Walter Burley Griffin - Chicago Career

Chicago Career

Following the completion of his studies, Griffin relocated to Chicago and was employed as a draftsman for two years in the offices of progressive architects Dwight H. Perkins, Robert C. Spencer, Jr., and H. Webster Tomlinson in "Steinway Hall". Griffin's employers worked in the distinctive Prairie School style. The school's style is marked by horizontal lines, flat roofs with broad overhanging eaves, solid construction, craftsmanship, and strict discipline in the use of ornament. Louis Sullivan was highly influential amongst Prairie School architects and Griffin was a great admirer of his work, and also of his philosophy of architecture which stressed that design should be free of historical precedent. In addition to Sullivan, influential architects identified with the Prairie School include George Grant Elmslie, George Washington Maher, William Gray Purcell, William Drummond and most importantly, Frank Lloyd Wright.

In July 1901 Griffin passed the new Illinois architects' licensing examination and this permitted him to enter private practice as an architect. He began to work in Frank Lloyd Wright's famous Oak Park, Illinois, studios. Although he was never made a partner, Griffin oversaw the construction on many of Wright's noted houses including the Willits House in 1902 and the Larkin Administration Building built in 1904. From 1905 he also began to supply landscape plans for Wright’s buildings. Wright allowed Griffin and his other staff to undertake small commissions of their own. The William Emery house, built in Elmhurst, Illinois, in 1903 was such a commission. While working for Wright, Griffin fell in love with Mr. Wright's sister, Maginel Wright. He proposed marriage to her, but his affections for her were not returned, and she refused

Early in 1906 Griffin resigned his position at Wright's studio and established his own practice at Steinway Hall. Griffin and Wright had fallen out over events following Mr. Wright's trip to Japan in 1905. While Wright was away for five months, Griffin ran the practice. When Wright returned, he told Griffin that he had overstepped his responsibilities—since Griffin had completed several of Wright's jobs, and he sometimes substituted his own building designs. Furthermore, Wright had borrowed money from Griffin to pay for his travels abroad, and then he tried to pay off his debts to Griffin with prints he had gotten in Japan. It became clear to Griffin then that Wright would not make Griffin a partner in his business.

Griffin's first independent commission was a landscape design for the State Normal School at Charleston, Illinois, now known as the Eastern Illinois University. In the autumn of that year, 1906, he received his first residential job from Harry Peters. The Peters' House was the first house designed with an L-shaped or open floor plan. The L-shape was an economical design and rather easily constructed. From 1907, 13 houses in this style were built in the Chicago neighborhood now known as Beverly-Morgan Park. Seven of these houses are on W. 104th Place in Beverly, Chicago. This street is now known as Walter Burley Griffin Place, and it forms a municipal historical district within the national Ridge Historic District, as this block contains the largest collection of small scale Griffin designs in existence.

In 1911 Griffin married Marion Lucy Mahony, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in architecture. She had been employed first in Wright's office, and then by the architect Hermann V. von Holst, who had taken over Wright's work in America when Wright abruptly left for Europe in 1909—eloping with a woman. Marion Mahony recommended to von Holst that he hire Griffin to develop a landscape plan for the area surrounding the three houses on Milliken Place for which Wright had been hired in Decatur, Illinois. Mahony and Griffin worked closely on the Decatur project immediately preceding their marriage. After their marriage, Mahony went to work in Griffin's practice. A Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony-designed development with several homes, Rock Crest Rock Glen in Mason City, Iowa, is seen as their most dramatic American design development of the decade and remains the largest collection of Prairie Style homes surrounding a natural setting.

From 1899 to 1914, Griffin created more than 130 designs in his Chicago office for buildings, urban plans and landscapes; half of these were built in mid-western states of Illinois, Iowa, Michigan and Wisconsin. In 1981, the city of Chicago granted landmark status to the Prairie-style bungalows designed between 1909 and 1914 by Griffin in the 1700 block of West 104th Place (also known as the Griffin Place Historic District), as well as 12 blocks on Longwood Drive and three blocks along Seeley Avenue between 98th and 110th Streets.

The relationship between Griffin and Frank Lloyd Wright cooled in the years following Griffin's departure from Wright's firm in 1906. With Walter and Marion's wedding, Wright started to feel they were "against him". After Griffin's win in the Canberra design competition, and resultant front page coverage in the New York Times, Wright and Griffin never spoke to each other again. In later years, whenever Griffin was brought up in conversation Wright would downplay his achievements and refer to him as a draftsman.

• William H. Emery, Jr. House, 1903

• Frederick Carter House 1910

• Page House, 1912

• Blythe-Rule House, 1913

• Ralph Griffin House, 1913

• Melson House, 1914

• Blythe House, 1914