouth, Sydney, 2014. 155. ‘The Profitable Club Bar’, Hotel, Motel and Restaurant, June 1961, pp. 12–13. 156. Advertisement, ‘Australia’s new International Hotel’, Canberra Times, 9 December 1960. 157. Gerstl Constructions, which built low-rise home units and houses, operated from the early 1970s until 1995. 158. Kirsty Grant, ‘Strange shapes and all’, in Mid-Century Modern: Australian Furniture Design, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2014, p. 2. 159. The following is an imaginative reconstruction based on interviews and correspondence with Dick Van Leer and the discussion of Sidon’s flat in the print media of the day. 160. ‘Colour transforms a small flat’, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 July 1953, p. 3. 161. ‘Sydney flat – simply modern, strictly functional’, Australian House & Garden, June 1954, pp. 44–5, 82. 162. ‘Personal statement and declaration by alien passengers entering Australia (Form A42)’, A12508, 25/315, NAA; Note: While historically part of Hungary on the great plain, Tiszaujlak is also referred to as Vylok, a city on the Tisza River which is now on the Ukraine/Hungary border and became part of the Ukraine after the Treaty of Versailles.

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163. Architecture Diploma and Transcript for Kóródi György, Budapest University of Technology and Economics Archive, BMELT 105/d. D-209/1907. Note: The Royal Joseph University is now the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. 164. ‘Revesz (Rosenfeld) Samuel’, ; Franciska Szabó, personal communication, 12 February 2014. 165. John Macsai, ‘Competing ideas in Hungarian Architecture’, in Wojciech Leśnikowsi (ed.), East European Modernism: Architecture in Czechoslovakia, Hungary & Poland Between the Wars 1919–1939, Rizzoli, New York, 1996, pp. 113–24. 166. A Greco, ‘Gobelin-Részvénytársaság’, Krónika, 1924, p. 67. Krónika provides a chronicle of Kóródy’s return from World War I up to 1924 and the establishment of his career as a tapestry weaver, and owner of the GRECO business to 1924. 167. ‘Revesz (Rosenfeld) Samuel’. 168. Éva Horányi, ‘Kóródy György (1890–1957), a gobelinszövő építész’, unpublished conference paper, 2012. For examples of Kóródy designs in the collection of the Hungarian Museum of Applied Arts see . 169. ‘Iparművészet Magyarországon a két világháború között’, . 170. Horányi, 2012 171. Horányi, 2012 172. CG Holme (ed,), Decorative Art: The Studio Yearbook, 1933, pp. 116, 135. 173. For information about Kóródy’s teaching duties at the school between 1932 and 1935, see Budapest Municipal Technical Drawing School, Annual Yearbook 1932/3, 1933, p. 67; Budapest Municipal Technical Drawing School, Annual Yearbook 1933/4, 1934, p. 22; Budapest Municipal Technical Drawing School, Annual Yearbook 1934/5, 1935, p. 15. 174. Horányi, 2012. 175. ‘Groupe VIII (Décoration intérieure et mobilier), classe 38 (Mobilier et ensemble mobiliers)’, Liste des récompenses décernées par le Jury International – Exposition Internationale de Paris 1937, 1939, pp. 82, 87. 176. James J Adams, ‘Tradition re-styled’, Australian Home Beautiful, January 1951, pp. 10–13. 177. ‘The Scene Abroad. Hungary’, Decoration and Glass, July 1939, p. 61. 178. ‘Gay and friendly – impressions of Australians’, The West Australian, 6 April 1940, p. 14. 179. Dick van Leer, ‘Artes Studios History’, personal communication, 25 April 2014. 180. ‘Architect sums up Sydney’, The Sun, NSW, 28 April 1940 p. 7. 181. Adams, 1951. It states in this article that Kóródy’s first public work in Australia was the Spirit on France exhibition in 1944, which suggests that the exhibition he had come here to work on did not eventuate. 182. Van Leer, 25 April 2014. For details of the ‘Fayence’ range see ‘Fayence Ceramics by

Professor Kóródy’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 April 1945, p. 5. 183. ‘The Spirit of France: Symbolic Exhibition in Sydney’, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 September 1944, p. 2. 184. ‘The “Spirit of France”. Exhibition planned for September’, Sydney Morning Herald, 28 June 1944, p. 5. 185. Robert Segaert, conversation with the author, 15 June 2016. 186. ‘Brilliant Pageant’, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 July 1926, p. 16. 187. ‘Social Sidelights’, The Sun, 11 December 1932, p. 34. 188. ‘President Masaryk: a personal interview’, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 December 1935, p. 10. 189. Robert Segaert, 2016. 190. ‘Sydney’s talking about’, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 December 1947, p. 12. 191. ‘The Shop Detective’, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 November 1947, p. 13. 192. Van Leer, 25 April 2014. 193. Dick van Leer, The Incredible Life of Dick van Leer, self-published, Avoca Beach, NSW, 2010, p. 91. 194. Van Leer, 25 April 2014. 195. ‘Interiors should be designed’, Advertiser, 25 April 1953, p. 9. 196. ‘Design for happiness’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 March 1949, p. 9. 197. ‘Design for happiness’, 20 March 1949, p. 9. 198. Adams, January 1951, pp. 10–13. 199. Van Leer, 2010, p. 88. 200. ‘The Latest in “Airborne” Furniture’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 December 1954, p. 3. 201. Van Leer, 25 April 2014. 202. Van Leer, 25 April 2014. 203. According to Dick van Leer, Segaert’s house in Castlecrag was designed by Buhrich who was a friend to all at Artes. The NSW phone records have Segaert residing at Castlecrag from 1954 onwards. 204. Van Leer, 2010, p. 88. 205. Michael Bogle, interview with Dick van Leer and Lyndal Evatt, 29 June 2013, SIDA Foundation. p. 3. 206. Alan Perry, personal correspondence, 12 January 2014. 207. New Citizen, 15 December 1947, p. 7. 208. See Terry Lane, Vienna 1913: Josef Hoffmann’s Gallia Apartment, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1983; and Tim Bonyhady, Good Living Street: The Fortunes of my Viennese Family, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2011. 209. Anne Bonyhady’s letters and diaries are held in a private collection. 210. New Citizen, 15 February 1947, p. 11; 15 April 1947, p. 10. 211. New Citizen, 15 February 1947, p. 3. 212. Sydney Morning Herald, 25 June 1940, p. 21. 213. Sydney Morning Herald, 27 November 1947, p. 14. 214. Sun, 13 March 1949, p. 46. 215. Sunday Herald Magazine, 20 March 1949, p. 9. 216. New Citizen, April 1946, p. 7; republished Daily Examiner, Grafton, 14 June 1946, p. 7.

