Prologue

It was a grey and sombre afternoon in mid-November. Winter was obviously close at hand as along the manicured verges of Oak Park workmen with large blower-vacs sucked up the last of the great piles of leaves from the season's fall. I strode, full of expectation, the few level blocks from the local train station, north to 951 Chicago Avenue, only occasionally distracted by what seemed half-familiar sights. I'd never been to Oak Park before, nor Chicago for that matter, but among the perfectly preserved rows of affluent nineteenth-century suburbia – white weatherboards, shingles and conformity – were one or two works of architecture vividly remembered from my student days. They were like the distant relatives you'd never met, the ones you'd been told about since childhood, seen in photographs and admired from afar. Shoulder to shoulder with their more sober brethren, they looked daring, almost scandalous, despite having stood for just over a century. But they were not what I had come to see. I was heading for the home and studio of their creator, the most famous American architect of the twentieth century – Frank Lloyd Wright.

In my student days some thirty years before, Wright had been held up as one of the four pillars of modern architecture, along with Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (himself a long-time Chicagoan). I therefore couldn't help but feel a frisson of excitement as I turned the corner of Forest Avenue at Chicago and headed for the ticket office. Wright's first house and studio is now a museum, carefully restored and lovingly fussed over by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. I'd booked my place on the afternoon tour from home in Sydney, anxious to beat any possible crowds. On the day, I think it was a Tuesday, I was ten or fifteen minutes early, so it was politely suggested that I browse in the gift shop until other takers for the tour arrived. Like any shop attached to a museum, the merchandise explored every possible means of exploiting its themes. In this case the singular genius of Wright was there in abundance: in books, cards, scarves, tapestry throws, objets d'art, and so on. It was all very tasteful, but it smacked overwhelmingly of the cult of celebrity – I was forewarned.

My wait at an end, I went to join my companions, only to find that the afternoon's event would be a tour for one – me. I was at first a little disappointed; I always enjoy watching others immersed in the same experience as me. But I then realised that I would have my own personal guide, and that I could glean far more from the experience through his undivided attention. The tour, I thought, could be relaxed and informal, so I decided at the start to announce to – let's call him Nathan (not his real name) – that my interest in Wright's home and studio extended a long way past a casual interlude on a cold Tuesday afternoon.

That interest dated from 1980, two years after the completion of an undergraduate degree in architecture, when, together with three colleagues, I entered a design in an international competition for Australia's permanent Parliament House in Canberra. Needless to say, our entry did not win. And although I did not stray far from the very comprehensive competition brief, my sketchy research at the time left me with some feeling not only for the difficult birth of Australia's capital city, but also for how the building on which our efforts were focused was to be placed on a site reserved by Canberra's original designer for an altogether different purpose. In the years that followed, I made many enjoyable visits to Canberra in the course of my work. The town grew on me long ago – its magnificent sense of place, its landscape setting, its openness to nature, all made for a city like none other that I knew. To invoke an overused expression, Canberra appeared to be a truly 'liveable' city. Yet, as so many outsiders like me complain, the city also seemed to lack a soul, as if the beating heart had been removed and its life support came from somewhere else. Was this a function of its premeditated beginnings, or was it simply too much to expect of a city with such a short history? Perhaps it was because of Canberra's role as a government town, a place with a monolithic purpose? As much as I loved Canberra, its disembodiment troubled me. Was it deliberately made so? Surely not. And was the Canberra of 1980, or for that matter the twenty-first century, the city that its designer had aspired to? Much of my puzzlement had a rhetorical edge – as I have said, I knew something of the city's difficult beginnings.

Through circumstances too entwined to unravel in a few introductory paragraphs, I eventually was able to meditate more widely on Australia's 'bush capital', its place in the development of the nation, and the ideals it represents. But what had Chicago, and Frank Lloyd Wright's presence in Oak Park, have to do with a purpose-built city of less than a hundred years' standing in far-flung Australia? Perhaps Nathan, aided by such hallowed spaces as Wright's architectural studio, might help me to a deeper, more visceral feel for it all.

