Introduction

In January 1976, Australian House and Garden (AHG) published a five-page review, ‘An Architect Builds His Ideal House’, describing an unusual dwelling in Sydney, along with critical commentary, a floor plan, and six photographs, two of which cover full pages (Figure 1). One photograph, in colour, shows a vivid orange-red freeform fibreglass curvilinear bathroom, with washbasin and bath all in one piece that ‘flows’ into the walls and floor (Figure 2). This vibrant interior opens to a narrow timber deck suspended over Sugarloaf Bay in Sydney’s Middle Harbour. The article begins by identifying the inhabitants and the site: ‘The exciting house where [Hugh Buhrich] and his wife, well-known architectural journalist Eva, live, took just over two years to build — on a spectacular waterfront site at Castlecrag, a Sydney suburb’ (‘An Architect’, 1976: 51). Salient details, including the form and assembly techniques of the dining table; an adjacent window; and unique structural and material aspects of the house, such as the peculiar geometry of the roof and the sinusoidal ceiling, punctuate the text (1976: 51–53).

Figure 1

Two pages of the 1976 article, showing photos of the living room and bathroom, with its sink and bathtub, in Buhrich House II. From ‘An Architect Builds His Ideal House’, Australian House and Garden, January, pp. 52–53. I photographed these pages from the magazine in Eva Buhrich’s papers at her desk in the bedroom/study of Buhrich House II in 2025.

Figure 2

Bathroom sink and bathtub, Buhrich House II, in 1991. Photograph by John Gollings.

Only on the last page of the article, near the end of the magazine, some distance from the rest of the review, are we introduced to “Mrs Buhrich,” in the kitchen:

Mrs Buhrich, who is also an architect, was involved with designing the kitchen, which is streamlined and fuss-free. A hood above the stove is covered with the same silver ash veneer as the cupboards and this material has also been used to make a new covering for the door of the refrigerator. (1976: 130)

In a subsequent reprint of the article in the same magazine, Mrs Buhrich has disappeared from all parts of the text, and the first sentence in the quote is edited down to this: ‘The kitchen is streamlined and fuss-free’ (c. 1977: 95). Despite Eva’s career as an architectural journalist, and without regard to any role she might have played in designing her own home, the article erased her.

Nevertheless, the first edition of the article registers a critical trace, followed by the seamless erasure, of a post-war, well-trained female architect and writer in Australia who, like many of her contemporaries, is largely hidden in the history of architecture. Invisibility for women of her generation in architecture was a shared experience, as Julie Willis and Bronwyn Hanna observed in Women Architects in Australia 1900–1950, which includes over 140 qualified women working during that time. For many, their professional output was registered ‘outside or on the fringes of architecture’ (2001: 68).

Notwithstanding her erasure by the editors of AHG, Eva Maria Buhrich (1913–1976),¹ née Bernard, was a professional partner in the couple’s work and life. Until 1971, when her husband, Hugh August Buhrich (1911–2004), was registered as an architect with the Board of Architects of New South Wales, the pair practiced together in Sydney, collaborating as architects, designers, and planning consultants. Surviving archival fragments, such as professional letterhead that reads ‘H. A. Buhrich, E. M. Buhrich. Architectural and Industrial Designers: Room 457. 491 Pitt Street. Sydney’, point to their equal participation in the office (Buhrich 1946 [letter]).

As was the case for many female architects during that period, architectural journalism was not equipped to see Eva’s collaborations with her husband, even though she was a journalist (Willis 1998: 6; Willis and Hanna 2001).² Furthermore, she worked between fields. Her output as an architectural writer was ‘on the fringes’ (Willis and Hanna 2001: 36, 67–68, 71, 100, 102).³ Beginning in 1940, she published in popular, professional, technical, and building journals in Australia and abroad. From 1958 to 1973, Eva was an editor for the journal Building Ideas, and beginning in 1957, she was a regular contributor to The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) through her weekly column ‘Homes and Building’, a column that continued as ‘Living’ from 1972 to 1974 (Buhrich 1974: 12; Myers 2012: 113). She co-designed Castlecrag (c. 1972), a book documenting the aligned social, urban, and architectural aspects of the Sydney suburb that was based on the master-plan of Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin, where she articulated the Griffins’ contributions (Buhrich c. 1972: 14–19), and she wrote Patios and Outdoor Living Areas for a broad audience (Buhrich 1976). Across all her writings, many illustrated with her own designs in plans and sketches for buildings, interiors, details, outdoor spaces, and furniture, her disciplinary knowledge and professional expertise are evident.

