Marion Lucy Mahony was born in Chicago, Illinois. When she was a baby her family fled from the Great Fire that precipitated the architectural revolution in that city.
After the fire the family settled in Evanstop, a semi-rural enclave north of the city that had been founded by Unitarians.
When she was eleven her schoolteacher father died of a self administered dose of laudanum. Shortly afterwards their house caught on fire. Her mother, Clara subsequently took her five children to the west side of the city and qualified to become an elementary school principal.
In 1890, Anna Wilmarth, the daughter of one her mother’s friends paid for Marion’s fees so she could study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She graduated in 1894, only the second woman to do so.
On returning to Chicago she worked for two years for her cousin, Dwight Heald Perkins, before moving to the office of Frank Lloyd Wright.
In 1898 she was formally licensed as an architect, probably first woman in the USA to achieve that qualification. While in Wright’s office she became known for the quality of her architectural renderings, exquisite drawings that encouraged clients to adopt Wright’s plans.
After Wright abandoned his practice in 1909, Hermann von Holst, who took over his practice, appointed Mahony as principal designer.
In 1911 she married fellow architect, Walter Burley Grffin, who saw had met when they both worked for Frank Lloyd Wright. After they established their own office, they entered the international competition to design Australia’s capital city, a result of Federation. Walter Burley Griffin’s design, rendered in exquisite autumnal tones by Marion Mahony Griffin, was awarded the prize.
The Griffins relocated to Sydney and then Melbourne, but found the Australian bureaucracy increasingly difficult to work with.
In 1921 the Griffins began to develop a Castlecrag, aa “a model residential suburb”, conceived in line with their Theosophical beliefs. They were so committed to the project that they moved there in 1925. In 1935 Walter moved to Lucknow to design the university library. She joined him as he designed other projects in India. After Walter Burley Griffin died suddenly of peritonitis in 1937, Marion returned to Australia, to Castlecrag.
The following year she relocated to Chicago, where she lived for the rest of her life.
Here she wrote The Magic of America, an unpublished account of her life and work with Walter Burley Griffin. She continued to lecture, write and design, but was no longer in the public eye.
She died in poverty at the Cook County hospital.
- Writers:
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- Date written:
- 2022
- Last updated:
- 2022
