Australian Dictionary of Biography

Marion Griffin at Haven Scenic Theatre, 1938

Pix 2 no. 16 (15 October 1938), p.32

Marion Lucy Mahony Griffin (1871–1961), architect, artist, and designer, was born on 14 February 1871 at Chicago, Illinois, United States of America, second of five children of Illinois-born Clara Hamilton, née Perkins, teacher, and her Irish-born husband Jeremiah Mahony, poet, journalist, and teacher. Following the October 1871 Great Fire that destroyed one-third of Chicago, the Mahony family left the city to settle in the rural neighbourhood of Hubbard Woods in north-east Winnetka, known for its dramatic ravines and lively Unitarian community. A shy girl with tomboyish ways and a rebellious spirit, Marion attended the local village school and developed a lifelong love of nature.

As Mahony approached the end of her elementary schooling, her family twice experienced tragedy: the loss of their house in a fire, hastening their return to Chicago in 1879, and the death of her father in July 1882. In the years after his death, she would gain a treasured confidante in her aunt, Myra Perkins, who moved in with the family (together with Mahony’s maternal grandmother) and impressed on her a deep appreciation of music. In a household led by three strong freethinking Perkins women, she was also immersed in liberal Protestantism and Chicago’s progressive movement. Her mother, faced with the financial burden of raising five children, was coached by the education reformer Ella Flagg Young and became principal of the highly regarded Komensky School. Through her mother’s circle, Mahony encountered reformers, activists, and suffragists, many of whom were connected with the Chicago Woman’s Club. Among them was peace activist and Hull House trustee Mary Hawes Wilmarth, and her daughter, Anna, with whom she became lifelong friends. The Wilmarths later supported her university education.

In 1890, after passing the university entrance examinations, Mahony moved to Boston to study at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BSArch, 1894). The second woman to enrol in architecture at MIT, she enjoyed a liberal education which included Ecole des Beaux-Arts instruction in architecture, as well as courses in literature, French, German, political economics, history, and anthropology. She had a close-knit circle of female friends, joined the university theatre, and excelled at her studies. For her 1894 thesis, ‘The House and Studios of a Painter,’ she broke with convention to explore an innovative home-work typology. Her future employer, Frank Lloyd Wright, later used the typology when he added a studio to his house at Oak Park, Illinois, in 1898.

Returning to Chicago after graduation, Mahony worked for her cousin and architect, Dwight Heald Perkins, before accepting a position in Wright’s office in 1895. Along with many progressive architects, Marion was influenced by Louis Sullivan’s discourses on architecture. She also frequented the intellectually vibrant Hull House settlement led by Jane Addams, where in 1906 she met the Australian novelist Miles Franklin, who would remain a lifelong friend, one of her ‘congenials’ as the author would call her circle of intimates.

 From 1895 to 1908 Mahony worked intermittently in Wright’s studio, while accepting other illustrating, design, and teaching jobs. Only four years Wright’s junior, she was the longest standing member of his ‘little university’ during this period and contributed to the development of the Prairie School that revolutionised American architecture. Combining her talents as an artist and architect, her Japanese-inspired renderings in the Wasmuth Portfolio (1910), including perspectives of the Cheney house and Unity Temple in Oak Park, helped define and publicise the Prairie style internationally. In January 1898 she passed the Illinois State examination for architects to become the first licensed female architect in the State. Her best-known private commission was the Unitarian Church of All Souls (1902–03) at Evanston, Chicago (demolished in 1961).

Mahony met Walter Burley Griffin, an Illinois-born architect, in 1901 at Wright’s Oak Park studio, where he worked for five years before starting his own practice in 1906. Though she and Griffin would later harbour a bitter resentment towards Wright, the unconventional studio nurtured both their abilities. In 1909 Wright left his wife for client Mamah Borthwick Cheney and travelled to Germany to oversee publication of the Wasmuth Portfolio. He offered his practice to Mahony. She refused. Subsequently, Hermann von Holst took over operations until Wright’s return in 1913, and Marion joined von Holst as chief designer. During this period, she ‘had great fun designing’ (Griffin 1938–49, IV.20) and completed, among other commissions, the Amberg house at Grand Rapids, Michigan (1910), the two Mueller houses at Decatur, Illinois (1909–10), and the design for Henry Ford’s house on his estate at Dearborn, Michigan (1912–13). She also reconnected with Griffin, who worked with her and von Holst as a landscape architect, and they began a courtship that developed over weekend canoeing trips on Illinois’s waterways. ‘[I was] swept off my feet,’ remembered Marion, first ‘by my delight in his achievements in my profession, then through the common bond of interest in nature and intellectual pursuits and then with the man himself’ (Griffin 1938–49, IV.157). They married on 29 June 1911 at Michigan City, Indiana, and subsequently collaborated on various projects in Illinois and Iowa, and on the international design competition for Australia’s new Federal capital, Canberra.

