Marion Mahony Griffin: Prairie School Founding Member
Marion Mahony Griffin (1871-1961) was a founding member of the Prairie School and did significant projects in the US, Australia, and India, but she is not well-known today. This is partly because she was a master collaborator who contributed to the careers of Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Burley Griffin. She was also an extraordinary delineator who created many iconic renderings for both men.
In 1894, Marion Lucy Mahony was the second woman to graduate from MIT with a degree in Architecture. Mahony returned to her hometown Chicago and went to work for her cousin Dwight Perkins. In 1895 she became Frank Lloyd Wright’s first employee and in in 1898 she was among the first group to sit for the Illinois state licensure exam. She passed, likely becoming the first woman in the US to earn an architecture license.
Mahony’s designs for Wright included art-glass patterns, mosaics, furnishing, lighting, fireplaces, murals, and two ground-breaking residential floor plans. Mahony completed her first independent commission for All Souls Unitarian Church in Evanston in 1903 but she continued to work for Wright in some capacity until 1909. That year Wright left for Europe with the wife of a client and a portfolio of a hundred drawings and renderings of his firm’s work, fully half of which were drawn by Mahony. Known today as the Wasmuth Portfolio, the work was published in Berlin in 1911 and helped cement Wright’s reputation.
Adolph Mueller House, Decatur, Illinois, 1910. (Photo by Randy Von Liski, 2021, Creative Commons license)
Several of Wright’s employees including Mahony declined Wright’s request to finish the work in his Oak Park office in his absence. Herman von Holst, an architect with no experience in the Prairie School, agreed to take on the commissions and hired Mahony as his principal designer. There she designed several Prairie style homes, including the one pictured here.
In 1911, Mahony married Walter Burley Griffin, an architect she had worked with in Wright’s studio, and they opened an office together. In 1912, Griffin won a design competition for Australia’s new capital city. One critic believed Mahony’s renderings had much to do with that victory. The couple moved to Australia and collaborated on hundreds of projects ranging in scale from homes to city plans. Griffin died suddenly in 1937 and the next year Mahony returned to Chicago where she continued to lecture, design, and work on her (unpublished) memoir and scrapbook “The Magic of America.”
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Sources:
Elizabeth Birmingham, “Marion Mahony Griffin,” Pioneering Women of American Architecture, n/d.