217. New Citizen, 15 December 1946, p. 11. 218. Australian Women’s Weekly, 16 August 1947, p. 39. 219. Truth, 27 October 1946, p. 43. 220. Sydney Morning Herald, 24 May 1947, p. 30; 30 August 1947, p. 3; 7 August 1948, p. 21; 16 September 1948, p. 10; 23 April 1949, p. 28. 221. ‘Latin Quarter: 3 Way Restaurant’, Hotel and Café News, April 1958, pp. 12–13. 222. ‘Latin Quarter: 3 Way Restaurant’, April 1958, pp. 12–13. 223. Gary Kurzer noted that the project gave his father a greater profile. Interview with author, July 2016. 224. Michael A Vidalis, ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, Architectural Review, 30 June 2010, . 225. Vidalis, 2010. 226. The Society of Interior Designers of Australia began c.1950 in Sydney, establishing education activities and exhibitions. Membership was open to decorators, architects interested in interiors and certain members of the furniture trade. 227. As identified in Michael Bogle, ‘Architecture, coffee and cocktails’, in Paul Hogben and Judith O’Callaghan (eds), Leisure Space: The Transformation of Sydney, 1945– 1970, NewSouth, Sydney, 2014, pp. 108–27. 228. FJ Zipfinger, Board of Architects file. 229. FJ Zipfinger, Board of Architects file. 230. Clive Carney, Impact of Design, Lawson Press, Sydney, 1959. 231. Australian Home Beautiful, October 1956, p. 23. 232. See Karl Bittman (ed.), Strauss to Matilda, Wenkart Foundation, 1988, with a short chapter about the family, pp. 293–301. 233. Never registered, there is no official record of the Soos brothers’ qualifications. Notes in the MAAS research file indicate that when interviewed, Guyla Soos indicated Imre had never graduated from architecture and had numerous bankruptcies. 234. ‘Brothers produce striking designs’, Advertiser, 23 January 1952, p. 2. 235. ‘Flat for bachelor’, Australian House & Garden, December 1954, p. 20. 236. One of these 1954 Soos chairs is held in the collection of the MAAS. 237. ‘“Space-ship” Coffee Lounge’, Hotel and Café News, July 1957, p. 14. 238. ‘Telephone book was open sesame to material’, Australian House and Garden, October 1959, pp. 33, 80. 239. MAAS’ Soos research file includes correspondence from Imre Soos from March 1990. 240. ‘Interview with Hugh Buhrich’, Constructive Women Architecture and Design Archive, 1939–2009, State Library NSW, 5 January 1998, p. 13. 241. Kóródy’s application and initial refusal is noted in correspondence within Charles (Hajos) Hayes, Board of Architects file. In a document held by the National Archives, Kóródy refers to himself as an architect unregistered in Australia (NAA: A261, 1945/783).

242. Hugh Buhrich collection of architectural and design plans, State Library NSW, PXD 970, 07/4. 243. Peter Myers, ‘House/Hugh Buhrich/1972’, exhibition catalogue, Garry Anderson Gallery, Sydney, 1991. 244. Hugh Buhrich collection of architectural and design plans, State Library NSW, PXD 970, 07/4. 245. Anne Watson, ‘Brave new world’, in Monument, vol. 83, February 2008. 246. Nanette Kuehn photographed the furniture as a record of the couple’s early design work. These photographs are now part of the remarkable ‘Hugh Buhrich scrap album’, held by the State Library of NSW; PXD 1012. 247. ‘Interview with Hugh Buhrich’, Constructive Women Architecture and Design Archive, 1939– 2009, State Library NSW, 5 January 1998, p. 13. 248. Hugh, surviving on a scholarship that was withdrawn by the German government, finished his degree in the lesser University of Danzig (now Poland). There is some confusion regarding the Buhrichs’ architectural education, however, Hugh Buhrich’s NSW Board of Architects file, his 1998 oral history recording (Constructive Women Archive) and Eva Buhrich’s unpublished biographical essay (private collection Neil Buhrich), record the sequence of institutions as noted here. 249. I am indebted to Glenn Harper for this research as detailed in his unpublished paper, ‘In paraphrasing Breuer: the Buhrich reclining chair as a Sydney translation, c 1941–1972’. 250. See Catherine Lassen’s article, ‘Hugh and Eva Buhrich: In and outside Architecture, Australia’, in Paul Hogben and Judith O’Callaghan (eds) Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 32, Architecture, Institutions and Change, SAHANZ, Sydney, 2015, pp. 331–40. 251. Architecture and Arts, January 1954. 252. Neil Buhrich, interview with author, September 2016. Neil recalls Hugh continuing to submit flat-roofed designs, which continued to fail. 253. Jo Holder, Robert Freestone, Joan Kerr and Kate Davidson, Gorge Molnar, Human Scale in Architecture, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2003, p. 17. 254. Eric C Daniels, A History of the Faculty of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture University of NSW, Sydney, 1988, p. 32. 255. Holder et al., 2003, p. 12. 256. Holder et al., 2003, p. 17. 257. ‘Builder of a solid foundation’, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 February 2002, p. 42. 258. Teddy Quinton, ‘Postwar modernism in Sydney’, BArchi thesis, University of NSW, 1997, p. 83. 259. Constructive Women Architecture and Design Archive, 1939–2009, SLNSW, Interview with Hugh Buhrich, 5 January 1998, p. 12. 260. Henry Cowan, A Contradiction in Terms, The Autobiography of Henry J. Cowan, Sydney University and Hermitage Press, Sydney, 1993. 261. Peter Kollar Obituary, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 January 2001, p. 16. 262. Anne Watson (ed.), Building a Masterpiece:

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The Sydney Opera House, NewSouth Books, Sydney, 2003, pp. 50, 53. 263. Watson, 2003, p. 56 264. Darrel Conybeare, Molnar obituary in Architecture Bulletin, October 1998, p. 19. 265. Holder et al., 2003, p. 11. 266. Anne Watson, ‘Kafka and Kalmar: two European furniture designers in postwar Sydney’, The Furniture History Society – Australasia, no. 2, 2004. Watson notes information about Kalmar’s background has been sourced through her 1985 interview with Kalmar and a 1990 interview with his wife, Carlotta. 267. ‘Many pretty girls on board Orion today’, Sun, 11 February 1937, p. 35. 268. Sun, 18 September 1938, p. 5. 269. MAAS research file on Kalmar includes notes from a 1990 interview with Carlotta Kalmar. During this time, he was seeking patents on the design of tables, lamps, chairs and cabinets; see National Archives A1337 Series, which includes 11 applications for registration of designs by Stephen (sic) Kalmar. 270. Watson, 2004. 271. The 1948 exhibition 7 Designers was curated by well-known interior designer Marion Hall Best. The exhibition What Is Good Modern Design? followed in 1951. 272. ‘Modern Hotel Design Ideas’, Hotel and Café News, July 1960, pp. 14–15. 273. The first column appeared on 25 June 1961. 274. Australian Women’s Weekly, 29 May 1963, p. 12. 275. Women’s World, 7 May 1975. 276. The Home, September 1940. 277. Australian Women’s Weekly, 7 September 1946, p. 48. 278. Bronwyn Hanna, ‘Absence and presence: A historiography of early women architects’, PhD thesis, UNSW, 2000, p. 288. 279. Lassen, 2015. 280. An example of the modernist furniture designs Buhrich provided can be found at ‘Now the lounges, chairs and stools’, Australian House and Garden, May 1955, & pp. 34–5. 281. See ‘Two low cost tables’, with designs for a folding and dropleaf table, Australian House & Garden, January 1955, p. 41. 282. Australian House & Garden, June 1955, p. 33; and September 1955, p. 44. 283. Australian Homemaker and Handyman, May 1955, p. 40. 284. Australian Homemaker and Handyman, December 1954, p. 52. 285. Michaelis’s photographs were included in the touring exhibition that was the culmination of the Australian Women Photographers Research Project, 1981, and in the book by Barbara Hall, Jenni Mather and Christine Gillespie, Australian Women Photographers 1840–1960, Greenhouse Publications, Melbourne, 1986. Helen Ennis curated an exhibition of Michaelis’s photographs for the Jewish Museum of Australia in Melbourne in 1987; and the two-person exhibition Utopian Visions: Photographs by Margaret Michaelis and Wolfgang Sievers, at the National Gallery of Australia in 1988. Jordana Mendelson and Juan