In May 1912 Walter’s name appeared in headlines around the world announcing he had won. The winning design, believed to have been conceived by Walter in collaboration with Marion, embodied their political and spiritual ideals and was exquisitely rendered in ink, gouache, and watercolour on fourteen linen and silk panels in Marion’s distinctive style. It is possible that Miles Franklin helped Marion understand the landscape depicted in her remarkably accurate ‘View from Mt Ainslie’ perspective drawing. The following year, while collaborating on projects across the United States, Griffin visited Australia (August–November 1913) before travelling to Europe with Marion (February–March 1914). Within weeks of their return to Chicago they departed for Sydney, expecting to see their plan for Canberra executed. They were accompanied by Walter’s brother-in-law and junior partner, Roy Lippincott and his wife, and George Elgh.

During a year that Marion later described as ‘full indeed with doors opening and doors slamming in our faces’ (Griffin 1938–49, II.100), she worked tirelessly to manage their Sydney office. She also published an article in two parts on ‘Democratic Architecture’ in Sydney’s foremost architectural magazine, Building, and became embroiled in a factional battle at the Town Planning Association of New South Wales, after agitating for the Women’s Section to be better organised. It was a fight she partly won, but which led to conflict with Florence Mary Taylor who, together with her husband and Building editor George, would subsequently campaign against the Griffins in architectural and political circles. Committed to progressive causes, Marion cultivated relationships with intellectuals and peace activists. The Sunday Times (Sydney) described her as a ’real live wire’ who advocated gender equality, believing that the profession of architecture ‘is eminently suited to women’ 1915, 7). She also spoke in support of the feminist cause in October 1915 during an address to the National Council of Women in Sydney.

The Griffins moved to Melbourne in 1916. With a small staff they collaborated closely on several major projects, including Newman College at the University of Melbourne (1915–17), Café Australia (1915–16), and several estates on the metropolitan fringe, among them the Glenard and Summit subdivisions of Mount Eagle (Eaglemont) Estate at Heidelberg (1914–16). These were exhausting years and in late 1918 Marion went on a two-week sketching holiday in Tasmania with the artists Bertha Merfield and Mabel Hookey. The trip provided inspiration for several of her forest portraits on silk and satin that show her innovative representations of nature. Soon afterwards, the Griffins built their beloved one-roomed Knitlock house, Pholiota, at Glenard Estate, where they lived until 1925.

From October 1913 until his resignation in 1920, Walter was Federal capital director of design and construction. Political and bureaucratic problems plagued his work from the beginning, and Marion railed at what she called the ‘bureau-crazies’ (Perkins, pers. comm.). Writing to Walter’s sister in May 1916, she complained: ‘… we’re helping to clear a way through the jungle but Lord how the beasts do bite and snap’ (Griffin 1938–49, II.27).

In late 1920, bruised by the Canberra experience, the Griffins purchased 650 acres (263 ha) on the shores of Sydney’s Middle Harbour and set up the Greater Sydney Development Association (GSDA) to finance and develop a utopian residential estate. They named it Castlecrag after the towering sandstone promontory known locally as Edinburgh Castle. Informed by their 1912 Rock Crest-Rock Glen project at Mason City, Iowa, their aim was to create a community where residents lived in harmony with nature. Roads would follow contours, site planning would enhance the natural landscape, and all residents would have access to the waterfront via strategically positioned pedestrian rights of way. Building covenants would protect views and require the planting of native species. They also kept busy with other projects in Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra, and between 1921 and 1924 they completed Melbourne’s Capitol House and Capitol Theatre, which featured a stunning ceiling design by Marion. Eric Nicholls, a young Victorian architect, joined the Sydney office in 1921 and later became a partner.

The Griffins visited Chicago briefly in early 1925 after the death of Marion’s mother. On their return, they moved to Castlecrag with Marion’s assistant Louisa Mary Lightfoot. Notwithstanding disagreements with GSDA shareholders and legal battles with planning authorities, Marion led efforts to create a lively social and cultural community. Withdrawing from architectural work, she helped host musical evenings, moonlight picnics, children’s activities, and dances, and became involved with local arts and women’s organisations. In 1930, the Griffins built the open-air Haven Valley Scenic Theatre, where Marion produced more than twelve plays, helping make Castlecrag an inspiring community in the interwar years. The Griffins were also enthusiastic patrons of Pakie’s Club, a modern salon opened in 1929, which attracted Sydney’s artistic and literary community to lectures, art shows, and international food and costume events. For the 11 November 1929 salon, the Griffins dressed as Mayan gods.

