From Australia’s Jewish past

Hugh Buhrich – an architect-constructor of exceptional ability

Hugh was born on 25 April 1911 in Germany.  He arrived in Australia from Nazi Germany before World War II.  In his earlier years, he would have pursued medicine instead of architecture; however, it required Latin. Hugh was influenced by the Bauhaus style of architecture and wanted to enrol in a university.   However, his scholarship would have been rendered invalid as he was required to leave. As a result, he studied at an architecture school in Munich until he was expelled by the Nazis in retaliation for student political activism against the regime.

Hugh decided to move to Berlin, where he studied and practised under Hans Poelzig, an architect, painter and set designer. During this time, he met his future wife, Eva, who was a fellow student, and she joined him in Germany, where they studied together under Hans Poelzig.  Hugh eventually moved to Zurich, where he finally finished his degree in the German Free State of Danzig, which is now Gdansk.

Eva fled Germany to the Netherlands, but unfortunately, Hugh was not able to practise there and was forced to go to London on his own.

The couple ultimately decided to settle in Australia; America and South Africa were their other choices.  They felt America was too competitive, and South Africa required a landing fee that was too expensive.   Eric Mendelsohn, an enforced expatriate, chipped in five pounds to a friend, Edward Carter’s 1838 Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) appeal to send Hugh and Eva to Australia.

He had already shrewdly assessed them as a partnership with intellectual tenacity.  When war broke out, Hugh joined the army and only resumed his practice upon return and restricted himself mainly to furniture and interiors.  During the 1960s and 1970s, roughly twenty buildings were designed and constructed by Hugh.

In Sydney, however, Hugh was to suffer the ignominy of his qualifications as they were not recognised, and so, being unable to register as an architect, he was forced to practise as a “planning consultant” for forty years.  He did not receive registration in New South Wales until 16 November 1971. His designs covered commercial and domestic projects, and were generally designed in a modernist style, often containing specific interior designs along with the buildings.  Eventually, official recognition came, but it was too late to work on any significant commissions; a couple of synagogues and a now much mutilated Chinatown building were among his few non-domestic projects. Ironically, an ingenious clandestine car park design for Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital was built exactly to Hugh’s unsigned drawings and survives unscathed.

Hugh was described as an architect-constructor of exceptional ability who lived long enough to see most of his work either demolished or “improved beyond recognition”.  He was an architect building at both the edge of the city – on cheap but difficult sites – and at the edge of a process that was just coming into existence and beginning to display signs of future potential of modern architectural culture.  He certainly understood that his work was always at risk.

Hence, the intensity of his last building, the beautiful house at Castlecrag, which he built between 1968 and 1972 for himself and his wife on a site that included the remnants of a dwelling designed by Walter Burley Griffin in the 1920s.

Hugh purchased the land with reparations received from Germany.  Eva, unfortunately, passed away in 1976, but her critical discernment permeated the house.  Hugh and Eva’s architecture could only ever be an expression of radical modernism; the house at 375 Edinburgh Road is, for its creator’s European intellectual legacy, finally an expression of its unique site, a profound work of architectural genius that shows unequivocally just how much Hugh understood and loved his landscape.  It is considered as one of the finest modern houses in Australia.  Their house is perhaps the most accomplished of all his works.  It had everything that he was taught by Hans Poelzig, particularly the acceptance of consciously rough technique in the pursuit of a spatial idea, and yet it is also far beyond.  The house is set high above the water’s edge on a steep rocky escarpment at the northern end of Sugarloaf Point. It is built using a mix of materials ─ precast concrete, metal-framed glazed walls, sheet copper roof cladding, steamed cedar sinusoidal ceiling, slate flooring, threaded timber panels and hand-cut local sandstone. The fixed and free-standing furniture was designed to complement the space as sculptures within a sculpture.

The house is considered to demonstrate a particular evolution of the influence of Modernism in Australia, an influence which Hugh brought to Australia as a migrant from Germany in 1938. The Buhrich House II is listed as an item of state significance for its historic and aesthetic values, as well as of particular cultural/social importance amongst the architectural community on the NSW State Heritage Inventory.  It was photographed for the Historic Houses Trust shortly after Hugh’s death on 18 June 2004.  Peter Myers, a Sydney architect who had worked with Jorn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House design team, described the house as a ‘moment of dazzling comprehension’.  The house provides extraordinary beauty in Hugh’s most intensely personal project. He went on to say that “I wish I could say that the book and exhibition of Hugh’s house (borrowing heavily from Frampton’s impeccable drawings of Maison de Verre) were primarily to thank him for this but in reality, I was so taken with this complete vision of a building that I attempted to possess it totally through documentation. I will never forget Hugh’s unassuming and refined pleasure on the night of the opening at Gary Anderson’s Gallery in Darlinghurst in 1991, nor will I ever forget that incredibly vivid image of Hugh at 90, gleefully scampering down those coiled stairs that seemed to project out into space like some tentative form of infinity.

Point Piper House in Point Piper Sydney, was also designed by Hugh and completed in 1961.  It was extensively renovated in 2005 with the object of keeping Hugh’s original design elements intact.

The AJHS acknowledges the following references in the preparation of this story:

Wikipedia; State Library of NSW; Museums of History of New South Wales; Architecture AU – Elizabeth Farrelly; 2004; Design and Art Australia – Davina Jackson; House: Hugh Buhrich 1972, exhibition curated by Neil Durbach and Cathy Lassen, Garry Anderson Gallery, Sydney, 10 September-5 October 1991

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