Marion Mahony Griffin
February 14, 1871 – August 10, 1961
Marion Mahony Griffin, circa 1935. National Library of Australia

Marion Mahony Griffin, circa 1935. National Library of Australia

Birthplace

Chicago, Illinois

Education

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, B.Arch., 1894

Major Projects

  • All Souls Unitarian Church, Evanston, Ill., 1903
  • Remodel of Gerald and Hattie Mahony House, Elkhart, Ind., 1907
  • David Amberg House, Grand Rapids, Mich., 1909, with Hermann V. von Holst
    E. P. Irving House, Millikin Place, Decatur, Ill., 1909, with von Holst
    Robert Mueller House, Millikin Place, Decatur, 1909–11, with von Holst
  • Adolph Mueller House, Millikin Place, Decatur, 1909, with von Holst
    C. H. Wills House, Detroit, Mich., 1912, unbuilt project with von Holst
    Fair Lane House for Henry Ford, Detroit, 1912, unbuilt project with von Holst
  • Plan for the international competition for the Australian Federal Capital at Canberra, Australia; delineator and project manager, 1912–13, with Walter Burley Griffin
  • Fern Room, Cafe Australia, Melbourne, Australia, 1916, with Burley Griffin
  • Capitol Theatre, Swanston Street, Melbourne, 1924, with Burley Griffin
  • Ellen Mower House, 12 The Rampart, Castlecrag, Sydney, Australia, 1926, with Burley Griffin
  • Creswick House, Castlecrag, Sydney, 1926, with Burley Griffin
  • Pioneer Press Building, Lucknow, India, 1936, with Burley Griffin

Awards and Honors

Winning design for the Australian Federal Capital at Canberra, Federal Design Competition, 1912, with Walter Burley Griffin

Firms

  • Office of Dwight Heald Perkins, Chicago, 1894–95
  • Office of Frank Lloyd Wright, Chicago, 1895–98
  • Oak Park Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright, Oak Park, Ill., 1898–1908
  • Principal Designer, Office of Hermann Valentine von Holst, Chicago, 1909–12
  • Office of Walter Burley Griffin, Chicago, 1911–13
  • Office of Walter Burley Griffin, Melbourne, Australia, 1915–25
  • Office of Walter Burley Griffin and Eric Nicholls, Sydney, Australia, 1925–circa 1929
  • Office of Walter Burley Griffin, Lucknow, India, 1936–37

Professional Organizations

  • Licensed Architect, State of Illinois, 1898
  • Chicago Arts and Crafts Society, founding member
  • Chicago Architectural Club, member
  • Illinois Chapter of AIA, member

Location of Last Office

Sydney, Australia (transferred to Eric Milton Nicholls)

[Show more]
By Elizabeth Birmingham

Reyner Banham, one of the twentieth century’s most renowned architectural critics, once described Marion Mahony Griffin (1871–1961) as “America’s (and perhaps the world’s) first woman architect who needed no apology in a world of men.”11Reyner Banham, “Death and Life of the Prairie School,” Architectural Review 154 (August 1973): 101. Her career, which included important collaborations with Frank Lloyd Wright and with Walter Burley Griffin, an architect she later married, took her to three continents and spanned more than six decades. Her work in the United States developed and expanded the American Prairie School, while her work in Australia and India reflected the Prairie School ideals of indigenous landscape and materials in the architecture of newly formed democracies.

Early Life and Education

Born on February 14, 1871, in Chicago, Marion Lucy Mahony described in her autobiography, The Magic of America, her mother carrying her as an infant in a clothes basket, holding tight to her toddler brother as they escaped the great Chicago fire (October 1871).22Marion Mahony Griffin, Magic of America, III, 70. Typescript. New-York Historical Society microfilm version, circa 1947 (hereafter, MOA). It was perhaps not accidental that she recorded this incident in the year of the great fire, situating her own life, education, and career centrally within the milieu of development, change, and progress that late nineteenth-century, post-fire Chicago represents.

After the fire, the Mahony family settled in an area just north of Evanston, Illinois, then known as Hubbard Woods, a neighborhood in Winnetka, an enclave founded by Unitarians. By 1880, Winnetka had a population of 584 and was more “like a pioneer town than a suburb.”33Michael Ebner, Creating Chicago’s North Shore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 83. Mahony described a pastoral childhood where she had easy access to a natural world that became central to her developing religious beliefs. Hubbard Woods offered intellectual community as well, of which it seems likely her family would have been a part.

