Marion Mahony Griffin

Marion Mahony Griffin (b. 1871–d. 1961) excelled in a range of creative endeavors as extensive as the geographic expanse of her long and storied career. Between 1894 and 1949, Mahony worked as an architect, illustrator, planner, real estate developer, community leader, public speaker, and author in the United States, Australia, and India. From the outset, Mahony’s career included solo commissions, independent exhibitions, and lectures as well as work completed in conjunction with contemporaries who, like Mahony, began their careers in Chicago’s Steinway Hall loft. They included, Frank Lloyd Wright, Hermann von Holst, and Mahony’s husband and professional partner Walter Burley Griffin. Critical interest in Mahony’s contribution to architecture and urbanism mirrors the reception of architectural modernism in the United States. At the beginning of the 20th century, Mahony’s work was examined for its potential to herald a new age. In the middle of the century, it was seen as a possible beacon and alternative to European modernism. Since the dawn of the 21st century, and after a period of apathy toward her work, historians and professionals have begun analyzing Mahony’s practice, its conceptual surround, and the history of its reception to reflect on the transnational routes of architectural modernism, biases in the historiography of architecture, and the potential for an ecologically sensitive approach to urbanism. This trajectory of US reactions to Mahony from hope to apathy to renewed interest is curiously also true of popular and scholarly portrayals of Mahony in other countries. It evinces a US-centric approach to understanding Mahony’s work that, until very recently, obscured the importance of anti-colonialism in shaping Mahony’s visual, spatial, and literary practice after 1914 when she began to live and work outside the United States. New scholarship on Mahony’s work has led to popular and professional acknowledgement of her talent: the Marion Mahony Emerging Practitioner Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology honors a distinguished alumna; Marion’s List is a public register of women working in architecture and the built environment in Australia, launched by Parlour in collaboration with the National Committee for Gender Equity of the Australian Institute of Architects; the Australian Capital Territory Government named the lookout on Mount Ainslie in Canberra, made famous by a Mahony rendering the Marion Mahony Griffin View; and the Chicago Park District and current residents in Mahony’s old neighborhood named a lakefront beach in Chicago the Marion Mahony Griffin Beach Park.

Material Connections

The architect Bruce Goff (1904–82) is often associated with Frank Lloyd Wright and Organic Architecture, but his concept of organicism was equally influenced by his interest in modern music, and in particular the work of Claude Debussy. Goff maintained correspondence with musicians throughout his life—including with composers Edgard Varèse and Harry Partch—and in the 1920s and 1930s, he actively composed works for piano and player piano. In Tulsa and then Chicago, Goff developed connections to other writers, artists, and musicians (notably Richard San Jule and Ernest Brooks) who cultivated modernist sensibilities across the arts. Following close consideration of his papers at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago, I examine Goff’s approaches to music and architecture as expressed not only through his correspondence, pedagogical writings, and architectural designs, but also through the analysis of some of his musical compositions. I also discuss a piece by Burrill Phillips that was inspired by the house Goff designed for John Garvey, violist of the Walden Quartet. By investigating the manifold contexts of these artworks as revealed by archival research, we can shed light on the divergent use of the term “organicism” as it is applied across the arts.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright (b. 1867–d. 1959) was perhaps the most well-known American architect, and one of the most important figures in modern architecture of the 20th century. After apprenticing in Chicago, importantly with Louis Sullivan in the firm of Adler and Sullivan, Wright began his independent practice in 1893 in the suburb of Oak Park. There, to 1909, Wright developed the spatially expansive and stylistically innovative type of the Prairie House. In this period Wright also designed his first major larger works, the Larkin Co. Administration Building, Buffalo, New York (1902–1906), and Unity Temple, Oak Park (1905–1909). Wright created a home and studio, Taliesin (1911–1913), amid the farmlands of his maternal family in southern Wisconsin. He also designed the Midway Gardens (1913–1914) in Chicago. Wright spent much of the next eight years in Tokyo working on the Imperial Hotel there, which survived the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. He also designed Hollyhock House (1919–1921) in Los Angeles for Aline Barnsdall, and in 1923–1925, living in Los Angeles, Wright built four “textile block houses.” Based at Taliesin, rebuilt after a second fire in 1925, and in winters from 1937 at Taliesin West near Scottsdale, Arizona, Wright worked with apprentices who formed the Taliesin Fellowship, to create such key works as Fallingwater (1934–1937), at Bear Run in southwestern Pennsylvania, and the S. C. Johnson Company Administration Building (1936–1939) in Racine, Wisconsin. Wright also wrote on new ideas for urbanism, especially his Broadacre City, first exhibited in New York City in 1935. The following year Wright built the first of many Usonian houses designed for clients with modest incomes and featuring many dimensional and material economies while maintaining a sense of spaciousness. In the last phase of his career following World War II, Wright and his apprentices continued to build houses for a national clientele, and such larger works as the S. C. Johnson Company Research Tower (1943–1950) in Racine, the H. C. Price Company Tower (1952–1956) in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, the Marin County Civic Center (1957–1970) in California, and his most influential late work, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1943–1959) in New York City. Wright’s later public buildings also included a series of religious structures, perhaps most notably Beth Sholom Synagogue, Elkins Park, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1954–1959), and Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church, Wauwatosa, near Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1956–1963). Oxford University Press online bibliographies usually have 50–150 citations. This bibliography of scholarly literature on Frank Lloyd Wright is limited to about four hundred citations, which is a small percentage of the thousands of publications on Wright from his earliest years through his death in 1959 and continuing through 2020. For publications on Wright through 2002, see Donald Langmead, Frank Lloyd Wright: A Bio-Bibliography (Langmead 2003, cited under Research and Reference Guides), with its over 3,500 entries. For a complete list of references on Wright since 2002, the reader may profitably consult several relevant online scholarly databases such as the Avery Index to Architecture Periodicals, Bibliography of the History of Art, America: History and Life, and Applied Science and Engineering. In this Oxford Bibliography article, publications contemporaneous with the completion of Wright’s works have largely been omitted in favor of later historical accounts of them. For scholarly writing, if an author’s article or book chapter was substantially incorporated into a later book by that same author, references to such earlier articles or chapters have been omitted. Also, the large literature on Wright which is almost exclusively photographic or popular has been mostly omitted, with the exception of local and comprehensive guidebooks to Wright’s architecture. Photographic volumes with substantive essays have been included. Unpublished dissertations and theses have not been included. These can be searched through such databases as Dissertations & Theses Global.