Eva’s fragmented, multi-disciplinary work can be read more collectively. By ‘thickly’ depicting these diverse materials with close attention to primary sources, one can identify tensions and connections between points of absence to recover her unusual mode of practice. To recast Eva’s role within architectural history, I turn to her own house, Buhrich House II, the building that was the subject of the 1976 article, and its later reprint, in AGH. This house, located at 375 Edinburgh Road, Castlecrag, was designed and built between 1971 and 1973. Eva’s insightful, literate views that appear in her published writings and private letters resonate throughout the architectural conception and realisation of that dwelling and its contents. Nevertheless, beyond the article in AHG, no published records exist of her contribution to its design. Fragmented evidence survives of her collaboration in the design of an earlier modern house the Buhrichs built for themselves in Castlecrag, between 1941 and 1959, just a few houses up Edinburgh Road, at number 315. However, given the couple’s shared professional background, traces of their explicit collaborations, and surviving public fragments such the sequence towards Eva’s erasure in AHG, the question of her involvement persists.

The later residence, which is still inhabited by their son, contains the Buhrichs’ modernist furniture and art collection, personal belongings, and books, as well as family photos and slides showing buildings Eva and Hugh visited on their travels. Eva’s personal papers and a collection of her letters, together with two scrapbooks she assembled to collate her published articles, are also stored there. Her scrapbooks contain articles she wrote in the 1940s for The Australian Women’s Weekly and, from the 1950s and 60s, articles in AHG, SMH, Walkabout, Woman, the Berlin-based architecture magazine Bauwelt (Buhrich 1965a: 1320), and Deutscher Bauzentrumring (Buhrich 1966a: 2.1–2.4). Her papers include issues of journals to which she contributed — the Melbourne-based Architecture and Arts, AHG, the Swiss monthly magazine Das ideale Heim (Buhrich 1942: 219–222) — and her personal copies of Castlecrag and Patios and Outdoor Living Areas.

Taken together, the furnished house and its contents invoke a private architectural archive that transcribes Eva and Hugh Buhrich’s professional activities in their many modes and makes possible the consideration of less forthcoming evidence. Following recent work by Harriet Edquist and others, this article employs ‘thick’ description as a method to offer a close reading of critical points within these interconnected built and written artefacts (Edquist 1993; Edquist 2000). First used by the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle, the method aims to resist reductive theoretical accounts by adding detailed context to surface-level observations to foreground the totality of a situation. A ‘thicker’ description highlights culture from the perspective of how the subject looked at and experienced life. It positions my writing, as a viewer, as a locus of meaning in preference to any imposed theoretical proposition (Edquist 2023: 458–477).

During my stay in the house, I researched and wrote about Eva’s work in situ, thanks to Neil Buhrich’s kind permission and generosity. For Eva, both historically present and absent as an architect in accounts such as the article in AHG, a ‘thicker’ description has the potential to highlight tensions between such factual reports and to register critical connections within a fragmented, ambiguous field. To better locate Eva’s professional position, I selected a series of moments within her interdisciplinary work, fragments in which both her visibility and her marginalization as an architect are evident: not just family dwellings but also her scrapbooks, letters, and books, as well as other materials in an archive of architectural drawings held under Hugh Buhrich’s name in the State Library of New South Wales. From the desk at which she worked in her study, I also photographed Eva’s personal papers and photographs that reside in that room.

‘A Job as a Draughtsman Not an Architect’

An ‘Ingenieur-Architekt’ by training, Eva was born in Nuremburg. She began architecture studies with Hugh in 1932, at the Technical University of Munich, and graduated in 1937 from the architecture department of ETH Zurich, then led by Otto Salvisberg (Buhrich Graduation Diploma 1937). Hugh graduated with the same qualification in 1936 from the University of Danzig.⁴ Prior to graduation, the couple also studied architecture at the Technical University in Berlin-Charlottenburg under Hans Poelzig. During their time in Zürich, Hugh recorded having worked with Alfred Roth, from around 1935 to 1937, and Eva, too, may have collaborated in Roth’s studio, which was in the Doldertal Apartments, a group of modern buildings designed for Sigfried Giedion between 1932 and 1936 by Alfred and Emil Roth with Marcel Breuer.⁵ Following their forced departure to London from Nazi-occupied Germany (the date is unknown) and their marriage on 14 May 1938 in Hampstead, they were able to emigrate to Australia with the financial assistance of Edward ‘Bobby’ Carter (the RIBA secretary), Serge Chermayeff, and Erich Mendelsohn. They arrived in Sydney in February 1939.

Sydney was an exile destination for European émigré architects such as the Buhrichs (Hawcroft 2013; Hawcroft 2017). Émigré architects had a considerable cultural impact on the uptake of modern architecture in Australia, with many having left promising careers and thriving practices to flee the rise of Nazism. They faced additional hurdles in their new home, such as not having their degrees recognised towards professional registration (Hawcroft 2013: 40–41). For example, Hugh’s repeated applications for inclusion on the Architects Registration Board of New South Wales were unsuccessful until he was sixty, and Eva never registered as an architect in Australia. Many such immigrants suffered from a ‘lack of fit’ with architectural institutions in Australia, prompting them to build their own professional networks (Lozanovska and McKnight 2015). The Buhrichs’ early architectural commissions came from these communities outside mainstream Australian society (Hawcroft 2017: 174).