Mahony’s father, Jeremiah Mahony, was an Irishman born in County Cork, Ireland, a “poet, journalist, and educator”44Anna Rubbo, “Marion Mahony Griffin: A Portrait,” in Walter Burley Griffin—A Re-View, ed. Jenepher Duncan (Clayton, Victoria, Australia: Monash University Gallery, 1988), 16; James Weirick, “Marion Mahony at M.I.T.,” Transition 25, no. 4 (1988): 49. who “had the reputation of being a better teacher drunk than most teachers sober.” Her mother, Clara Hamilton Mahony, was the daughter of a respected doctor who moved from New Hampshire to downstate Illinois and had ties to liberal politics.55Griffin, MOA, VI, 92. The public hall of Winnetka’s Unitarian chapel was a meeting place for discussions of literary works and contemporary issues by such intellectuals as Henry Demarest Lloyd and Jessie Bross Lloyd, who organized a variety of community activities and political actions; the Lloyds considered Winnetka “a laboratory where he [Henry] tested his theories about the practice of democracy.”66Ebner, Creating Chicago’s North Shore, 84. This combined access to liberal intellectual activism and an unspoiled natural environment must have had a profound effect on Marion, who throughout her life attempted to replicate the combination of these two formative influences.

This idyllic period in Winnetka ended when she was eleven and the youngest of the family’s five children was four. Mahony’s father died “from a self-administered overdose of laudanum.”77Griffin, MOA, IV, 134; Weirick, “Marion Mahony at M.I.T.,” 49. After their own home caught fire, sometime after her father’s death, the five Mahony children and their mother moved to the west side of Chicago, where Clara Mahony studied for and passed the Chicago Public School Board examination to become an elementary school principal.88Griffin, MOA, III, 77. Mahony’s aunt, Myra Perkins, moved in with the family and became young Marion’s confidante, encouraging her intellectual pursuits. Marion never lacked successful women as role models.

Marion Mahony Griffin, View from Summit of Mount Ainslie, ink on silk, 1912. National Archive of Australia

Marion Mahony Griffin, View from Summit of Mount Ainslie, ink on silk, 1912. National Archive of Australia

Nor did she lack for architect role models. Her cousin, Dwight Heald Perkins, studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for two years; it is likely that this connection drew Marion to enroll at MIT in 1890.99Eric Emmett Davis, Dwight Heald Perkins: Social Consciousness and Prairie School Architecture: An Exhibition Organized by Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, April 1989 (Chicago: Gallery 400 of the University of Illinois, Chicago, 1989), 4. Anna Wilmarth, the daughter of her mother’s friend Mary Hawes Wilmarth, funded her education after helping her study for entrance exams.1010Griffin, MOA, IV, 152. Mahony’s senior thesis was titled “The House and Studio of a Painter.”1111Weirick, “Marion Mahony at M.I.T.,” 50. For many years, “The House and Studio of a Painter” was assumed to be lost, but in the 1970s it was discovered buried in the MIT archives. Her presentation, a house attached to a studio by means of a colonnade enclosing a courtyard garden, is vaguely Second Empire in style. The plan is most interesting for its concept, connecting a suburban home to a workplace. When she graduated in 1894, Mahony was just the second woman to receive a degree from MIT’s school of architecture.

Career

Upon returning to Chicago, Mahony began working with her cousin, Dwight Heald Perkins, in the downtown Loop. She worked with him for nearly two years, much of that time in his office in Steinway Hall, home to many of Chicago’s progressive young artists and architects of the era.1212H. Allen Brooks, “Steinway Hall, Architects and Dreams,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 22, no. 3 (October 1963): 171–75. When he had to let her go, she soon found work in the office of another young Chicago architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, with whom she worked intermittently for the next fourteen years in a number of different locations. In January 1898, Mahony took and passed the Illinois State licensure exam for architects; she was probably the first woman in the United States to be professionally licensed.1313Paul Kruty, “A New Look at the Beginnings of the Illinois Architects’ Licensing Law,” Illinois Historical Journal 90, no. 3 (1997): 154. Barry Byrne, another member of Wright’s staff, suggested that Mahony was “the most talented member of Frank Lloyd Wright’s staff, and I doubt that the studio, then or later, produced anyone superior.”1414Barry Byrne, Review of The Drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright, by Arthur Drexler, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 22, no. 2 (May 1963): 109.