José Lahuerta curated the exhibition Margaret Michaelis: Fotografia, vanguardia y politica en la Barcelona de la Republica for IVAM in Valencia in 1998, which was accompanied by a major publication. Helen Ennis curated Margaret Michaelis, Love, Loss and Photography for the National Gallery of Australia in 2005. This essay draws from the eponymously titled book published at the same time. 286. Madame d’Ora was Jewish and left Vienna for Paris in 1927. Jewish Women’s Archive, Encyclopedia, Madame d’Ora, . 287. The information for Michaelis’s employment in various Berlin studios is as follows: 19 May to 6 July 1928, Atelier A Binder; 25 October to 7 December 1929, M Bucovich (Atelier Karl Schenker); 8 March to 19 April 1930, Suse Byk Studio; 20 April to 6 October 1931, Atelier Bucovich; 8 October 1931 to 31 August 1932, Winterfeld Studio; and at Atelier Stettenheim 4 September 1932 to 30 April 1933. Dates for her employment at Atelier Blumenfeld in Berlin are not available. She also worked in Prague, from 1 November 1928 to 1 August 1929, at Studio Foto-Style Prague; and from 8 December 1929 to 7 March 1930 ran her own business in Berlin. 288. Yva was banned from practising photography in 1938 and had to close her studio. She and her husband were killed shortly after their arrest by the Gestapo in 1942. Newton went from Berlin to China in 1938, was in Singapore during its fall to the Japanese and was sent to Australia aboard the ship the Queen Mary. He was held in an internment camp in Victoria from 1940 until 1942. See Guy Featherstone, ‘Helmut Newton’s Australian years’, The La Trobe Journal, no.76, Spring 2005. 289. Margaret Michaelis’s compensation claim submitted to the then West German government is archived in Berlin’s Landesamt für Bürgerund Ordnungsangelegenheiten archive (LABO), filed under no. 346.618. This comprises the records of the Entschädigungsamt (Compensation Office [for the victims of Nazism]). I am extremely grateful to English historian Helen Graham who brought this extraordinary file to my attention. She is currently working on a book Lives at the Limit, a chapter of which will be devoted to the lives of Margaret Michaelis and Rudolf Michaelis. 290. 3 August 1962, LABO, E10. 291. Other architectural photographs were published in the magazines D’Aci d’Allà and Cronica, which championed modern approaches. 292. LABO, B29. 293. This relationship is dealt with in-depth in Helen Ennis, Margaret Michaelis, Love, Loss and Photography, National Gallery of Australia, Sydney, 2005. 294. Rudolf Michaelis remained in Spain after Margaret left and spent five years in a Francoist jail during the Spanish Civil War. He was repatriated to East Germany in 1946. For further information see Helen Graham, The War and Its Shadow: Spain’s Civil War in Europe’s Long Twentieth Century, Sussex Academic Press, Brighton, 2012, p. 90.

295. See Helen Ennis, ‘Blue hydrangeas: Four émigré photographers’ in Roger Butler (ed.), The Europeans. Émigré Artists in Australia 1930– 1960, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, pp. 102–19. 296. Michaelis approached the Russell Roberts studio, Sydney’s largest, but he was not hiring any new staff. Ennis, 2005, p. 179. 297. One of her home portraits, of the St John family, is reproduced in Helen Trinca, Madeleine: A Life of Madeleine St John, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2013. It has lovely elements, including the play of light, but the poses and overall effect are stilted. 298. See Ennis, 2005, p. 181. 299. Cotton and Dupain married in April 1939; Cotton left the marriage in mid-1941 and taught at Frensham school in Mittagong. She ran the Dupain studio in 1942–45 while Dupain worked as a camoufleur. Helen Ennis’s biography on Olive Cotton is expected to be completed in 2017. 300. My thanks to Tim Bonyhady who kindly alerted me to the work of Mara Landauer. 301. The Photographic Society of NSW initially focused on fundraising - an exhibition of work by members of the Victorian Salon of Photography and Photographic Society of New South Wales was held at the Society of Arts Gallery in Adelaide in July 1941 to raise money for the Red Cross. 302. In September 1945, well-known photographer Monte Luke organised an exhibition of work by members of the Photographic Society of NSW, Sydney Camera Circle and Miniature Camera Group, which traced the development of photography from the invention of the daguerreotype up to the present day. Sydney Morning Herald, 26 September 1945. 303. Letter from the Right Reverend Bishop C Venn Pilcher, Coadjutor of Sydney, to the Commissioner, 2 October 1941, ASIO file 6119. 304. ASIO file 6119. 305. Michaelis told me about this incident in 1985 and I am dependent on my memory of our conversation. 306. ASIO file 6119. 307. When Tim Bonyhady interviewed Herta Jarvis, the first wife of the architect Hans Peter Oser, in 2010, she said that Michaelis ‘did all the interior photography for Hans between 1952 and 1957’. It has not been possible to establish whether this was the case – Michaelis had closed Photo-studio by then – but the claim is plausible. 308. When I curated Utopian Visions on the work of Sievers and Michaelis for the NGA, Sievers objected to the combination as he regarded her work as inferior to his. Wolfgang Sievers, personal conversation with the author, November 1988. 309. This was pointed out to me by Jan Poddebsky who is researching Michaelis’s dance photography as part of her doctoral thesis ‘Viennese emigres and modernity’ (working title) at the University of Sydney. 310. Michaelis was an active participant in cultural activities; she took art classes and

creative writing classes, and regularly attended music concerts, exhibitions and events at the National Gallery of Victoria. 311. Jan Poddebsky kindly drew my attention to photographs of Irene Vera Young and Vera Goldman who were not Bodenwieser dancers. 312. Shona Dunlop MacTavish, letter to the author, August 1990. 313. Broughton Hall may have provided her with desperately needed treatment, but it was an institution that had been under considerable scrutiny a few years earlier due to overcrowding and under-resourcing. Helen Trinca has noted that due to the insufficient number of bathrooms for the female patients, they had to line up naked while waiting for a bath. Trinca, 2013. 314. Lawrence Slater, 25 April 1963, LABO, B18. 315. Dr H Stevenson, 28 September 1964, LABO, B30. 316. A note on Hungarian naming conventions; the English convention for Christian name first and surname second is adopted for all names in this chapter, including the Hungarian names. Please note in Hungarian, these names are arranged with surname first, for example, Kozma Zsuzsa. 317. The Schreiber family changed their name to Simor in 1939. 318. Correspondence between V&A and Zsuzsa Kozma, November 1997, held in Peter Orlay’s personal collection. 319. The impact of European migrants on the development of modernism in the US and the UK is a well-covered field. See Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960. Vol. 2, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University, 1968; and Charlotte Benton, David Elliott and Elain Harwood, A Different World: Emigre Architects in Britain 1928–1958, RIBA Heinz Gallery, London, 1995. 320. Peter Sugar, ‘A Somewhat Slanted View of Interwar Budapest’, Hungarian Studies, vol. 9, nos 1–2, Akademiai Kiado (Hungarian Academy of Science), Budapest, 1994, pp. 201–8, recounts his youth as a member of Budapest’s wealthy middle class and notes little exposure to other sectors of the city’s population. 321. Passuth Krisztina, Orbán Dezső, Corvina, 1977, p. 9 (of English translation). 322. Julia Szabo, ‘European Arts Centers and Hungarian Art (1890–1919)’, Hungarian Studies, vol. 9, nos 1–2, Akademiai Kiado (Hungarian Academy of Science), Budapest, 1994, pp. 41–53. 323. The Wiener Werkstättte had been established in 1903. Philosophically inspired by the English Arts & Crafts movement, the collective sought to return craftsmanship to industrial production. Similar groups were formed in Germany (Deutscher Werkbund) in 1907 and later Switzerland and England. 324. The Workshop closed in 1920 in the uncertainty after World War II. Applied Arts Museum Budapest, curator, Eva Horanyi, correspondence, 1 November 2016. 325. A number of his pieces are held by the Applied Arts Museum, Budapest and can be seen on their online catalogue .