Yet Eva valued the freedom that came with navigating between cultures: ‘Personally I am lucky that I work among Aussies’, she wrote. ‘Hugh’s business (brisker than ever) is almost exclusively among unsre Leut wie die Wiener sagen [our people, as the Viennese say], and this is not always pleasant’ (Buhrich 1949 [letter]). At the time, Eva was collaborating with Hugh, while also typing building specifications, caring for her twin sons and ‘Grandma’, and working at the Commonwealth Experimental Building Station (CEBS).⁶ The latter work involved producing construction drawings for public projects, researching and developing new types of building materials such as concrete blocks, and designing and realising exhibitions and buildings such as bus shelters (Buhrich 1949 [letter]).

When Eva was a student in Munich, it was rare for women to study architecture. In her unpublished autobiography, she noted that ‘there were 50 boys to every girl’ (Buhrich, n.d.: 16). In Australia, the gender gap took other forms as well. There was structural inequity in pay rates; a prominent sexist attitude, through which women were perceived as ‘less assertive’; the difficult negotiations while balancing motherhood in a predominantly male profession; and additional prejudice against émigrés, all factors that compounded invisibility for women (Willis and Hanna 2001: 67–102). When Eva lost her job at the CEBS in 1951, she commented on the difficulty of finding another that was as well paid. ‘[O]utside the public service my Swiss degree is not recognised and I can only get a job as a draughtsman not an architect’, she relayed (Buhrich 1951 [letter]; 2001: 100).⁷ Regardless of the growing body of scholarship on women architects, she remains little known and is consistently misrepresented, if mentioned at all in architectural history.

‘Designing Furniture for a Flat’

Whilst writing about architecture was to be a lifelong professional activity, Eva’s letter writing is a record of her collaborative architectural design work with her husband on commissions: ‘just now we are designing furniture for a flat’ (Buhrich 1940 [letter]). Those commissioned designs, jointly developed, are among the architectural drawings held in the archive credited only to Hugh Buhrich. On inspection, however, each drawing for this furniture was framed within a shared professional title: ‘H.A. Buhrich & E.M. Buhrich, Arch. Designers and Civil Engineers’. Their collective contributions in November and December 1940 are registered through both Eva and Hugh’s initials in the title blocks.

Measured drawings show designs for a timber sideboard, dining table, and a plywood and glass bar trolley, together with a range of upholstered timber framed chairs. Four dining chairs, a desk chair, a combined stool and couch, a corner settee, an easy chair, and two long ‘bent wood’ reclining chairs are all precisely documented. Highly technical, the drawings show the dimensions, geometric shape, and framing details for all furniture elements, including spring upholstery and details such as a ‘continuous rubber string’ edge for the wheels to the trolley. Eva and Hugh’s initials record their individual contributions to these working drawings on different dates during the period the designs were developed. In the context of a joint professional name in the title block, such details indicate that the furniture was co-designed.

In 1940–41 the Buhrichs invoked Breuer’s work in those designs for the plywood reclining chairs. While they designed details for a bent wood frame so that it could be constructed by a local craftsman, the shape emulated the long chair developed for repetitive assembly at the UK manufacturing firm Isokon, which began to produce it in 1936. Eva’s regard for Breuer’s method of design is explicit in a letter sent in 1949, where she thanks her friend in the United States for sending ‘the booklet on Breuer’s house … I like particularly his [Breuer’s] very European careful approach to detailing — unknown here’ (Buhrich 1949 [letter]). As a signal of their commitment to the priorities within that design, the couple was to commission another pair of identical recliners for their own use, both of which are still owned by the family. These feature in published photographs of the two modern houses the Buhrichs built for themselves. In the 1976 article in AHG, for example, their long bent wood upholstered chair is visible in the foreground of the smaller black and white photograph of the ‘large living room’ in Figure 1 (‘An Architect’, 1976: 52).

‘Cottage for Mrs EM Buhrich’

Five months after completing the drawings for the furniture, Eva wrote a letter, sent from Potts Point, Sydney, dated 14 May 1941, conveying dual threads of news: ‘we are expecting a … baby in August’, and

we are going to have a house. We have at last found an opportunity to lease some land and Hugh wants to do the actual work himself, as our means are rather limited. … [It is] a very pretty little house … in the most glorious surroundings — bush, water, hills, hardly any houses. (Buhrich 1941a [letter])

Design drawings, held in an archive at the State Library of New South Wales under Hugh Buhrich’s name, reveal at least two proposals for the site of their first house, at 315 Edinburgh Road in Castlecrag (the house eventually built there is known as Buhrich House I), which was finally completed in 1959. The earliest designs, for the first proposal, are dated June 1941 (Figure 3). Two of these drawings, titled ‘Cottage for Mrs EM Buhrich’, show a collaborative design, despite the title block that includes only ‘H. A. Buhrich, designer’. One drawing includes both Eva and Hugh’s initials: ‘Drawn: HAB 2.6.41, Traced: EMB 9.6.41’. And the other working drawing, completed approximately a month later, shows only Eva’s initials in the title block: ‘Drawn: EMB 13.7.41, Traced: EMB 15.7.41’. Conventions for recording contributions to the evolution of construction drawings suggest that the only person who worked on the latter drawing was Eva.