Marion Mahony Griffin, Eucalyptus Urnigera Tasmania/Scarlet Bark, Sunset, watercolor and ink on silk, circa 1919. Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art

Marion Mahony Griffin, Eucalyptus Urnigera Tasmania/Scarlet Bark, Sunset, watercolor and ink on silk, circa 1919. Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art

Byrne also describes the informal competitions Wright held in the studio among employees to design the details of a project: stained glass, murals, mosaics, linens, and furnishings. Byrne recollected that Mahony Griffin won most of the competitions, and that Wright sharply reprimanded anyone who referred to “Miss Mahony’s design” when her work appeared in later Wright commissions.1515David T. Van Zanten, “The Early Work of Marion Mahony Griffin.” The Prairie School Review 3, no. 2 (1969): 10.

In a more conventionally organized office, she would have held the title of “head designer.”1616Grant Carpenter Manson, Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910: The First Golden Age (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold: 1958), 217. Mahony herself teasingly suggested that Wright hired her as “superintendent of his drafting force,” a hollow title when she was Wright’s only employee, but one that seemed accurate as more employees were hired.1717Susan Berkon, “Marion Mahony Griffin,” in Women in American Architecture, ed. Susanna Torre, (New York: Whitney Library of Design, Watson-Guptill, 1977), 75. She became well known for her exquisite architectural rendering, which many architectural historians have claimed is among the finest ever produced. In an often repeated sentiment, Reyner Banham called her the “greatest architectural delineator of her generation.”1818Banham, “Death and Life of the Prairie School.” The project for which Mahony is perhaps best known during her years in Wright’s studio did not come to be associated with her until long after its publication in 1910. Wright’s portfolio, Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe, von Frank Lloyd Wright, published in Berlin by Wasmuth after Wright left Germany, is, according to historian Vincent Scully, “one of the three most influential architectural treatises of the twentieth century.”1919Vincent Scully, Studies and Executed Buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 5. Most historians now credit Mahony with at least half the drawings in the portfolio.

During the time she worked for Wright, she completed several independent projects, among them All Souls Unitarian Church in Evanston, Illinois (1903), and an addition to her brother’s farmhouse in Elkhart, Indiana (1907).

When Wright left for Europe with a married client, Mamah Borthwick Cheney, in 1909, abandoning his practice and family, Hermann von Holst took over Wright’s commissions and hired Mahony as his principal designer. She designed Millikin Place, a housing development built in Decatur, Illinois (1909–11), and several homes, most notably an unbuilt home for Henry Ford (1912).

Marion Mahony Griffin, rendering of un-built Henry Ford Dwelling, Dearborn, Mich., 1912. Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art

Marion Mahony Griffin, rendering of un-built Henry Ford Dwelling, Dearborn, Mich., 1912. Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art

In 1911, she married architect Walter Burley Griffin, whom she had first met in Wright’s firm, and they established an office, collaborating on several hundred projects in the United States, Australia, and India, including the prize-winning design for the Commonwealth of Australia Federal Capital competition at Canberra. Mahony Griffin’s renderings for the Federal Capital project captured the rich variety of golds, browns, and reds characteristic of the Australian landscape, which the Griffins only knew from black-and-white photos. Such a depiction of the beauty of the harsh landscape perhaps resonated with the judges. On May 23, 1912, Griffin was declared the winner of the competition. Historian Mark Peisch notes: “A British critic, commenting on the fact that an unknown American architect had won such a distinguished prize, said that the beauty of the renderings probably had a great deal to do with the judges’ decision to award the prize to Griffin’s plan.”2020Mark Peisch, The Chicago School of Architecture: Early Followers of Sullivan and Wright (New York: Random House, 1964), 111. After the result was announced, Australian author (Ms.) Miles Franklin and Alice Henry, a feminist activist from Australia who were in Chicago visiting Hull House, came to see the Griffins in their studio and described their impressions of the couple in an article for the Sydney Daily Telegraph. Among the multitudes of newspaper stories about the impressive international honor, only the account by the Australian women notes Marion’s credentials as an architect and the many projects on which the couple collaborated; Henry and Franklin wrote, “it is plainly apparent that their ideals are happily interwoven.”2121Alice Henry and Miles Franklin, “Walter Burley Griffin: Winner of the Federal Capital Prize,” Sydney Daily Telegraph, July 3, 1912.

