Prior to her 1911 marriage to fellow architect Walter Burley Griffin, Marion Mahony had worked intermittently, along with Griffin, at the epicentre of an architectural revolution, the unlikely venue of the suburban Chicago studio of that redoubtable and mercurial genius Frank Lloyd Wright. Mahony worked on and off for Wright for a total of eleven years. It was in illustrating Wright’s revolutionary designs at the forefront of the so-called Prairie School of domestic architecture that she developed a reputation as a brilliant artist and draughtsman among her peers, a reputation that would endure throughout her life.

Becoming Marion Mahony Griffin at the age of forty, in mid-career, shejoined Walter Burley Griffin in an entirely complementary professional and intimate union that would see the couple move from Chicago to Australia, and finally to India, in the mid-1930s. Following Griffin’s untimely death there in 1937, she returned briefly to Australia, before living out her days in humble circumstances back in Chicago.

When historians began knocking on Mahony’s door in the 1940s and 1950s, it was the men in her life – namely Griffin and Wright – they were interested in discovering, not her. But the times were a-changing. A decade after Mahony’s death, the renowned architectural critic Reyner Banham described her as the ‘greatest architectural [draughtsman] of her generation, which included mere men such as [Edwin] Lutyens, [Adolf] Loos, and Wright’. In more recent years, her role as collaborator with both Wright and Griffin, and, as David van Zanten states in the Introduction to this fine collection of essays, her place as ‘one at the pivot point of the formulation of international design’, has come in for increasing scrutiny.

However, as van Zanten continues, she might have been the ‘subject of vivid interest, but her exact position and contribution are frustratingly difficult to define’. Much of this elusivenessstems from the way Mahony positioned herself. Her magnum opus was not a work of architecture, or a single work of her spectacular graphic art, but The Magic of America,her vast memoir of 1400 typescript pages written over at least a decade from the late 1930s, largely as a homage to her adored late husband. Despite her pioneering position as a woman in a male-dominated world, Mahony’s feminism was not one disposed to strident rivalry with men. Yet in her essay ‘Girl Talk: Feminism and Domestic Architecture at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Oak Park Studio’, Alice Friedman talks of Mahony as revealed in Magic as no pushover. ‘We know immediately,’ writes Friedman, ‘that we are in the presence of a force of nature, a woman of no uncertain opinions, a person possessed of deep convictions and profound spiritual experiences.’ She perceptively points out that, in Mahony’s view, the ‘search for individual fame and glory, of the sort that she unfailingly chastises Wright for pursuing, was unworthy of a truly evolved man or woman’. Friedman outlines Mahony’s educational and progressive feminist milieu and her special place in Wright’s office, her relationship with female clients such as Susan Lawrence Dana, and her place as a virtual member of Wright’s extended family. She became, as Friedman puts it, a ‘comrade in arms in creating and publicizing an entirely original approach to the American home’. But when Wright ran off to Europe in 1909 with Mamah Borthwick Cheney, a former client and neighbour, an already charged relationship came dramatically unstuck. Wright and Mahony would remain implacable foes. ‘Though both she and Wright would disavow their connection for the rest of their lives,’ writes Friedman, ‘it remains a cornerstone in both their careers – one that despite their complaints, should not be forgotten by historians.’

Marion Mahony's drawing of DeRhodes house, South Bend, Indiana, 1906  

It was in Wright’s office that Mahony’s wondrous graphic technique was allowed to prosper. In his essay ‘Graphic Depictions: The Evolution of Marion Mahony’s Architectural Renderings’, Paul Kruty examines in detail the antecedents and international context of Mahony’s unique contribution to what Americans often call architectural ‘delineation’. It was her distinctive style that ultimately helped make Wright’s reputation far beyond Chicago and the Midwest through the famed Wasmuth portfolio of 1910, and, two years later, did much to propel Griffin to the head of the pack in the international competition for the design of Australia’s capital city. So potent was the force of Mahony’s style that Wright famously scrawled on an early masterwork, a perspective of the K.C. DeRhodes house in South Bend, Indiana: ‘after Hiroshige and FLW.’ As Kruty asserts, an envious Wright was ‘attempting to argue [the drawing’s] historical indebtedness to Japanese art while also desperately trying to make it his own’. Kruty dissects Mahony’s graphic environment with a forensic clarity and rightly assesses her achievement to be a ‘highly original amalgam of tradition and precedent, that was capable of internal development as well as credible external imitation – a rendering style that itself became a recognizable sign of American Modernism’.

In his essay ‘Motifs and Motives in the Lifework of Marion Mahony’, James Weirick returns to the decipherment of the woman behind the ravishing drawings, inventive ornament, and pioneering architecture. Yet despite Weirick’s impressive analysis of Mahony’s involvement in any number of collaborative projects with her husband, the woman remains elusive. This is in no way a criticism; Mahony herself deems it so. Weirick writes that in The Magic of America’s ‘interplay of intense observation, poetic insight, and “occult science” we sense the free imagination of a free spirit, a combination so compelling that we are more than willing to suspend judgement on the veracity and value of her ideas’. How could it be otherwise? Weirick reflects on Magic with the aid of French philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting (2004),a discourse on memory and the imagination in the construction of history. In Mahony’s case, her amalgam of memory and history is seen through the imaginative prism of Rudolph Steiner’s ‘science’ of anthroposophy, of which she was a passionate adherent. In the end, though, ‘it is the gaps’, writes Weirick, ‘the absences in the Griffin story that we find the clues to Marion Mahony’s passionate life’.

In a worthy conclusion to this absorbing book, which does much to place Mahony in the correct relationship to the men in her life and the world in which they collectively functioned, Anna Rubbo explores the final years of Mahony’s life in ‘Marion Mahony’s Return to the United States: War, Women, and “Magic”’. Cut off from the glories of the Sydney bushland at Castlecrag, Mahony lived out her days with female members of her family in suburban Chicago. Yet she was far from idle, and central to Rubbo’s account are the circumstances in which Mahony produced The Magic of America. Also, in the aftermath of her husband’s death, she had vowed never to hold a pencil again, but relented in the 1940s to produce two utopian planning schemes for wealthy pacifist and feminist Lola Maverick Lloyd. Because of the exigencies of war and the death of her client, neither scheme came to fruition, but they were an easy fit with Mahony’s pacifism, and her espousal of anthroposophy and world government. Mahony, as Rubbo puts it, ‘came full circle’, back to a strong female realm whence one of the most remarkable women of her era had gone forth to enliven and enchant all those who would listen, look, and learn.