Architecture, Biography
Book Details

The Griffins in Australia and India

The Complete Works and Projects of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin

Edited by Jeff Turnbull and Peter Y. Navaretti

The first comprehensive study of the work of these two pioneer architects of the early twentieth century in Australia.

Opinion

‘This large and scholarly work is a bargain at $95 . . . and an absolute must in the library of anyone who places value in good (and collectable) books, in practice of architecture, the Griffins work and its place in Australian history, fascinating reading, or all of these things.’ (Architect Victoria, July/August 1999)

‘For fans of the Griffins and their work, this is an essential reference book.’ (Louise Cox, Heritage NSW, June 1999, Volume 6, Number 2)

About this Title

Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin were Australia’s first internationally significant architects—the creators of 125 projects in the USA, 270 in Australia and 42 in India.

In Australia their wider achievements have been largely overshadowed by their local fame as the original design planners of the national capital, Canberra. Less well known are the Griffins’ designs for several towns, suburban estates, civic and commercial buildings, cinemas, a university residential college, low cost dwellings, industrial buildings, furniture, landscapes and many beautiful houses, as well as Marion’s tree studies.

The Griffins are also important to Australia because their architecture—organic, often submerged in native foliage, or seemingly rooted in the land—defines them as the originators of our contemporary regard for native landscape as an expression of national identity.

Walter and Marion made Australia their home in 1914. Before that they had been, along with eminent architect Frank Lloyd Wright, practitioners in the US ‘Prairie School’ of architecture. Unlike Wright, however, the Griffins were reserved and shy about revealing an overall architectural theory, though as followers of the political idealist Henry George they pursued a social philosophy committed to equity and democracy.

After twenty years in Australia the Griffins went to India where from 1935 to 1937 they produced, among other projects, many gorgeously ornamented pavilions for the United Provinces Exhibition in Lucknow.

The Griffins left behind little documentation about themselves and no single archive of drawings, a fact which has frustrated scholars in their attempts to define the Griffins’ place in twentieth-century architecture. In an endeavour to reveal the truth and significance of their work, an international Griffin Exchange Programme was set up in the late 1980s by the architecture schools of the universities of Melbourne and Illinois. This book is published as part of that programme. It reveals the extent and variety of a prolific output in three very different societies.

Profusely illustrated with photographs, plans and drawings, The Griffins in Australia and India not only offers an evaluative context for the Griffins’ oeuvre by a group of distinguished scholars, but records for the first time and with complete authority all of the Griffins’ known projects in Australia and India.

About the Author

Jeff Turnbull graduated in Architecture and Town and Regional Planning from the University of Melbourne in 1962. He obtained a Masters degree and taught a course in Asian architecture with the late Charles Willard Moore at the University of California at Berkeley. Now a senior lecturer in Architecture at the University of Melbourne, Jeff taught and studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign as part of the Griffin Exchange Programme. He is completing a comprehensive study of Newman College, University of Melbourne, designed by the Griffins and built in 1915–18.

Peter Y. Navaretti, an architectural historian, is Heritage Strategy Planner at RMIT University, Melbourne. In 1988 Peter contributed an inventory of Griffin’s projects in Australia to Walter Burley Griffin, a Re-view at Monash University Gallery. After twenty-five years of his own research on the Griffins’ work, he became a Research Associate at the University of Melbourne, working on the Catalogue Raisonné on the Griffins in Australia and India. Publication of the complete proven works of the Griffins in Australia and India is the culmination of a lifelong ambition.

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978-0-522-84830-4