Despite bureaucratic intervention and obstacles that derailed much of their vision for Canberra,2222Alasdair McGregor, Grand Obsessions: The Life and Work of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin (Melbourne: Lantern, 2009): 111–48. the Griffins continued to work in Australia creating town plans and landscape designs, houses, restaurants, theaters, colleges, and communities. Together, they produced the Capitol Theatre in Melbourne (1924) and saved a particularly lovely piece of Sydney’s Middle Cove from runaway development, giving birth to the community of Castlecrag (1920s). Always artistically talented, Marion spent time documenting Australia’s natural beauty and cataloging indigenous plant life. She retired in her sixties to focus her attention on her beloved community, using the principles of her anthroposophical beliefs to guide her work of running a kindergarten, and supporting the arts and the community’s shared intellectual and religious pursuits.

Marion Mahony Griffin and Walter Burley Griffin, Capitol Theatre, Melbourne, Australia, 1924. Photograph by John Gollings, 1999
© John Gollings

Marion Mahony Griffin and Walter Burley Griffin, Capitol Theatre, Melbourne, Australia, 1924. Photograph by John Gollings, 1999

© John Gollings

In an effort to save Castlecrag with an influx of needed money during the Great Depression, Walter took on a project in India, the library of the University of Lucknow.2323“The Idealists: Creating Castlecrag,” Hindsight (ABC Radio National, July 8, 2012); Paul Kruty and Paul E. Sprague, Two American Architects in India: The Complete Works and Projects of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). In early 1936, when he was offered the design for the United Provinces Industrial and Agricultural exhibition in India (1936), he entreated Marion to come out of retirement and help him with the Herculean endeavor; his plan shows dozens of buildings that needed to be constructed in eight months. Marion agreed to join him and boarded a ship for Calcutta in April 1936. They worked furiously on this project and other commissions, such as the one for Lucknow’s Pioneer Press Building (1936). Walter died suddenly in 1937 of peritonitis following surgery for a burst gallbladder.

Marion considered remaining in India and finishing the projects there on her own; she followed that course of action briefly until Walter’s partner in Sydney begged her to return to settle the office there, as she was executor of Walter’s will.2424Jeffery Turnbull and Peter Navaretti, eds., The Griffins in Australia and India (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1998), 95. In 1938, she returned to Chicago, where she wrote an (unpublished) autobiography of the couple’s life and work together titled The Magic of America. Although most earlier scholarship ended Marion Griffin’s career with her husband’s death, Australian architect and historian Anna Rubbo has recently documented the extent of Griffin’s work after her return in 1938 to the United States, where she continued to lecture, design, and write.2525Anna Rubbo, “Marion Mahony’s Return to the United States: War, Women, and ‘Magic,’” in Marion Mahony Reconsidered, ed. David van Zanten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011): 123–46. Unfortunately, Mahony Griffin’s life and impressive body of architecture and writings are not well known in the U.S., perhaps in part because her career spanned sixty years and three continents. She died in poverty, with a failing memory, on August 10, 1961, at Cook County Hospital in Chicago and is buried in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery.

Bibliography

Writings by Mahony Griffin

  • Summers, Maud, Lucy Fitch Perkins, and Marion L. Mahony. First Reader. New York: Frank D. Beattys and Co., 1908. Reprinted in 2008 by Bibliobazaar.
  • “The Bungalow Indoors.” One Hundred Bungalows. Boston, 1912. 115–20.
  • “Democratic Architecture I.” Building (August 14, 1913), 88–91.
  • “Democratic Architecture II.” Building (June 12, 1914), 101–2.
  • “Community Planning. Chat with Mr. and Mrs. Walter Burley Griffin.” Advance Australia! (July 21, 1914), 231–36.
  • “Building, Plans and Tenders, Women as Architects.” Sydney Daily Telegraph. October 12, 1915.
  • The Magic of America. The Art Institute of Chicago, 2007. http://www.artic.edu/magicofamerica/

