He enrolled at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1909 and graduated from Kunstakademiets Arkitektskole in 1919.

[1] Already as students, Rafn and Kay Fisker won 2nd prize in am architectural competition to design the stations on a new railway on Bornholm.

Their railway stations were influenced by Martin Nyrop's National Romantic style.

Like the majority of his contemporaries, Rafn would later work within the idioms of forst Nordic Classicism and then Functionalism.

[1] In 1936, together with Hans Jørgen Kampmann, he was awarded the Rckersberg Medal for Vartov gl.