277 277

278 278

326. English architect FRS Yorke published a number of editions of The Modern House, a collection of examples of modern architecture from around the world, particularly Germany and central Europe. Kozma’s house was included in the 1937 edition. 327. The house is well described and reproduced within Kozma’s own publication Das Neue Haus of 1941. 328. The majority of the houses still remain on the street and are now protected monuments. 329. Eszter Gabor, ‘The House Spatial’, The Hungarian Quarterly, Vol. XLVIII, no. 185, Spring 2007. 330. Leśnikowski and Šlapeta, 1996, p. 114. 331. Passuth, 1977, p. 18. 332. Passuth, 1977, p. 20. 333. Peter Simor, personal correspondence, October 2016. 334. Ludwig Kozma: Das Neue Haus published 1941 by Verlag Dr H Girsbergger, Zurich. 335. A number of Lajos Kozma–designed houses were featured in Raymond McGrath’s Twentieth Century Houses, published in the United Kingdom by Faber and Faber in 1934, however, there was little focus on his work in the English-speaking world following the end of World War II. 336. Leśnikowski and Šlapeta, 1996, p. 149. 337. Peter Simor, personal correspondence, October 2016. 338. Randolph L Braham, A Magyarországi Holokauszt Földrajzi Enciklopediája [The Geographic Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in Hungary], 3 vols, Park Publishing, Budapest, 2006, vol. 1, p. 91. 339. In his later years Janös said that too many friends had died and there were too many bad memories for him to return. Personal recollection Coco Mandorla Orlay. 340. Zsuzsa Kozma, personal letter to friend ‘Pista’ from Budapest, 1 January 1947. 341. The role Eric Hearnshaw, Avis Higgs and the staff designers played in establishing the approach has been acknowledge by Douglas Lloyd-Jenkins in his article ‘Joie de Vivre: Avis Higgs at Silk & Textile Printers’, in Michael Bogle, Designing Australia: Readings in the History of Design, Pluto Press Australia, Sydney 2002 pp. 203–13. 342. There have been a number of detailed accounts of the project including Christopher Menz, ‘1946 Modernage Fabrics’, in Craft Australia, no. 4, Summer 1987. 343. The publication included written contributions from prominent figures in the art world including Professor JT Burke, Chair of Fine Art, University of Melbourne and Hal Missingham, Director of the National Gallery of Art, NSW. A New Approach to Textile Design, Ure Smith, Sydney 1947. 344. The feature in the Australian Women’s Weekly, ‘Well-known artists style fabrics’, August 1947, pp. 43–4 being one example. 345. The Argus, Melbourne, 7 October 1947, p. 8. 346. The Weekly Times, Melbourne, 13 October 1948. 347. Derek Wrigley, ‘The ANU Years’, in Fred

Ward: A Selection of Furniture and Drawings, ANU Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 1996. 348. Other designers to submit schemes were WK Greenwood and LS Bunbury. This is noted in the Pegrum and Associates, University House Conservation Management Plan, 2001, p. 25. 349. Helen O’Neill, David Jones: 175 Years, NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, 2013, p. 185. 350. Lucy Gemes, Stories from a Lost World, Wild & Woolley, Sydney, 2007, p. 103. 351. ‘In The Tradition of the Old Masters’, Sydney Morning Herald, 8 March 1992, p. 211. 352. Eva Clarke, interview with author, 1 November 2016. 353. Zsuzsa Kozma-Orlay, correspondence with V&A curator Gareth Williams, December 1997. 354. Peter Simor, correspondence and interview with author, October 2016. 355. Population Statistics derived from Australian Bureau of Statistics, data sheet: 3105.0.65.001 Australian Historical Population Statistics, 2014 356. 150 feet converts to 45 metres or approximately 15 storeys. 357. Information on Dick Dusseldorp is drawn from Lindie Clark, Finding a Common Interest: The story of Dick Dusseldorp and Lend Lease, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2002. 358. Clark, 2002, p. 38. 359. Clark, 2002, p.45. 360. See Richard Apperley and Peter Lind (eds), 444 Sydney Buildings, Angus and Roberston with RAIA, Sydney, 1971; and Graham Jahn, A Guide to Sydney Architecture, The Watermark Press, Sydney, 1997. 361. Information on Frank Lowy is drawn from Jill Margo and Frank Lowy, Pushing the Limits, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2000; and Jill Margo and Frank Lowy, Second Life, HarperCollins, Sydney, 2015. 362. Karl Bittman (ed.), Strauss to Matilda: The Viennese in Australia 1938–1988, Wenkart Foundation, Sydney, 1988, p. 22. 363. Toga, , accessed 22 September 2016. 364. Graham Jahn, A Guide to Sydney Architecture, The Watermark Press, Sydney, 1997. 365. Clark, 2002. The most common forms of land title in the world, Torrens and Strata, were both invented in Australia. 366. For instance, despite its importance in size and history it does not appear in Graham Jahn’s A Guide to Sydney Architecture, 1997. 367. Dugald Jellie, ‘A ’60s icon turns 40’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2007, , accessed 20 September 2016. 368. Stockland, , accessed 14 February 2017. 369. Henry Pollack, The Accidental Developer: The Fascinating Rise to the Top of Mirvac Founder Henry Pollack, ABC Books, Sydney, 2005, 370. ‘Triguboff and the new Great Australian Dream’, Sydney Morning Herald, , accessed 20 September 2016.

Image credits

Cover and page 7 Hotel Hotel and U-P Introduction page 12: Max Dupain and Associates Archive c.1950 page 15: Max Dupain and Associates Archive, 1958 page 17: Hotel Hotel and U-P page 19: George Molnar 1956. National Library of Australia, PIC Drawer 9481 #PIC/7345/2349 page 22: Max Dupain and Associates Archive, 1969 Chapter 1 page 30: Josef Hoffmann (designer), Wiener Werkstätte, Vienna (commissioning workshop), J Soulek, Vienna (manufacturer), Armchair, from the Gallia apartment hall (c.1912), ebonised wood, (other materials), 90.6 x 59.7 x 53.4 cm, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Samuel E Wills Bequest, 1976 (D157.4-1976), © Estate of Josef Hoffmann page 31 top: Courtesy Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest page 31 lower: Photographer unknown. Wikicommons, Wikimedia page 33: Photo by Nicola Perscheid (d.1930), courtesy and © Nicola Perscheid page 35: Photo by Karl Ernst Osthaus, courtesy and copyright © Karl Ernst Osthaus page 36: Photo by Christos Vittoratos, 2014, courtesy and © Christos Vittoratos pages 38–39: Photo Anton Schroll Verlag, 1932, courtesy and copyright © Anton Schroll page 40: Photo by Martin Gerlach, MAK–Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna/ Contemporary Art page 43: Hotel Hotel and U-P Chapter 2 page 50: Max Dupain and Associates Archive, c.1950 page 51: Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection, © Sydney Living Museums, photograph Ray Joyce page 52 top: Photographer unknown, Australian House & Garden, April 1951, © Bauer Media Pty Limited/Australian House & Garden page 52 lower: Photographer unknown, courtesy Paul Georgiadies page 55: Max Dupain and Associates Archive, 1956