Writings about Mahony Griffin

  • Berkon, Susan. “Marion Mahony Griffin.” In Women in American Architecture, edited by Susanna Torre, 75–79, New York: Whitney Library of Design, Watson-Guptill, 1977.
  • Berkon, Susan Fondiler, and Jane Holtz Kay. “Marion Mahony Griffin, Architect.” Feminist Art Journal 4 (Spring 1975), 10–14.
  • Birmingham, Elizabeth. “The Case of Marion Mahony Griffin and the Gendered Nature of Discourse in Architectural History.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 35, no. 2 (2006): 87–123.
  • ———. “I See Dead People: Archive, Crypt, and an Argument for the Researcher’s 6th Sense.” In Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, edited by Elizabeth Rohan and Gesa Kirsch. 139–46. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008.
  • ———. “Marion Mahony, Architectural Attribution, and Millikin Place: Response to the Call for a Reinterpretation of Architectural History.” Architectural Theory Review 9, no. 2 (2004): 34–50.
  • ———. “Marion Mahony and the Magic of America: Visiting the Text.” Wright Angles 31, no. 3 (2005): 3–8.
  • ———. “Marion Lucy Mahony: A Brief Biography.” Women’s Arts News 5, no. 3 (November 2002).
  • Brooks, H. Allen. “The Early Works of the Prairie School Architects.” JSAH 19, no. 1 (March 1960): 2–10.
  • ———. “Frank Lloyd Wright and the Wasmuth Drawings.” The Art Bulletin (June 1966), 193–201.
  • ———. The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and His Midwest Contemporaries. New York: W. W. Norton, 1972.
  • Burns, Karen. “Prophets and the Wilderness.” Transition 24, no. 3 (1988): 14–30.
  • Byrne, Barry. Review of The Drawings of Frank Lloyd Wright by Arthur Drexler. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 22, no. 5 (May 1963): 108–9.
  • ———. “Frank Lloyd Wright and His Atelier.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 39, no. 6 (June 1963): 120.
  • Duncan, Jenepher, ed. Walter Burley Griffin: A Re-view. Clayton, Victoria, Australia: Monash University Gallery, 1988.
  • Freestone, Robert. “Women in the Australian Town Planning Movement, 1900–1950.” Planning Perspectives 10 (1995): 259–77.
  • Hamann, Conrad. “Themes and Inheritances: The Architecture of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony.” In Walter Burley Griffin: A Re-view, edited by Jenepher Duncan. 27–42. Clayton, Victoria, Australia: Monash University Gallery, 1988.
  • Harrison, Peter. Marion Mahony Griffin: An Historical Profile. (Pamphlet). Canberra, Australia, 1982.
  • Hines, Thomas S. “Portrait: Marion Mahony Griffin Drafting a Role for Women in Architecture.” Architectural Digest 52, no. 3 (1995): 28 ff.
  • Johnson, Donald Leslie. “Castlecrag: A Physical and Social Planning Experiment.” The Prairie School Review VIII, no. 3 (1971): 5–13.
  • ———. “Dear Marion.” Architectural Theory Review 3, no. 2 (1998): 130–34.
  • Kruty, Paul, and Paul E. Sprague. Two American Architects in India. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997.
  • ———. Marion Mahony and Millikin Place: Creating a Prairie School Masterpiece. St. Louis: Walter Burley Griffin Society of America, 2007.
  • Lacey, Robert. “Historic Houses: Henry Ford and Fairlane.” Architectural Digest 53, no. 5 (1996): 158–63.
  • Lake, P. “Marion Mahony Griffin.” Refractory Girl 8 (1975).
  • Larson, Paul. “Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin: The Marriage of Drawing and Architecture.” Print Collectors Newsletter 13, no. 2 (1982): 38–41.
  • Markham, Michael. “The Griffin Incinerators.” Transition 24, no. 3 (1988): 49–54.
  • Martone, Fran. “Commemorating Marion Mahony Griffin.” Wright Angles 24, no. 2 (1998): 3–9.
  • ———. In Wright’s Shadow: Artists and Architects at the Oak Park Studio. Oak Park, Ill.: Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio Foundation, 1998.
  • McCoy, Robert E. “Rock Crest/Rock Glen, Prairie Planning in Iowa.” Prairie School Review 5, no. 3 (1968): 5–39.
  • McGregor, Alasdair. Grand Obsessions: The Life and Work of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin. Camberwell, Victoria, Australia: Lantern Books, 2009.
  • Mills, Jonathan and Peter King. “Lament for Lost Buildings.” The Listening Room, ABC Radio, February 6, 1998.
