Grand Obsessions – Alasdair McGregor

This is a joint biography of architects Walter Burley Griffin, of Canberra fame, and his wife, Marion Mahony Griffin. After their formative years in Chicago – the centre of the Prairie School of architecture made most famous by Frank Lloyd Wright, for whom they both worked – the pair moved to Australia in 1914 after Walter won the competition to design the new national capital. Amid controversy, slander and almost overwhelming opposition, they stayed on in Australia to make material as much of their vision as the stultifying Australian bureaucracy would allow.

They remained here until 1935, designing many buildings in Melbourne – such as Newman College – and in Sydney – particularly in the suburb they created, Castlecrag, where they also played an important cultural role in the local community. In 1935 they moved to Lucknow, India, where Walter designed several important public buildings. But his life was cut short and he died in India in 1937 at the age of sixty-six. Marion returned to a life of obscurity in Chicago, where she died in 1961. Since her death, scholars have come to realise that she was not simply Walter’s helpmate but his equal creative partner.

This is the fascinating story of two dogged individuals of great talent and vision and their fight against the forces of bureaucracy and mediocrity; of the building of Canberra and the troubled birth of the Australian national identity; of a pioneering woman who achieved extraordinary things but was rarely credited with that achievement; and of the nature of fame in a small, young country uncertain of its position in the world.