page 56: Max Dupain and Associates Archive, 1953 pages 58–59: Photographed by Anna Clements, 1965, State Library of New South Wales, Mitchell Library Australian Photographic Agency 20380 page 61: Max Dupain and Associates Archive, 1960 page 62: Max Dupain and Associates Archive, 1958 page 65: Hotel Hotel and U-P page 66: Max Dupain and Associates Archive, 1965 Chapter 3 pages 72–82: Courtesy Susan Silvan page 82 lower: State Archives NSW, NRS 16475 Electricity Authority of New South Wales, 1946-1950 D/18 Drawings [of power stations], Wallerwang page 85: Hotel Hotel and U-P page 87 top: State Archives NSW, NRS 16486, photographs [of power stations and plant] no date, P/9 Bunnerong page 87 lower: SANSW: NRS 16486 P/9 Bunnerong Chapter 4 pages 93 to 95: Courtesy Heinz Gerstl, Gerstl family archive page 97: Marion Landau collection pages 98–99: Courtesy Heinz Gerstl, Gerstl family archive page 100: Photographer Clive Thompson for Telegraph Colour Studio, 1953, digitised by Eric Sierins, courtesy and copyright © Penelope Seidler (public domain in Australia) page 102 top: Courtesy Heinz Gerstl, Gerstl family archive page 102 lower: Caroline Simpson Library and Research Collection, Sydney Living Museums, gift of Heinz Gerstl page 104 top: Courtesy Bartos family collection page 104 lower left: Courtesy Shapiro Auctioneers Sydney page 105 top: Courtesy Shapiro Auctioneers Sydney page 105 lower: Courtesy Bartos family collection page 107: Photo Rebecca Hawcroft 2003 page 108 top: Courtesy Bartos family collection page 108 lower: Photo Rebecca Hawcroft 2003 pages 111–112: Hotel Hotel and U-P pages 115–118: Courtesy Heinz Gerstl, Gerstl family archive Chapter 5 page 124: ‘Sydney Flat’, Australian House & Garden, June 1954, ©Bauer Media Pty Limited/ Australian House & Garden page 126: Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest page 127: Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest page 128: The Sydney Morning Herald, 27 August 1953, Women’s section, p.3, courtesy State Library of NSW page 129 top: Decorative Art: The Studio Yearbook, 1938, p.18 page 129, lower: Decoration and Glass, vol. 5, no. 2, July 1939, p.60 pages 131–132: Hotel Hotel and U-P

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page 135: Caroline Simpson Library and Research Collection, Sydney Living Museums page 139: National Archives of Australia, A1337, 26223, application for registration of design by Professor George Kóródy for SOS Unit page 141 top: Max Dupain and Associates Archive, 1956 page 141 lower: Max Dupain and Associates Archive, 1959 page 142: Max Dupain and Associates Archive, 1958 Chapter 6 pages 148–149: Courtesy Tim Bonyhady page 150: Photo Guy Wilkinson, 2017 pages 151–154: Courtesy Tim Bonyhady page 159: Hotel Hotel and U-P page 161: Courtesy Tim Bonyhady page 162: Collection National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Chapter 7 page 168: Max Dupain and Associates Archive, 1958, courtesy State Library of NSW. © Rod Taylor Promotions page 171: Max Dupain and Associates Archive, 1956 page 173: Hotel Hotel and U-P page 175: Nanette Kuehn photograph, 1940, Buhrich Album, courtesy State Library of NSW page 176 top: Max Dupain and Associates Archive, 1958, courtesy and copyright © JW Thompson page 176 lower left and right: Photographer unknown, Buhrich family album, courtesy Neil Buhrich page 177 top: Photographer unknown, Buhrich family album,. courtesy Neil Buhrich page 177 lower: Photo Phil Ward Studios, 1951, Neil Buhrich Collection page 178: Courtesy and copyright © estate of George Molnar page 181: Statues, George Molnar, Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney, 2000, courtesy and copyright © estate of George Molnar pages 182–183: Australian House & Garden, August 1953, © Bauer Media Pty Limited/ Australian House & Garden page 184: You and Your Home, Steven Kalmar, Shakespeare Head Press, Sydney, 1964 page 185: Max Dupain and Associates, c.1953, courtesy Neil Buhrich page 186: Das ideale Heim, July 1942, courtesy Neil Buhrich page 188: Max Dupain and Associates Archive, 1963, courtesy and copyright © CSR Limited page 189: Australian House & Garden, February 1955, © Bauer Media Pty Limited/ Australian House & Garden

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Chapter 8 page 203: Courtesy Tim Bonyhady All other images, Courtesy National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Chapter 9 page 216: Copyright © Victoria & Albert Museum, London page 217: Photographer unknown, courtesy Peter Orlay page 218: Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest page 220: Photographer unknown, courtesy Peter Orlay page 221: Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest pages 222–227: Photographer unknown, courtesy Peter Orlay page 232: Courtesy Bauer Media Pty Limited/ The Australian Women’s Weekly page 233: Courtesy Peter Orlay pages 236–237: Courtesy Juno Gemes page 240: Photo Susan Kozma, courtesy Peter Orlay Chapter 10 page 246: Photo Tone Wheeler Page 247: City of Sydney Archives, Graeme Andrews ‘Working Harbour’ Collection: 86715 page 249: Max Dupain and Associates Archive, 1959 page 250 top: Photo Jack Hickson 1965, SLNSW Australian Photographic Agency 18805 page 250 lower: Photo Jack Hickson 1966, SLNSW Australian Photographic Agency 24561 page 253: Hotel Hotel and U-P page 255: National Library of Australia, PIC Drawer 9481 #PIC/7345/2419 page 256: Photo by GD Internegative, September 1968, Negative Number S4724, NAA: B941, Hotels Motels Restaurants/2 page 256: National Library of Australia, PIC Drawer 9481 #PIC/7345/2359 page 259: National Library of Australia, PIC Drawer 9431 #PIC/7345/887 page 260: Max Dupain and Associates Archive, 1968 page 261: Max Dupain and Associates Archive, 1968 Q and A Lee Grant for Molonglo Group

Index

Page numbers in bold indicate illustrations. All locations are in New South Wales unless otherwise stated. Aalto, Alvar 175, 178 Academy (or Royal School) of Art and Applied Arts, Breslau, Germany 37 AEG electric kettles (Behrens) 36, 37 Alcorso, Claudio 230 Anarcho-Syndicalist movement 195 Andrews, Gordon 231, 234 Angel, Gerty 155 Annandale Timber and Moulding Co. 92 Arcos Steel Company 53–54 Artes Studios (formerly Artes Studio, latterly Space Furniture) 20, 123–44, 141–42, 156–57 Art in Australia (magazine) 201 Association of Craftspeople (Werkbund), Germany 28 Atelier, Budapest, Hungary 223, 227 Australia National Journal 201 Australian Homemaker and Handyman (magazine) 190 Australian House & Garden (magazine) 182–83, 187–88 Australian modernism, surveys of 14–15, 167 Australian Photography (journal) 206 Australia Square, Sydney (H Seidler) 119, 248, 250 Balint, Emery 179–80 Bartos, Alex 109 Bauhaus, Weimar, Germany 28 Beard Watson 114 Behrens, Peter 29, 36, 37, 40, 169 Berend House, Budapest, Hungary (Kóródy/ Ribáry) 128, 129 Berlin, Germany, photographers in 194 Berryman Furniture Company 92, 234–35, 236–37, 239 Better Homes Bureau 1954 Homes Exhibition 109, 114 Bing, Margot 134, 157, 160 Blues Point Tower, McMahons Point (H Seidler) 258 Board of Architects of NSW 41, 44–46, 49, 81, 178 Bodenwieser, Gertrud 206–207 Bodenwieser Ballet 149, 154, 206–207 Bolot, Aaron 258 Bonyhady, Anne (née Herschmann-Gallia) 20, 147–64, 148, 161 Bonyhady, Bruce 163 Bonyhady, Edward 156

