European designers in Sydney

A new exhibition takes a timely look at European designers in Sydney in the postwar years: their backgrounds, their Australian careers and their legacy.

In 1947, Russian-born architect Dr Henry Epstein began designing a house in Sydney’s Roseville for Polish tailor Chaim Hillman and his wife, Florence. Epstein had graduated in 1935 with a Doctorate of Technical Sciences from the Technical University of Vienna before fleeing the increasingly dangerous political situation in 1938. He arrived in Sydney the following year, but due to wartime restrictions on building, the Hillman House was one of his first completed residential projects in Australia.

Disrupted careers

A number of Sydney’s émigré designers arrived with extensive experience, having left behind established careers. Czechoslovakian architect and town planner Ernst Korner was 51 when he arrived in Sydney in 1939. He had studied architecture in Vienna, and after working for a number of years in Sweden and Prague, developed a successful practice in the Czechoslovakian city of Ostrava. On his arrival in Sydney, Korner immediately began designing, working in partnership with his brother-in-law, Hungarian émigré Kurt Singer. The pair designed Korner’s own functionalist modernist house in Mosman and an apartment building in Cremorne before wartime restrictions halted their practice. Korner died in 1966 without having returned to work, the years of displacement and disruption having all but ended his career. Although celebrated as one of Ostrava’s best architects, Korner remained unknown in Australia.

Outside the profession

The total work of art

Like other émigré designers, the Buhrichs’ work extended to furniture. Many of their early commissions were for custom-made furniture, and during the 1950s Eva and Hugh provided build-your-own furniture designs in homemaker publications such as Australian House & Garden. European design education included a focus on furniture as well as architecture, and numerous European trained designers found work in Sydney’s burgeoning postwar furniture trade. This approach – known in Germany as Gesamtkunstwerk or the ‘total work of art’ – was well accepted in Europe by the early 20th century and saw architects involved in every aspect of a project’s design and realisation, providing a unified approach to furniture, lighting, interior colour scheme, carpets and more, with the aim of creating an overall harmonising effect.

A forgotten legacy

While Kalmar and Korody were well-known figures in their day, very few Europeans are identified in the histories of Australian modernism. A salient example is D L Johnson’s Australian architecture 1901–1951: sources of modernism, published in 1980. Although Johnson noted the importance of ‘European strains’ in the local development of modernism, with the exception of Harry Seidler, no European designer working in Sydney was considered important enough to name. The arrival of a large, robust and interconnected community who continued European forms of modernism had become nothing more than a footnote.

In what has been an exciting journey of discovery, The Moderns explores the stories of Sydney’s ‘forgotten’ émigré designers, examining their impact on mid-20th-century Australia. Their stories of achievement, loss, adaptation and ingenuity are also a reminder of the richness that migration brings and of the importance of diversity in the history of our city.