Figure 3

‘Cottage for Mrs EM Buhrich’, June 1941. The title block records the collaboration of Eva and Hugh Buhrich in this (unrealised) design. From the Hugh Buhrich collection of architectural and design plans, ca. 1940–1988, Drawing Archives, State Library of New South Wales, 1941, PXD970.

These two pages of drawings, which include drafted plans, sections, and elevations, are for a compact two-level house with a flat roof and taut, modern Neues Bauen appearance. In both drawings, a galley kitchen with dining ‘nook’ overlooks Edinburgh Road, approximately five metres away. The kitchen is parallel to the rectangular living room which faces in the opposite direction, opening onto a balcony and a dramatic view of the harbour and Sydney’s Sugarloaf Bay. A lower level, afforded by the steep slope, accommodates a bedroom and study with porch, all oriented toward the harbour, and a bathroom. The predominantly glass façade that opened to the harbour adjoined a lateral, almost freestanding, two-storey sandstone wall with a large fireplace as a focal point for the living room. The house, with its tightly planned design that indicated an extreme economy of means, would provide fresh air and an expansive outlook to every room.

During the unusually long period of design and construction for this house (completed eighteen years later, to a larger, later design), Eva’s letters contain frequent references to the difficulty of their obtaining approval for the dwelling’s modernist appearance. On 5 July 1941, she wrote, ‘We are fighting a battle against the Council who refused our application to build our little house because it is too modern’ (Buhrich 1941b [letter]). Modern architecture, with its utilitarian appearance and flat roofs, was considered radical in 1941 in a suburban Sydney dominated by red brick bungalows with ‘Marseilles’ terracotta-tiled pitched roofs (Buhrich 1968).⁸ In 1946 Eva wrote that they were ‘struggling very hard [as architects] just to make a living. Jobs take an endless time … between them municipal councils and money lenders put their brakes on any decent or modern design’ (Buhrich 1946 [letter]). Four years later, in August 1950, the unorthodox design of their house continued to compromise their ability to secure a mortgage (Buhrich 1950 [letter]).

Eva’s plans dated a month later, July 1941, present an adjusted version of the June plan, with some dimensions extended, including those within the minimal kitchen. The galley space between the sink and cupboards opposite is increased by seven inches (approximately 18 cm). This subtle extension aligned the new arrangement with the dimensions of the narrow ‘Frankfurt Kitchen’, an influential model project designed by the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in 1926 that Eva presumably encountered in her studies. It is also published in a book owned by the Buhrichs, still in their family home, Die deutsche Wohnung der Gegenwart (1930) in the Die Blauen Bücher series (Müller-Wulckow 1930: 26). Schütte-Lihotzky is identified in that publication as the designer of that model kitchen, and other women appear too, such as Alma Buscher, who had designed a children’s room with Marcel Breuer (1927) in Berlin, and Ella Briggs, the designer of an apartment in Pestalozzi-Hof (1926) in Vienna (1930: 23 and 85).

Eva’s name appears in several places on the design drawings for this house, even on its own. In 1948 a further version of the project for the same steeply sloping site at 315 Edinburgh Road was titled ‘Home for Mrs E. M. Buhrich’, an echo of ‘Cottage for Mrs E. M. Buhrich’, suggesting that she was the client throughout the process (Buhrich, H. SLNSW 1948: PXD970). That drawing was completed by Hugh, but Eva was clearly a crucial participant in the building project, as co-designer of the early scheme. And it is plausible that her salary was important for the Buhrichs’ ability to secure a mortgage. Her letters described her financial contribution: ‘maybe … [my work] will do to pay off the house’ (Buhrich 1949 [letter]). Nomination as the client in the drawings would support this organisation.

In the 1948 plan, the design arrangement from 1941 was maintained but allowed more space. Flanked by the sandstone wall, the main bedroom and living areas extend farther toward the harbour, creating a larger terrace for the living room, and the lower-level ‘study’ is reorganised as a bedroom for the Buhrichs’ twin boys (born in 1941). Expansion of the rectangular volume at the southern end slightly shifts the plan from a rectangle to a trapezium which re-orients the glazing that faces the harbour toward a northern sunnier aspect. Above the kitchen, dining room, and living room, a roof terrace is accessed from an additional ‘study/bedroom’ that is partly cantilevered over an open carport to the north. Eva reported in her letters that ‘every room will get the view’ (Buhrich 1949 [letter]), a comment that reflects her democratic considerations for every space, including the bathroom. As in the 1941 design, along the southern façade, the vertically proportioned sandstone wall with a fireplace for the living room suggests a stepped extension of the ground. Here too, it provides a weighted counterpoint to the otherwise predominantly horizontal, taut glass and lighter concrete slab and block-walled enclosure, which possesses some affinities with a dwelling designed by Poelzig and realised in 1927 for the influential Weissenhofsiedlung model housing estate in Stuttgart (Buhrich, H. SLNSW 1948: PXD970).