'As I'm your only customer this afternoon,' I said, after we shook hands and introduced ourselves, 'I might take the opportunity of declaring a special interest before we start.' Unwittingly, I seemed to have caught Nathan slightly off guard:

Yes, I'm researching and writing a biography of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, so I'm really looking forward to an individual tour. I'm sure you'll be able to help me get more out of it than if we had company.

The temperature on the front porch of Wright's house must have been close to zero, and as if my words had been snap frozen in transmission, all I received from my guide in response was a blank look. In an instant, I realised that Nathan had never heard of the two names I had invoked.

But not for a moment would I want to disparage my guide's knowledge or ability. The tour proved to be a fascinating, detailed and highly informative walk through the early work and family life of a remarkable man. But to me, Nathan's clueless reaction to the names of two individuals who had worked in Wright's Oak Park studio for a combined total of nearly seventeen years, beggared belief. Apart from his family, there was one name, and one name alone – that of Frank Lloyd Wright – spoken from the house to the studio, and on into the museum shop. Much will be said in the course of my narrative as to why Frank Lloyd Wright's personality should be so totally to the fore, but since that visit to Oak Park, the old saying that 'to the victors go the spoils of history' reverberates with me still.

Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Lucy Mahony (as she was when she worked for Wright) were no pair of hack draftsmen or trudging foot soldiers of architecture. Even while working for Wright, Mahony was recognised as a brilliant artist and, a decade after her death, the renowned architectural critic Reyner Banham described her as the 'greatest architectural delineator [draftsman] of her generation, which included mere men such as [Edwin] Lutyens, [Adolf] Loos, and Wright'. But at the time of her passing in 1961, Marion Mahony Griffin was close to poverty and lay deep in the obscurity of Chicago's suburbs. Wright's name, on the other hand, had long been lauded worldwide.

As for Walter Burley Griffin, he had been credited with the design of a capital city for not just a country but an entire continent. In his native Chicago, Griffin is known, but he is not celebrated outside the architectural cognoscenti and, as I discovered, is completely ignored at Wright's studio, the place of his longest period in the employ of others.

Perhaps Griffin's greatest failing was to die tragically young and far from his homeland. Had the international competition for the design of the Australian capital not gone the way of Griffin and the woman who in 1911 became both his work mate and life partner, their existence would, without doubt, have been much easier and most likely happier. If Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin had remained in the United States, their careers could quite easily have risen to rival that of Wright – but perhaps not with the 'colour' lent by their former employer's eventful personal life. As Griffin scholar David Dolan has noted:

Wright spent almost all his working life in the USA, with more and richer clients . . . He had the advantage of living longer than Griffin by some 30 years, which enabled him to produce his best late work, and also to build his own legend.

Leaving conjecture aside, the Griffins' real story is one of great drama, and of abounding hopes and ambitions – some met, yet many others dashed. Their lives were played out on three continents against a backdrop of great change and upheaval in world and local events: the rise of modernism in architecture, and the growth of the city planning movement; war and economic disaster; Federation and nation-building. The Griffins moved in unconventional circles, befriended political radicals, social activists, intellectuals, artists, freethinkers and eccentrics, but were also often shunned as outsiders, seen as misfits in the stultifying Anglophile Australia of the early twentieth century. They were an extraordinary couple by any measure, and as a working partnership as well as a marriage, their collaboration was highly unusual for its time.

The Griffins brought to their individual and shared lives the highest ideals in work and conduct, and both were seized of a fervent hope for the betterment of humanity through sound and creative architecture and city planning. In Australia, they spent seven years in a battle of wits against a reactionary and entrenched bureaucracy, while at the same time riding an unruly sea of political instability. Walter's words of 1912 (written upon winning the international competition) ring lamentably true in hindsight: 'I have planned a city not like any other city in the world. I have planned it not in a way that I expected any government authorities in the world would accept'.

But rather than return to the United States after the disappointments of Canberra, Walter and Marion stayed on in Australia before eventually moving to India in the mid-1930s. Their Australian output was prodigious, though a high proportion of their projects went no further than the drawing board – of some 170 or more buildings, landscape designs and planning schemes between 1914 and 1937, only about eighty were ever realised.