Bonyhady, Eric 147–64, 149, 161 Bonyhady, Fred 149 Bonyhady house, Chatswood (Wollaston) 153–63 Boomerang desk (Kóródy) 143 Bratislava, Slovakia 74 Brenac, Andre 156 Breuer, Marcel 175, 178 Bryant, JH 63, 257 Buckwell (Buchwald), Leslie 155, 157, 160 Buda, George 60 Budapesti Műhely, Budapest, Hungary 220 Buhrich, Eva (née Bernard) 18, 102, 182–83, 185–88, 185, 190 Buhrich, Eva and Hugh (designs) 18, 174–75, 175, 176–77, 178 Buhrich, Hugh 15, 18, 34, 81, 102–103, 177 Bund Deutscher Architekten (BDA; Federation of German Architects), Germany 29 Bunnerong Power Station (Silberstein-Silvan) 87, 87 Bunzl House, Vienna, Austria (Frank) 40 Cassab, Judy 106 Catanzariti, Dominic 238 Civil and Civic 245, 249 Coles supermarkets 254 Coltoff, Arnold (‘Nol’) 140 Cotton, Olive 201, 204, 206 Cowan (Cohn-Salisch), Henry (Hans Jacob) 180 Czech Republic, design training in 32 Dadswell, Lyndon 51 Danube Nymph and Iron Man (Powolny) 151 Das ideale Heim (magazine) 185, 186 David Jones 231, 233, 234 David Jones Art Gallery 137, 184 Department of Housing Construction, New Zealand 86 Deutsche Technische Hochschule (German University), Prague, Czech Republic 73 Dr M Hodza Business Academy, Trencin, Slovakia (Silberstein-Silvan) 74, 76, 77 Dümling, Albrecht 82 Dupain, Max 141, 141, 142, 176, 178 Dusseldorp, Dick see Dusseldorp, Gerard (Gerardus Jozef; ‘Dick’, ‘Dik’) Dusseldorp, Gerard (Gerardus Jozef; ‘Dick’, ‘Dik’) 11, 57, 97, 245, 248, 250, 258 Eisner, Moses 53 Eisner house, Warrawee (Stossel) 52, 52, 53 Electricity Commission 82–83 Emil Gerstel Mobelfabrik, Prague, Czech Republic 91 Endell, August 29 Epstein, Henry (Heinrich, Henrik) 11, 49, 57, 58–59 North Shore Medical Centre, St Leonards 245, 249 residential projects 12, 12, 50–51, 50, 51 Ernst, Laszlo 170, 171 Europe, design training in 27–46 European modernism 13–14 Federation of German Architects (Bund Deutscher Architekten, BDA), Germany 29 Feledy, Francis 45–46

281 281

Fombertaux, Jean 11, 54, 57, 60 Fombertaux Rice Hanley 60 Fooks, Ernest 86 Foto-elis see Fotostudio (later Foto-elis) Fotostudio (later Foto-elis), Barcelona, Spain 198 Fractional Furniture (M Gerstl) 109, 116–17 Frank, Josef 40, 40–41 Franklin House, Waverley (H Buhrich) 15 Fry (Freiwillig), Theodore (‘Theo’) 33, 63 Furniture Trends (journal) 188 Galleria Expresso, Sydney (Ernst) 170, 171 Gallia, Gretl see Herschmann-Gallia, Gretl (née Gallia) Gallia, Hermine 148, 152 Gallia, Kathe 148 Gallia, Moriz 148, 152 Gallia apartment, Vienna, Austria (Hoffmann) 30, 152–53, 153 Gandel, John 254–55 GATCPAC, Barcelona, Spain 198 Gemes (Goldfischer), Alex 234–35 Georges Restaurant, Double Bay (I Soos) 174 Gergely, Stephen 66–67, 235 Gergely & Pinter 66–67 German University (Deutsche Technische Hochschule), Prague, Czech Republic 73 Germany, design training in 29, 33–34 Gerstl, Heinz 92, 114–15, 119 Gerstl, Josef 91 Gerstl, Michael 91–120, 93, 102, 167 Gerstl Furniture see M. Gerstl Furniture Pty Ltd (formerly M. Gerstl Cabinet Works) Graf, Ervin 255, 259 Gray, Sheila 232 Great Theatre, Berlin, Germany (Poelzig) 35 GRECO Tapestry Pty Ltd (later Municipal Tapestry Weaving Workshop), Budapest, Hungary 125 Gropius, Walter 28, 81

282 282

Haber, Henry 255 Haerdtl, Oswald 54 Hafner, Fritz 148, 149, 152 Hafner, Mira (née Bonyhady) 148, 152 Hakoah soccer club, Bondi 255 Hamilton, Bob 262 Herschmann-Gallia, Anne see Bonyhady, Anne (née Herschmann-Gallia) Herschmann-Gallia, Gretl (née Gallia) 148, 156 Hillman House, Roseville (Epstein) 12, 12, 50–51, 51 Hilton hotels 63, 255, 257 Hoffmann, Josef 30, 30, 54, 152–53, 153, 161–64, 162, 169 The Home (magazine) 201 Homemaker (Australian Homemaker and Handyman, magazine) 190 Hook, Alfred S 180 Hotel Hotel, Canberra, ACT 265, 267–68 H Stossel & Associates 11, 22, 60 Hungarian Society for Applied Arts, Hungary 128, 129 Hungarian Union of Engineers and Architects, Hungary 30 Hungary, design training in 30, 32

Insubstantial Pageant cartoons (Molnar) 181 Jarrett, Kevin 143–44 Jelinek, Alex 88 Johnston, Don 128 Kafka, Paul 51, 91, 92, 96, 155, 167, 175 Bonyhady furniture 156, 160, 163 Kalmar, Steven 20, 173, 174, 184–85, 184, 266, 267 Kalmar Interiors 184 Kamsler, George 155 Kann, Alexander (‘Alex’) 97, 115, 119 Kingsford-Maroubra Synagogue (H Burich) 103 Klinger Villa, Budapest, Hungary (L Kozma) 31 Knoll, New York, United States 114 Kollar, Peter 180–81 Kolos, Frank 46, 63, 257 Kolos and Bryant 63, 256, 257 Korab, Balthazar 181 Korner, Ernst 18–19, 72 Kóródy, George (György) 20, 123–44, 124, 128, 157, 174, 266–67 Berend House, Budapest, Hungary (with Ribáry) 128, 129 Bonyhady furniture 147, 150, 155–56, 160, 161–64 fabric 126, 127, 135 furniture 7, 43, 65, 85, 126, 131, 133, 138–39, 141, 142, 143, 159, 253 Kotsis, Ivan 103 Kozma, Erzsebet 222, 223, 224, 229 Kozma, Lajos 31, 32, 215, 220, 220, 221, 228 Danube house 222, 223, 224–26 Kozma-Orlay, Susan (Zsuzsa, née Kozma, also known as Susan Orlay) 21, 215–40, 216–19, 222, 225, 227, 233, 240 Krimper, Schulim 101 Kristallnacht 199 Kulka, Henry 36, 38–39 Kunstgewerbeschule (School for Applied Arts), Vienna, Austria 30 Kurzer, Henry 33, 167, 168, 170, 255 Landau, Janek 92, 97, 101 Landau, Joyce 97, 101 Landauer, Mara 149, 149 Landau house, Whale Beach (Seidler) 100, 101 Latin Quarter restaurant, Sydney (Kurzer) 167, 168 Lechner, Ödön 124 Lend Lease Homes 11, 67, 119, 245, 251 Lewis, Brian 231 Lipcsei Vilmos Fashion Salon, Budapest, Hungary (Kóródy) 128–29, 129 Loos, Adolf 32, 36, 38–39 Lord, Edith 79 Lord, Francis 155, 156 Lord, Margaret 128 Lowy, Frank 251, 254, 255 Lukacs, Gabor 56–57, 56, 66 Lukacs Gergely 66 Maciuika, John 28 Mark Foys 114 Meriton 262 Mestska sporitelna (bank building), Trencin, Slovakia (Silberstein-Silvan) 75, 78 M. Gerstl Furniture Pty Ltd (formerly M. Gerstl Cabinet Works) 20, 91–119, 94