In 1952, when the house was still incomplete, the SMH published an article on the children’s bedroom in the first Buhrich house and remarked on the accommodations for each child (‘Twin Designs’, 1952: 3). The captions for the photographs introduce Eva as both a wife and the co-designer of her children’s spaces (1952: 3). In that children’s bedroom, she thoughtfully combines play, study, and sleeping areas, providing each child individuation and equality. Eva and Hugh designed the room and the built-in details to give their children privacy and space for them to grow (1952: 3). Each inhabitant was equally considered throughout the design. Both the parents’ and children’s bedrooms are equally spacious, on the same level, and with the same access to outdoor spaces, sunny orientation, and harbour prospect. Both have an equal sense of connection to the common spaces, with opportunities for retreat.

Two months later, for The ABC Weekly, Eva is featured in a photograph, taken by the architectural photographer Max Dupain, who highlighted the dramatic native landscape and harbour outlook of the house for the publication. In this image, she is a mother, seated in front of a wide view of the bay, reading a book to her sons, with a dog at their feet (‘ABC Talks’, 1953: 24) (Figure 4). The caption reads, ‘Mrs Eva Buhrich, her twin sons Neil and Clive, at the home she and her husband have built in Sydney. Swiss-trained architect, she will give a talk, Building to Suit the Climate, on February 12’ (1953: 24). The text in The ABC Weekly asserts Eva’s position as a well-trained architect, with expertise in architectural design for optimised response to climatic circumstances ‘so as to make the most of the good features of each area and to combat the worst’ (1953: 7). Dupain’s image also hints at the Buhrichs’ inclusive architectural priorities embedded in the design. Whilst the photograph celebrates an abstracted, elevated prospect over the natural environment, one frequently emphasised, say, in modern works by Gropius in the Stuttgart Weissenhofsiedlung, the subject and her activity in this image is to the left of the setting, against the wall and on the floor that are both of locally quarried stone. Eva and the children and dog together form one edge of the scene — domestic life is part of the constructed frame of site sandstone. Grounded within the landscape, as well as distinct from it, this modern house and its inhabitants suggest an architectural position aligned with the Buhrichs’ design for the cantilevered chairs. The building emulates the earlier German and Swiss models but continues a critical questioning, with adaptation to new circumstances and environmental contexts.

Figure 4

Photograph of Eva Buhrich with her two children and the family dog, by Max Dupain, in Buhrich House II. From ‘ABC Talks’, The ABC Weekly, 7 February 1953, p. 24. I photographed the page from the magazine in Eva Buhrich’s papers at her desk in the bedroom/study of Buhrich House II in 2025.

Eva’s contributions to the design for their first house, at 315 Edinburgh Road, can be traced through moments where her position as a partner, someone with the same education and cultural knowledge as her husband, both as co-designer and as homeowner, was at once presented and erased. Dupain’s published portrait in 1953 framed not only a mother reading to her children but a ‘Swiss-trained’ architectural expert in her own home. Later, in 1976, she was credited for the design of the couple’s second house only because of the kitchen. At that time, in AHG, it was framed as a space for ‘Mrs Buhrich’ as wife. Mindful of her knowledge of Schütte-Lihotzky’s work, the design of the kitchen can be read in terms of her professional expertise.

‘Mrs Buhrich, Who Is Also an Architect’

During her lifetime, Eva was recognised as a journalist, but even her journalism was all about architecture. Frequently illustrated with design sketches and construction details, her publications, such as those in AHG and Woman, invoked additional social and political goals to disseminate architectural knowledge and empower individuals to shape their environments for living. Her clear prose and tangible examples engaged and informed all audiences through the broad range of venues in which her work was published. In a systematic assessment of affordable housing projects constructed in Sydney during the 1960s, she critically reviewed ‘mass produced’ houses in a series called ‘Project Homes’, part of her weekly architecture column ‘Homes and Building’ in the SMH. From mid 1966 and throughout 1967, she published an article on that topic almost every week (Lassen 2025).⁹ She also collated her regular articles on this subject from 10 May 1966 to 19 March 1968 in one of her two scrapbooks (Buhrich Scrapbook) (Figure 5). In Our Women, she advised readers in practical and financial terms about ways to benefit from modern architecture, with informed reference to an economical ‘Project Home’ (a term for a mass-produced dwelling) that was given an architectural award for good design and ‘promoted by the New South Wales Institute of Architects’ (Buhrich 1967a: 12–13) (Figure 6).

Figure 5

Eva Buhrich Scrapbook. Left to right: Cover, inside cover, article on first page. I photographed these pages in 2025 from the scrapbook that is on the desk, and part of the Eva Buhrich papers, in Eva’s bedroom/study in Buhrich House II.

Figure 6

Eva Buhrich, ‘A Sydney Woman Architect looks at Design for Today’s Needs’, Our Women, September-December 1967, 12–13. I photographed these pages in 2025 from the magazine that is on the desk in Eva’s bedroom/study, and part of the Eva Buhrich papers in Buhrich House II.