That a young architect from Chicago should win an international competition in fulfilment of another country's aspirations was indeed an extraordinary feat. But aside from Griffin's vision for Canberra, the win speaks loudly of the optimistic American mood of the time. Both Walter and Marion believed in the power of the American democratic tradition, with its enshrinement of individual liberty as an agent for good – not just at home but in the wider world. Marion thought parliamentary democracy as practised in European countries, and particularly by governments of the Westminster lineage, to be far inferior to the American Congressional system. As an inheritance from Thomas Jefferson, it was the duty of all good Americans to spread the word.

By the late 1930s, Walter was dead and Marion was left alone to face two decades of life without the man she idolised. With her belief in the American way undiminished, she titled her unpublished memoir, completed around 1949, The Magic of America. A voluminous four-volume document, Magic is the primary source for this biography and will be referred to throughout. Chaotic, polemical, unreliable and fascinatingly brilliant, it is both an indispensable and dangerous work. And with a surprising dearth of alternative major sources to hand, my task would probably have proven impossible without recourse to Magic. If I have misconstrued or mistakenly accepted Marion on trust, then I do not retreat from the alleyways she led me down – this is her story as much as it is my reading of it. Much more will be said of how Marion came to write Magic, but in broad terms it is a memoir covering both her childhood and that of her husband, their upbringing and education, and their professional and personal lives together.

The Magic of America is far from a straightforward recounting of the adventures of two architects; interwoven through its irregular biographical frame are often random utopian meditations on the role of architecture and planning, philosophy, art, science, sociology, politics and governance, international relations, education, nature and the spiritual realm. Marion's musings on the spiritual are dominated by her faith in anthroposophy, a system of beliefs derived from the philosopher Rudolf Steiner, to which she became a passionate adherent in the mid-1920s. Magic is broken into four volumes or sections, each relating to the major struggles in Walter and Marion's personal and professional lives: 'The Empirial Battle' (India – Marion deliberately spelt 'imperial' with the 'e' and 'i' reversed for Empire); 'The Federal Battle' (Canberra); 'The Municipal Battle' (Castlecrag and local government); and 'The Individual Battle' (their personal histories and struggles).

Also indispensable to my narrative are the works of a number of scholars and writers stretching back to the 1950s. The phenomenon of Chicago's Prairie School, of which Wright and the Griffins were principal exponents, has been masterfully explored in the research and writings of Mark Peisch,

H. Allen Brooks and David Van Zanten, while specific knowledge of the Griffins' American and Indian architecture owes much to the painstaking scholarship of Paul Kruty and Paul Sprague. In the Australian context, the likes of Peter Harrison, Robin Boyd, James Weirick, Anna Rubbo, Christopher Vernon, Jeffrey Turnbull, Peter Navaretti, James Birrell, Simon Reeves and Donald Leslie Johnson have all made contributions to the body of knowledge and opinion on Walter and Marion that I could not imagine working without.

Near the end of Walter's life, India offered new hope, and an Indian summer it proved in the main. The question 'what if' inevitably spouts forth; as Dolan wrote:

If Walter Burley Griffin had lived a few more years and been able to build some of his spectacular geometric colourful Indian designs, comparison with Wright would do him no harm . . . This is speculation, but it is not nonsensical fantasy.

That fate should then consign both Walter and Marion to long periods of obscurity seems cruelly unjust when weighed against the individual and combined worth of two creative minds filled with the highest of human aspirations. Perhaps then, in solace, the 'spoils of history' should lie not in celebrity or fame, but in the truth of life's purpose. At the risk of making light of the Griffins' tangible legacy – Canberra and all the rest – it is worth quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was ever an inspiration to them both:

If a man can build a plain cottage with such symmetry as to make all the fine places look cheap and vulgar; can take such advantage of nature that all her powers serve him; making use of geometry instead of expense; tapping a mountain for a water-jet causing the sun and moon to seem only the decorations of his estate; this is still the legitimate dominion of beauty.

Herein lies a tale of two souls and their quest for that 'dominion of beauty'.