After a long association with theosophical ideas, in September 1930 Marion joined the Sydney branch of the Anthroposophical Society. Walter joined in 1931. Towards the end of 1930, after a ‘character testing decade,’ she ‘ran away’ to Chicago, telling Walter he was a ‘free man’ (Griffin 1939–49, IV.159). Staying with her widowed sister in the Rogers Park family home, she studied Rudolph Steiner’s teachings and executed a large mural in oils, Fairies Feeding the Herons (1931), at George B. Armstrong Elementary School. She eventually reconciled with Walter and returned to Sydney in September 1932. Her devotion to anthroposophy, ’a path to knowledge to guide the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the universe’ (Steiner 1973, 13) shaped the rest of her life. Anthroposophy underpinned her enthusiasm for eurythmic dance and her friendship with Ruth Janet Drummond, with whom she hosted Steiner festivals at Castlecrag. The philosophy was reflected in buildings, notably Griffin’s 1934 pre-Columbian influenced Pyrmont Incinerator, demolished in 1992 following sustained protests.

In October 1935 Walter left for India after winning a commission to design a library for the University of Lucknow. Marion followed in April 1936 to work on this and other projects, including the Pioneer Press Office and Works, Lucknow (1936–37), and a site plan for the United Provinces Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition (1936). When Walter died unexpectedly at Lucknow in February 1937 following a gall bladder operation, she wound up their affairs and returned to Castlecrag.

Marion departed for Chicago in October 1938 and again took up residence in Rogers Park with her sister and niece, whose three children she helped care for. Describing her departure she wrote, ‘now I left Castlecrag truly a bit of Paradise on earth to take on the next adventure.’ (Griffin 1939–49, II.209). Over the next decade, she worked on ‘The Magic of America,’ a manifesto, and memoir about the Griffins’ personal and professional lives, which would run to over 1,400 typewritten pages with 650 accompanying photographs and illustrations. Besides occasional speaking engagements and interviews, she accepted two commissions from the American peace activist and feminist Lola Maverick Lloyd: a 338-acre (137 ha) World Fellowship Center site at Conway, New Hampshire (1942), and a town plan for Hills Crystal-Rosary Crystals on Lloyd’s childhood ranch near Boerne, Texas (1943). Neither project proceeded following Lloyd’s death in 1944.

In 1943 Marion gifted the title deeds of Castlehaven Reserve, encompassing the open-air Haven Valley Scenic Theatre (later Haven Amphitheatre), to Sydney’s Willoughby Council and, after a period of disuse, it became a treasured community asset. Visiting Marion in 1952, Chicago School historian Mark Peisch noted signs of memory loss. Marion died a pauper on 10 August 1961 in Cook County Hospital, Chicago, and her ashes were interred in an unmarked grave at Graceland cemetery. In 1997 they were reinterred in the cemetery’s columbarium with a memorial plaque.

Tall, thin, and angular, with a lean, wiry strength, Marion often dressed in colourful and unconventional clothing. She was a woman of no uncertain opinions who was well known for her passion, scathing wit, and brilliant intellect. In Australia her uncompromising and unconventional views occasionally raised conservative hackles, and she and Walter were seen by some as too idealistic and personally eccentric. She was also deeply anti-authoritarian and maintained a lifelong commitment to democracy, pacifism, spirituality, and the power of architecture to create change. In a career that spanned three continents and fifty years, she was by turns artist, graphic designer, delineator, interior and furniture designer, environmentalist, muralist, activist, theatre director, architect, and writer. She was also an outstanding collaborator who, despite being one of the leading architectural artists of her generation, usually worked in creative partnerships with male architects, especially her husband, to whom she remained devoted. One of the foundations of her emotional and intellectual life was friendship, which she saw as ‘one of the greatest schools of thinking’ (Griffin 1938–49, IV.145).

Although Marion was held in high esteem by many of her contemporaries, she was marginalised in early architectural and historical scholarship. In the 1980s, new scholarship in Australia and the United States began to recognise her as a more equal partner with her husband and as an artist and architect in her own right. The Griffins’ professional legacy amounts to around 280 architectural, planning, and landscape projects in the United States, Australia, and India, of which more than half were built, including almost a hundred in Australia. Marion has been profiled in exhibitions in Australia and the USA; Canberra’s popular Mount Ainslie lookout and a beach in Rogers Park, Chicago, were named after her. ‘The Magic of America’ and the plan for Canberra inspired two works by composer Jonathan Mills. In 1998 the New South Wales chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects established an annual prize in her honour. With the support of the Walter Burley Griffin Society (established in 1988), many of the Griffins’ surviving works have been listed on local, State, and national heritage registers. In 2024 the National Capital Authority announced plans to commission a commemorative artwork to honour the Griffins on the northern side of Canberra’s Lake Burley Griffin.