In the second family home built by the couple, introduced in January 1976 in AHG, the working drawings and construction were realised by Hugh. Though the article acknowledges her involvement ‘in designing the kitchen’, the critical questions and observations relayed throughout Eva’s writings echo within her work on architecture. For example, her extensive writings on Project Homes demonstrate her engagement with the potentials for architectural design offered by industrialised construction, an interest that can be seen in the detailed development of the glass façade that formed the north-facing wall of the house. By minimizing redundant structure and optimizing re-combinations of standard elements, a refined, floor to ceiling operable glass wall was assembled with inexpensive off-the-shelf components (Lassen 2025: 10–18). In an article Eva published in 1963 in AHG, ‘Ceilings Are Looking Up!’, in one section, ‘Ways to Make a Curved Ceiling’, she explains how to create the sinusoidal shape that prefigures the distinctive ceiling in Buhrich House II (Buhrich 1963: 52–53 and 56, 58, 60).

The kitchen in both houses was arranged as a galley, with a built-in dining area at the end farthest from the entrance, which reflects an understanding of Schütte-Lihotzky’s work of 1926. The dimensions of their second kitchen (2.6 m × 3.6 m), which was still compact and efficient, were slightly more generous than the Buhrichs’ first kitchen and Schütte-Lihotzky’s famous model. The layout indicates a precise study of Schütte-Lihotzky’s principles, and perhaps a knowledge of her larger, later models. The corridor was approximately 10 cm wider than the kitchen corridor in Buhrich House I, allowing two people to pass and work more easily. The width accommodated a layer of continuous cupboards (approximately 30 cm deep) behind each of the two long work benches. Like the Frankfurt Kitchen, within a modest area, the space is optimised for minimal movement between activities, with copious storage space for particular functions, including pull-out ‘extra bench’ panels, and for the correspondence of material with each component and its performance. For example, along one side, the sink, adjacent benches, and backsplash were all made from brushed stainless steel, while the workbench opposite was made from laminated timber block board. All the cupboards, including those behind the sink, that were accessed from the living room, were of silver ash veneer on particleboard. Eva topped those cupboards with a shelf (1080 mm high) that shielded the kitchen from public view and incorporated a continuous lighting pelmet. Raised three steps, the kitchen and dining areas overlooked and were part of the larger parallel living space, and all three areas enjoyed expansive views of Sydney’s Middle Harbour. Someone standing in the kitchen would feel both private, set apart from the rest of the house, and also included in social activities from an elevated prospect and with an appealing view. Like the kitchen of the first house, yet with more generous accommodations, more privacy, and greater inclusion in the living room, the later design shows a deliberate extension of the Frankfurt Kitchen rationale. Eva critically engaged with the principles of German and Swiss models of modernism to better integrate the space of housework within the more public parts of the house.

Throughout Buhrich House II, various design choices, such as the kitchen, are more legible when seen in relationship to their earlier house, just up the road, and through the lens of Eva’s architectural writing. Her book, Patios and Outdoor Living Areas, highlights responsiveness in design to different environmental conditions, and opens with a reference to the indigenous inhabitants: ‘Outdoor living is the natural way of life in Australia. A mere two hundred years ago nobody lived indoors’ (Buhrich 1976: 5). Written for a popular audience and practical implementation, the text also contains detailed climatic data for assessing conditions in regions across Australia. Eva recommends native ‘bush’ gardens for their low maintenance, low water consumption, and suitability for the local climate: ‘A lot can be said for growing plants which are indigenous to the specific area and will therefore thrive and require little maintenance’, she observes (1976: 79).

In broad terms, Patios suggests how to live seamlessly with the immediate natural environment, with affordable ideas that were not only easy to build and practical to maintain but also prioritised a balance for living in both the natural and constructed realms, as its cover image shows (Figure 7). At the second Buhrich house, the predominantly native bush garden, which continues to grow, is integral to the planning of the building in its harbour setting. Reciprocity and balance between natural and constructed elements is emphasised throughout the dwelling. For example, the built-in dining table deliberately frames a view of this indigenous landscape. Made from toughened glass, the table forms an extended sill to a horizontal window in a rough site-quarried sandstone wall and appears to float, supported on brackets of clear acrylic, in turn resting on a suspended stainless-steel bar (Figure 8). As observed in AHG, the table was placed low, at ‘just the right height for viewing the bush garden when people are seated’ (‘An Architect’, 1976: 51). The horizontal opening in the stone frames that landscape’s literal reflections in the table, but suggests the framing of other types of reflections as well. Reflective attitudes might be discussed during a meal. A self-reflexive play with geometry is apparent between the table shape that tapers towards the window and the window’s reflection on that surface. Reflections in the glass suggest a play with perspective. The angles of the reflected table lead the eye outward, perhaps to a debate over the as-found ‘natural’ garden and evoking a situation where neither technology nor nature was dominant — an invitation to the viewer to participate in the perceptual process. Glass, steel, and Perspex frame, reflect, and refract transparent perspectives on the bushland. The design crafts a deliberate interplay between constructed and natural conditions. It recalls an enquiry Eva posed in 1966, examining a trend in which ‘leading younger architects the world over … use natural materials in building. In Sydney, almost all the prize-winning designs of the last few years show this approach’ (Buhrich 1966b: 12). In her article ‘Strength and Boldness in Natural Materials’, she asked, ‘What actually are natural materials?’ (1966b: 12). Eva’s critical questions prefigure the questioning internal to the architecture of their dwelling.

