Early Life
Griffin was born in 1876 in Maywood, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He was the eldest of the four children of George Walter Griffin, an insurance agent, and Estelle Griffin. His family moved to Oak Park and later to Elmhurst during his childhood. As a boy he had an interest in landscape design and gardening, and his parents allowed him to landscape the yard at their new home in Elmhurst. Griffin completed high school at Oak Park High School. He considered studying landscape design but was advised by the landscape gardener O. C. Simonds to pursue a more lucrative profession.
Griffin chose to study professional architecture, and in 1899 he completed his bachelor's degree in architecture at the University of Illinois. The University of Illinois program was run by Nathan Clifford Ricker, a German-educated architect, whose teaching emphasized the technical aspects of architecture. During his studies, Griffin also took courses in horticulture and in forestry.
Read more about this topic: Walter Burley Griffin
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true, and the problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilled—or would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact? Did we anticipate the ways in which, vivid and continuous, they would unsuit us for the business of daily life? Or should our notion of daily life itself be transformed?”
—Edmund White (b. 1940)