Rudolf Kompfner was born Rudolf Kömpfner in Vienna, Austria on 16 May 1909 and studied engineering (architecture) at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna from where he graduated in 1931. In 1934, due to the rise of anti-Semitism in Austria, he moved to London where from 1936 to 1940 he worked as managing director and architect with a building firm owned by Roy Mowgli Franey. A house in Lambeth, London he designed in collaboration with (?) Keller, a fellow émigré is discussed in Small Houses £500-£2500, edited by H. Myles Wright (1937 pp. 34-35).
In June 1940 Kompfner was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man. He was released in December 1940. From then on he focused his attention on physics and is not thought to have produced any further architectural work. He became a British subject in 1947. In 1951 he moved to the USA to take up an appointment as associate director at Bell Laboratories. He became an American citizen in 1957 and died in Stanford, California, on 3 December 1977.