Figure 7

Cover of Patios and Outdoor Living Areas, by Eva Buhrich, published in 1976. I photographed this book, part of the Eva Buhrich papers, where it lies on Eva’s bedroom/study desk in Buhrich House II, in 2025.

Figure 8

Buhrich House II, dining table detail, native bush garden and sandstone walls, in 1991. Photograph by John Gollings.

Eva’s numerous writings on Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin also echo within the design of her second house. From Edinburgh Road, Buhrich House II was, and is, almost invisible; the predominant impression of number 375 is one of landscape. However, the glimpses from the road through the bush reveal a modernist structure that was unusual amongst its neighbours. Obliquely sited, approached through bushland, located below and beyond a small Griffin-designed ‘Knitlock’ studio and carport (Buhrich c. 1972: 17),¹⁰ the building followed Eva’s articulation of Griffin’s conception for the planned suburban locale, where found qualities in the native landscape were valued, protected, and expected to predominate. She writes, ‘The spaces around the [Griffin designed] houses were designed as carefully as the buildings … They merge with the native landscape, the interesting rock formations, the bush flora … to such a degree that they are often almost invisible … from the street’ (c. 1972: 15; Buhrich 1965b; and Buhrich 1967b: 30–32). And within the Buhrichs’ house, the two almost freestanding site-quarried sandstone walls acknowledge Griffin’s directive for building materials and formed frames for living and dining activities, such as sharing a meal, or gathering around the fire (Figures 1, 8). At the same time, those elements reprised the south-facing sandstone wall in the couple’s earlier home, part of the frame in Dupain’s portrait. In both Buhrich houses, locally quarried stone formed a lateral end wall to a glass façade facing the harbour.¹¹ In the later dwelling, however, that wall was more fragmented, and buried in bushland. The shift suggests a counterbalance of site-carved stone with a continuous façade of catalogue glazing more vigorously posed in counterpoint, less grounded, both balanced above the bay on the narrow site. Within an extension of the earlier modern design, the second house suggests a continued critique of the Swiss and German models, for example, around the issue of ‘natural’ materials.

As an addition to an existing ‘Knitlock’ structure on the site, Buhrich House II physically and metaphorically extended Griffin’s town planning ideas. In her journalism, Eva articulates an architectural modernity that does not embrace an urban ‘tabula rasa’ but instead prioritises an attentive historical awareness of the city. Not simply an advocate for modern ‘progress’, she interrogated urban renewal ‘modernization’ projects in Sydney that promoted widespread demolition of nineteenth-century Victorian streets. This conception included the recognition and preservation of indigenous landscape, such as that found in Castlecrag. Articles she published in the SMH in the 1960s argue for urban ‘heritage’ preservation of continuous row ‘terrace’ houses and ‘sensible street planning, of urban good manners’ in the Sydney suburb of Paddington, to retain an ‘object lesson of urban renewal without large scale development’ (Buhrich 1966c: 14).

Eva’s informed questions drove her writing, layered with productive tensions, in professional forums such as Architecture and Arts and more popular magazines like Woman and The Australian Woman’s Weekly (Buhrich 1947: 48–49; Buhrich 1952: 35). In her editorial for the June 1954 edition of Architecture and Arts, she reports on Walter Gropius’s visit to Australia and complicated his commitment to a narrow conception of functionalism: ‘Perhaps we had misunderstood Gropius in the past. His “functionalism” was a wider term than we had supposed. It included man’s emotional functions, his dreams as well as the materialistic-rationalistic ones’ (Buhrich 1954: 891). Eva challenged a dogmatism advocated by many proponents of modernism in architecture:

We had not broken with the 19th century’s applied archaeology called architecture in order to follow another narrow path, that of the so-called international style. Gropius knew then as many of us know now (and one might have been listening to Lewis Mumford instead of the great exponent of German functionalism) that as architects we must plan the physical background for a fully democratic life (1954: 891).

Her writing consistently intertwines socio-political aspirations with technical, material, financial, ‘functional’, and aesthetic or cultural conditions in modern architecture.