advertisements and displays 95, 102, 115–18 furniture 99, 100, 104–105, 108 Michaelis, Margaret (Margarete; née Gross) 21, 149, 193–212 14 June 1948, Parramatta River, Sydney (self-portrait) 210 Cynthia Reed - writer, Sidney Nolan’s wife 201, 202 English Red Cross convoy in Portbou, 5am, 6 June 1936 199 Left Berlin November 1933 (the artist’s living room looking towards kitchen) 195 No title (Back view, Francis Street, Sydney) 208 No title (Female dancer leaning back) 209 No title (Margaret Michaelis leaning against park bench) 205 Portrait of the Bonyhady family 149, 201, 203 Ruth Seidler 149, 154 Self portrait in coat at Sydney studio 200 Slum children, Barcelona 197 Torre Eugenia. Architect: Ribas Seva 196 Michaelis, Rudolf (‘Michel’) 194–95, 198 Mirvac 261, 262 Mobel Haus Josef Gerstl, Vienna, Austria 91 Modern Unit furniture range (Kóródy) 133, 136–37, 159 Molnar, George 19, 44, 179, 180, 181 ‘But if we’ve sprawled so far from the centre …’ 259 ‘Darling, you know we’re not supposed to use the balcony’ 19 ‘Fortunately, way back in 1962, the first development scheme …’ 256 ‘Nice composition …’ 255 ‘Statue showing good traditional use of Classic Motif’ 181 Municipal Tapestry Weaving Workshop (formerly GRECO Tapestry Pty Ltd), Budapest, Hungary 125 Municipal Technical Drawing School, Budapest, Hungary 125, 128 Nagy, Gabor 109 Neale, Ken 265–68, 267 Nebenzahl furniture (E and H Buhrich) 175, 175, 178 New Photography movement, Germany 194 North Shore Medical Centre (NSMC, Epstein) 245, 249 NSW Board of Architects see Board of Architects of NSW NSW Electricity Commission 82–83 One, Two, Three Milk Bar, Sydney (Zipfinger) 169 Orbán, Desiderius (Dezső) 223, 227–28, 230 Orlay, John (Janös) 229, 230, 238 Orlay, Susan see Kozma-Orlay, Susan (Zsuzsa; née Kozma, also known as Susan Orlay) Oser, Hans Peter 11, 54, 55, 57, 60

Oser Fombertaux & Associates 11, 54, 57, 60, 61 Parkes, Cobden 45 Park Regis, Sydney (Stocks and Holdings) 259, 260 Paul, Bruno 28, 29 Photographic Society of NSW 204 Photo-studio, Sydney 200, 211 Pinter, John 66–67 Pitt, EC 258 Plischke, Ernst 83, 86 Poelzig, Hans 28, 29, 35, 37 Poland, design training in 33 Pollack, Henry 261, 262 Powolny, Michael: Danube Nymph and Iron Man 148–49, 151 Prague, Czech Republic, design training in 32 Pretzl, Marion 167, 168 Professional Photographers’ Association of New South Wales 204 Prussia, Germany, design training in 34 Rayner, Laurence Tibor 63 Reed, Cynthia 201, 202 Reeves, ET 53 Reiffenstein, Bruno 153 Reves (Revesz), George 45–46, 56, 103, 104–105, 106, 107–108 Rex Hotels 115, 119 Ribáry, Alajos 128, 129 Romberg, Frederick 15 Rosenthal, Jacques 207 Rose Seidler House, Wahroonga (H Seidler) 10, 11, 96 Rossler, Henry 67 Royal School (or Academy) of Art and Applied Arts, Breslau, Germany 37 Sachs, Albert 211 Sandringham Memorial Gardens, Hyde Park 51 Saunders, John 251, 254 Schaffa, Erika (‘Ricki’) 155 Scheinberg, Albert 235 School for Applied Arts (Kunstgewerbeschule), Vienna, Austria 30 Schwartz, Laszlo (‘Laci’) 103, 104, 106 Schwartz, Magda 103, 104, 106, 109 Schwartz house, Rose Bay (Reves) 103, 104–105, 106, 107–108 Sebel, Harry: Sebel Townhouse 257 Segaert, Elsie 123–24, 134–36, 140, 156–57 Seidler, Harry 10–11, 15, 19, 20, 92, 96, 97, 98–100, 101, 251, 258 Australia Square, Sydney 119, 248, 250 Seidler, Ruth 149, 154 Sevcik apartment complex, Trencin, Slovakia (Silberstein-Silvan) 74–75, 78 Shanghai, China, wartime refugees in 92 Shefstik house, Frenchs Forest (I Soos) 170, 174 Sidon, CS (Madame) 123–24, 124 Silberstein-Silvan (Silvan), Ferdinand 19, 32, 71–88, 72, 80 Bunnerong Power Station 87, 87 Dr M Hodza Business Academy, Trencin, Slovakia 74, 76, 77 Mestska sporitelna (bank building), Trencin, Slovakia 75, 78 post office, Sered, Slovakia 74, 75

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Sevcik apartment complex, Trencin, Slovakia 74–75, 78 South Sydney substation 82 Wallerawang Power Station 82 Silk & Textile Printers (STP) 230 Silvan, Ferdinand see Silberstein-Silvan (Silvan), Ferdinand Simor, Elizabeth 228 Simor, Eugene (‘Jenö’) 228 Simor, Peter 238 Skidmore Owings and Merrill 257 Slovakia 74, 79, 81 Smith, Sydney Ure see Ure Smith, Sydney Smith, TJ 97 Snowy Mountains Scheme 244, 245 Soos, Gyula 170, 174, 187, 189 Soos, Imre 170, 174, 187, 190 South Sydney substation (Silberstein-Silvan) 82 Space Furniture see Artes Studios (formerly Artes Studio, latterly Space Furniture) Spanish Civil War 198–99 Spinak house, Bellevue Hill (H Buhrich) 102–103 Spirit of France (exhibition), Blaxland Galleries, Sydney 134 Stockland see Stocks and Holdings (later Stockland) Stocks and Holdings (later Stockland) 259, 260, 262 Stössel, Franzi 149 Stossel, Hugo 11, 22, 52–54, 60, 72 Eisner house, Warrawee 52 Yarranabbe Gardens, Darling Point 60, 62, 62 Stroud house, Clareville (Oser) 55 STP (Silk & Textile Printers) 230 St Ursula Apartments, Elizabeth Bay (Stossel) 54 Sunday Telegraph 185 Sydney 246–47 Sydney, Nino 67 Sydney Camera Circle 204 Sydney County Council 82 Sydney Morning Herald 181 Sydney Opera House 60, 180–81, 244–45 Sydney University 179, 180 Szegi, Pal 228 Technical University main building, Berlin, Germany 31 Toga 257 Travelodge Motel Rushcutters Bay 63, 256 Trencin, Slovakia 74 Triguboff, Harry 262 University House, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 231 University of New South Wales (UNSW) 179–80 Ure Smith, Sydney 201, 230 Utzon, Jørn 244

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van de Velde, Henri 28, 29, 33, 34, 169 van Leer, Dick 140, 143 Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London, United Kingdom 215, 238 Victorian Housing Commission, Vic. 86 Vidor, Charlotte 257 Vidor, Ervin 257 Vienna, Austria, design training in 30