  • Munchick, Donna Ruff. “The Work of Marion Mahony Griffin, 1894–1913.” Master’s thesis, Florida State University, School of Visual Arts, 1974.
  • Newton, David. “Millikin Place: Decatur’s Architectural Park.” Historic Illinois 11, no. 4 (1988): 8–12.
  • Nicholas, P. Themes for Nature in the Architecture of Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin. Dissertation, Faculty of Architecture, University of New South Wales. 1994.
  • Northup, Dale. “Henry Ford’s ‘Fairlane.’” Inland Architect (January–February 1997): 8–9.
  • Peisch, Mark. The Chicago School of Architecture. New York: Columbia Architectural Press, 1964.
  • ———. “Marion Mahony Griffin. The Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architecture, vol. 2. New York: Macmillan, 1982.
  • Pregliasco, Janice. “The Life and Work of Marion Mahony Griffin.” Museum Studies 21, no. 2 (1995): 164–81.
  • Proudfoot, Peter. “Ancient Cosmological Symbolism in the Initial Canberra Plan.” Fabrications 4, no. 6 (1993): 139–69.
  • ———. The Secret Plan of Canberra. Sydney, Australia: University of New South Wales Press, 1994.
  • ———. “Symbolism and Axiality in Canberra.” Architecture Australia 80, no. 7 (1991): 45–49.
  • ———. “The Symbolism of the Crystal in the Planning and Geometry of the Design for Canberra.” Planning Perspectives 11 (1996): 225–57.
  • Roe, Jill. “The Magical World of Marion Mahony Griffin.” In Minorities and Cultural Diversity in Sydney, edited by Sheila Fitzgerald and G. Wotherspoon. Sydney, Australia: New South Wales State Library Press, 1995.
  • ———. My Congenials: Miles Franklin and Friends in Letters, vol. I. Sydney, Australia: Angus and Robinson, 1993.
  • Rubbo, Anna. “Marion Mahony Griffin: A Portrait.” In Walter Burley Griffin: A Re-view, edited by Jenepher Duncan. 15–26. Clayton, Victoria, Australia: Monash University Gallery, 1988.
  • ———. “Marion Mahony: A Larger Than Life Presence.” In Beyond Architecture: Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin, edited by Anne Watson. 40–55. Sydney, Australia: Powerhouse, 1998.
  • ———. “Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin: A Creative Partnership.” Architectural Theory Review 1, no. 1 (1996): 78–94.
  • ———. “The Numinous World of Marion Mahony Griffin: Architect, Artist, Writer.” In Spirit and Place: Art in Australia 1861–1996, edited by Ross Mellick. 123–31. Sydney, Australia: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996.
  • Turnbull, Jeffery. “The Griffins in Sydney.” Art and Australia 37, no. 1 (1999): 43–45.
  • ——— and Peter Navaretti, eds. The Griffins in Australia and India. Melbourne, Australia: University of Melbourne Press, 1998.
  • Van Zanten, David T. “The Early Work of Marion Mahony Griffin.” The Prairie School Review 3, no. 2 (1969): 5–23.
  • ———., ed. Marion Mahony Reconsidered. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
  • Vernon, Christopher. “Antipodean Visions.” Landscape Australia 20, no. 4 (1998): 356–60.
  • ———. A Vision Splendid: How the Griffins Imagined Australia’s Capital. Canberra, Australia: National Archives of Australia, 2002.
  • Walker, Meredith, Adrienne Kabos, and James Weirick. Building for Nature: Walter Burley Griffin and Castlecrag. Sydney, Australia: Walter Burley Griffin Society, 1994.
  • Ward, Peter. “How Much Does Our Capital Owe Marion?” The Australian (June 3–4, 1995): 8.
  • Watson, Anne, ed. Beyond Architecture: Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin. Sydney, Australia: Powerhouse, 1998.
  • Weirick, James. “The Griffins and Modernism.” Transition 24, no. 3 (1988): 5–13.
  • ———. “Lost Griffin Works.” Architecture Australia 87, no. 4 (1998): 14–16.
  • ———. “Marion Mahony at M.I.T.” Transition 25, no. 4 (1988): 49–54.
  • ———. “The Symbolic Landscape of Canberra.” In ACT Heritage Seminars, edited by Alan Fitzgerald. 51–59. Canberra, Australia: ACT Heritage Committee, 1985.
  • Wells, Judy. “Representations of Marion Mahony Griffin.” Architectural Theory Review 3, no. 2 (1998): 123–25.
  • Wood, Debora, ed. Marion Mahony Griffin: Drawing the Form of Nature. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005.
  • Zukowsky, John. Walter Burley Griffin, Marion Mahony Griffin: Architectural Drawings from the Burnham Library of Architecture. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1982.

Additional Sources