Eva Buhrich read and thought about the design of the domestic sphere throughout her life. Amongst her books in the collection in the second Buhrich house is her annotated copy of the catalogue from the exhibition curated by Emilio Ambasz at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, Achievements and Problems of Italian Design (I:NDL) (Ambasz 1972). Edited by Ambasz and generously illustrated with visionary designs and radical ‘environments’ by a new generation of designers such as Archizoom, Mario Bellini, Joe Colombo, Gruppo Strum, Ugo La Pietra, Gaetano Pesce, Superstudio, and Zanuso/Sapper, the volume featured critical writing on the Italian architectural scene by Vittorio Gregotti and Paolo Portoghesi, Giulio Carlo Argan, Germano Celant, and Manfredo Tafuri, among others. Eva marked the book in several places, such as areas that questioned a narrowly conceived functionalism. Eva’s reports in the SMH reiterate a similar, more variable, inclusive relationship between form and function. For her column of 6 September 1972, she discusses ideas about living: ‘Mobility, change, flexibility are the only constant ideas in our time. This is now true for our domestic surroundings as much as for anything else … there are many people who no longer live within a traditional family unit. They might live alone … or with a group of friends’ (Buhrich 1972b: 12). She observes that such models might prompt flexibility in the design of rooms, an aspect seen in their second home where both bedrooms doubled as studies (‘An Architect’, 1976: 51).

Newspaper articles by Eva Buhrich from that time emphasise the distinctive materials, colours, and modes of assembly that were the focus of I:NDL. In her column ‘Living’ of 2 August 1972, she notes, ‘An interesting example of an Italian bathroom is on show at the Sydney Building Information Centre. Brilliant orange fibreglass … moulded in the factory and placed into a building complete with all fittings’ (Buhrich 1972a: 12). Within Buhrich House II, critical elements within the overall design, such as the free-form moulded orange-red fibreglass bathroom, light fixtures combining two different standardised bulb fixtures, economical industrialised glazing, and details such as clear plexiglass for fittings and furniture, all recall images, materials, and socio-political questions around manufacturing conditions explored in the MoMA exhibition (see Lassen (2025: 8–20) for more on this topic). Relationships posed between design and ‘counterdesign’ in I:NDL resound in key relationships throughout the Buhrichs’ house.

The project reverberated with a constellation of debates. Locally quarried sandstone walls, a timber-lined ceiling, and interconnections with native bush gardens read as if in deliberate tension with off-the-shelf curtain wall glazing, a sense of floating above the setting, an open plan, and, in the Buhrichs’ reclining bent wood chair, the memory of Marcel Breuer and Alfred Roth’s interiors. Constructed and ‘natural’ materials are framed as if in counterpoint. Mass-produced economical components are deliberately adjacent to crafted artefacts. Moments throughout the house invoke suspended judgments, states of architectural attitudes in critical balance, that, like Eva’s questions after Gropius in 1954, challenged narrow conceptions of ‘function’ and either-or dogmatism. An aligned approach was advised in Patios, where indigenous gardens were promoted but with ‘no need to be dogmatic’ (Buhrich 1976: 79). In addition to Eva’s apparent influence, her letters show that she also remained in dialogue with her husband. As their dwelling neared completion, she remarked in a letter to a friend that ‘we still argue about some things’ and ‘I am giving up in my saner moments’ (Buhrich 1973 [letter]). Hugh drew and constructed the building, but Eva’s texts trace questions mirrored within the design, placing her as co-author and architect of her own houses.

Conclusion

Eva Buhrich described herself as an architect. In letters, articles, and books, in buildings and drawings, her texts register thoughtful ‘conversations’ that connect diverse threads in her work. Eva continued the critique within modern architecture she encountered in her training under Poelzig and Salvisberg and via connections to Roth and Breuer in Zürich. For example, furniture that she designed with Hugh on their arrival in Sydney recorded an ongoing interrogation of those political, social, and cultural ideals within the Australian environment.

Eva’s presence persists throughout designs for both the Buhrichs’ self-built family homes and against efforts that undermined her contributions by presenting her solely as a wife and a mother. Continuities and distinctions between the dwellings suggest her critical input in the design for their later house. Eva’s practice, located between fields, was atypical. Her writings for the Project Homes series in the SMH and her interest in affordable design through industrialised production can be traced in Buhrich House II, for example in the northern glazed façade. Her arguments for the preservation of indigenous landscape informed the layout and detailed design of that dwelling. Questioning a narrow functionalism and uncritical urban renewal in Sydney suburbs such as Paddington, Eva’s views transcribed an aspiration that modernism promised to a larger proportion of the population for living well, but via counterbalance, as a measured interweaving of competing progressive forces. Positions in argued counterpoint framed tensions within the design of the second Buhrich house, as in the interplay between constructed and ‘as found’ materials, ‘off-the-shelf’ and crafted details. Seen through Eva’s writings as a judgement suspended between either–or attitudes, her contribution to this ‘ideal house’, as presented in Australian House and Garden, now considered critically important in Australia, revises the record as being a house that was both his and hers.

Author’s Note

I am grateful to Neil Buhrich for his kindness and generosity in providing extended access to his house and his mother’s personal papers. John Gollings very generously shared his images and memories and granted permission to publish his photographs. Thanks always to my colleagues Andrew Leach and Cameron Logan for their vital feedback and support. I am similarly indebted to the anonymous reviewers and the editors of Architectural Histories, particularly Olga Touloumi, whose insights and guidance greatly enriched this paper.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.