Wallerawang Power Station (Silberstein-Silvan) 82 Ward, Fred 231 Weissenstein, Grete: Anne Gallia 148, 148 Werkbund (Association of Craftspeople), Germany 28 Westfield 251, 254 Wiener Secession, Austria 30 Wiener Werkbundsiedlung, Vienna, Austria (Houses 49 and 50; Loos/Kulka) 38–39 William Bland Centre, Sydney (Oser Fombertaux & Associates) 61 Wilson, Gordon 86 Wollaston, HV 153 Wylde Street apartments, Potts Point (Bolot) 258 Wynyard Travelodge, Sydney (H Stossel & Associates) 22, 60 Yarranabbe Gardens, Darling Point (Stossel) 60, 62, 62 Zipfinger, Franz Johann 169–70

Editor’s acknowledgments

This has been a subject I have been investigating and ruminating on since 2003; a Masters thesis that even after it was completed continued to grow, particularly as the lack of knowledge about Sydney’s émigré designers remained, despite the continued study of modernism. For me, modernism was the style of my grandparents, Paul and Nonnie Sonnino. My Italian grandfather and his circle of European friends had strongly modernist tastes in design, furniture and art. This collection is, in large part, a tribute to them. The encouragement of a number of other researchers inspired me to continue. In particular, Michael Bogle as well as Scott Robertson, Anne Higham and Noni Boyd (both former Heritage Officers at the NSW Australian Institute of Architects), who collected and shared information about many other émigrés whom I had not identified. Knowledge continued to grow and it became clear there were many fascinating stories to tell. In 2015, Sydney Living Museums took the project on as an exhibition, providing substantial support and encouragement. My thanks go to Caroline Butler-Bowdon in particular for her enthusiasm for the project. The exhibition brief – to cover furniture and interior design as well as architecture – expanded the research, and what emerged was a complex picture of a dynamic community of European émigrés working across many aspects of design in Sydney in the postwar period. I am grateful for the input of area specialists Michael Bogle, Catriona Quinn, Jeromie Maver, Helen Ennis, Tim Bonyhady and Tone Wheeler, for generously sharing their knowledge throughout the project and providing chapters for this publication. Without the personal papers held by relatives, many of these stories would not have been told. I am especially grateful to designers and their family members who so generously shared their memories, photographs and documents. It has been a privilege to get to know Peter Orlay and Coco Mandorla, Susan Silvan, Peter Simor, Neil Buhrich, the Bartos family, Heinz Gerstl, Stephen Gergely, Juno Gemes, Nicholas Hollo, Eva Clarke, Frank Zipfinger and Gary and Edie Kurzer. Liane Rossler and Sam Marshall also provided essential support throughout the project for

which I am very grateful. I am also indebted to Penelope Seidler and Glenn Harper for sharing their considerable knowledge. Research at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences was essential to the early development of the exhibition, in large part due to the work of former curators Anne Watson and Judith O’Callaghan. The always helpful assistance provided by Paul Wilson and Anne-Marie Van der Ven is also appreciated. Shaune Lakin, Senior Curator of Photography, and Nick Nicholson, Rights and Permissions Officer at the National Gallery of Australia, provided great support, for which I am forever thankful. Eric Sierens, of Max Dupain and Associates, was a key source of both images and information. Michael Lech and Megan Martin at the Caroline Simpson Research Library were generous with their extensive knowledge and collection. Thanks also go to Tim Horton at the NSW Architects Registration Board, whose files are a gold mine of information. Andrew Shapiro was also generous with his time and resources. A challenge for this area is linking information across nations and language boundaries. Essential assistance was provided by Éva Horányi, Curator at the Applied Arts Museum Budapest, Budapest-based architect Anthony Gill, and Martin Strakoš in Czechoslovakia. I am also grateful for Sandor Siro’s and Cecile Hawcroft’s translations. My personal thanks go to my family, in particular Brendan, Milo and Benjamin, whose love and support have carried me through the long weekends and nights of work. Finally, research-based studies like this one are increasingly hard to fund. It is with exceptional gratitude that I acknowledge the support of the Orlay family, GML Heritage and in particular Hotel Hotel for playing a vital role in the production of this book. The vision, energy and drive of the Hotel Hotel team, particularly Dan Honey and Nectar Efkarpidis, have been an essential part of the project. The unwavering support and good cheer of Elspeth Menzies and all at NewSouth Publishing have also been vital.

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Contributors

Michael Bogle is a writer, historian and curator specialising in the history of architecture and design. He has authored publications in many areas of design including furniture, interiors and popular culture. This includes a chapter on interior architecture of Sydney espresso bars and cocktail lounges in Leisure Space: The Transformation of Sydney 1945–1970, UNSW Press, 2014, Design in Flight [Marc Newson and the A380 Airbus] (2009), a collection of essays, Designing Australia (2002) and a survey history, Design in Australia 1880–1870 (1998). Michael has written extensively on modernism in Australia. Tim Bonyhady is one of Australia’s foremost environmental lawyers and cultural historians. A professor at the Australian National University, he is the author of many books including The Law of the Countryside: The Rights of the Public; Images in Opposition: Australian Landscape Painting 1801–1890; Places Worth Keeping: Conservationists, Politics and Law; Burke and Wills: From Melbourne to Myth; The Colonial Earth and Good Living Street: The Fortunes of my Viennese Family. He has been an advisor to Commonwealth and State inquiries into environmental law. He has curated exhibitions for the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria.

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Professor Helen Ennis FAHA is the Director of the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at ANU School of Art and Design. She specialises in Australian photographic history and is concerned with finding new ways of thinking, curating and writing about photographs. Projects include In a New Light: Australian Photography 1850s–1930s (2003-04), Margaret Michaelis: Love, Loss and Photography (2005) and Reveries: Photography and Mortality (2007). Her book Photography and Australia was published by Reaktion, London in 2007 and Wolfgang Sievers was published in 2011. Helen recently curated Things: Photographing the constructed world for the National Library. She is currently writing a biography on Australian photographer Olive Cotton, supported by the Peter Blazey Fellowship and funding from the Australia Council Literature Board. In 2013 Helen was awarded the inaugural Australian Book Review George Hicks Foundation Fellowship.

Rebecca Hawcroft is a cultural heritage professional with 20 years’ experience working across the heritage and museums sector. Rebecca has researched and written about numerous aspects of Australian architectural history, with articles published in the Australian Institute of Architects (NSW) Architecture Bulletin, Historic Environment, and the 2012 Encyclopaedia of Australian Architecture. Rebecca was the curator of the exhibition The Moderns: European designers in Sydney at the Museum of Sydney in 2017. Jeromie Maver is a researcher of Australian mid-century design. Jeromie has advised on Australian design history for the Powerhouse Museum, Ian Potter: NGV Australia and Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest. Jeromie is, along with Dean Keep, lecturer/researcher at Swinburne University, the 2016 recipient of the State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship. The output of the Fellowship will be an exhibition and publication focusing on midcentury designer Clement Meadmore. Catriona Quinn is a former curator at the Historic Houses Trust of NSW and is currently a research consultant on 20th century interior design history. Her 1993 exhibition, Sydney Style – Marion Hall Best Interior Designer, was the first museum retrospective of an interior designer’s work held in Australia. Recent and current research projects include a previously unseen Sydney collection of Krimper furniture and the work of Sydney post-war furniture design and production firm Gerstl. Tone Wheeler is an architect, author, educator and consultant. Current President of the Australian Architecture Association, Tone is committed to the promotion of architecture to the public. Tone has taught extensively over the last 40 years at numerous universities in Australia, New Zealand and the USA. Tone has been the author of a regular column in Architectural Review, amongst other publications, and is a frequent speaker at architectural conferences and seminars. Since 1986, Tone has operated his own practice and has won numerous awards and competitions.