A CASINHA DE VILANOVA ARTIGAS COMO SÍMBOLO DEMOCRÁTICO DO PATRIMÔNIO MODERNISTA PAULISTANO

O presente artigo tem como objetivo apresentar a Casinha de João Batista Vilanova Artigas, um de seus mais relevantes trabalhos no cenário modernista da arquitetura paulistana, permeando sob a perspectiva técnica e política. O período de concepção da obra foi revolucionário em questões construtivas, funcionais e plásticas. O Brasil vivera um período de resistência artística; 1922 trouxe inúmeras discussões sobre a arte moderna que estava sendo importada e reformulada. Com isso, mesmo duas décadas mais tarde, o país se mostrava rígido arquitetonicamente, contando com poucas referências externas em pauta à arquitetura moderna - essa que, por sua vez, estava sendo estudada e difundida mundo afora. Acrescenta-se, nesse ponto, o caráter progressista de Artigas a partir de seus estudos, principalmente pela influência de Frank Lloyd Wright, que vinha mudando o cenário construtivo norte americano. É evidenciado, ainda, a natureza política de Artigas que, a partir da década de 1940, trouxe significativas memórias pelas quais o engenheiro-arquiteto ainda é reconhecido. A partir disso, coloca-se a primeira residência do arquiteto não somente como uma edificação de grande importância no cenário arquitetônico nacional, mas como um refúgio e espaço de deliberações de Artigas, de seus amigos e alunos

La familia Kaufmann y la modernidad americana

El rol jugado por la familia Kaufmann como mecenas de las artes en la escena cultural de Norteamérica, es invisibilizado en el cometido de dos de las casas modernas más importantes del siglo XX, la Casa de la Cascada de Frank Lloyd Wright, y la Casa Kaufmann de Richard Neutra. Este artículo revela los criterios y necesidades objetivas de los clientes durante el encargo, construcción y apropiación de las casas, el cual más allá de la financiación económica, sin duda sitúa a los Kaufmann como pioneros que, interactuando de manera activa con los autores de estas piezas icónicas de la arquitectura doméstica, adoptaron y promulgaron nuevas formas de vida, modernas y revolucionarias para la época.

Enchanted Catastrophe

This chapter rethinks Le Corbusier’s idea of New York as an “enchanted catastrophe” by focusing on related concerns about architectural elevation and capitalist “creative destruction” in critical writings about the rise of the modernist American metropolis. In particular, it considers essays by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright and novels by John Dos Passos as well as key French texts by Fernand Léger, Le Corbusier, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Michel de Certeau, among others. In turn, it traces the post-World War II shift according to which Paris “lost its hegemony,” as Beauvoir put it, and New York appeared to replace it as the capital of the twentieth century.

Time in the Work of Frank Lloyd Wright

This paper contains a first exploration of the question of time in the work of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright.11 By way of introduction I will start by going back to the treatise of the Roman architect Vitruvius to find a first formulation of the importance of time in architecture in the form of the Latin tempus, meaning time of the day and time of the season. I will then expand on the entanglement of the concepts of templum and tempus, both related to the founding rites of the antique city. Finally, I will make the jump to modernity to see how these concepts still persist in the work of Wright, ending up in the Janus face of a geological and an atmospheric time of architecture.