|
|
|
QUESTION: What was the nature of the relationship between Walter and Marion when they were both employed by Wright? PAUL KRUTY: Unfortunately we don't have any information about the relationship between Walter and Marion during the five years that they both worked together in Wright's studio. We do know however, that Walter did fall in love with Frank Lloyd Wright's sister Maginel who was roughly Griffin's age. Unfortunately for him, she turned him down and married a Chicago artist in the Oak Park Studio. After that Griffin seems to haven't shown much interest in the subject whatsoever, until 1910, when we find Walter and Marion taking canoe trips together in St. Joe Michigan and finally in 1911 getting married. Marion would certainly have been aware of Walter's, this relationship that was going on. In some respects Griffin was an introverted personality and Maginel later wrote that Walter's proposal to her was a complete shock, and she had no idea that she was even interested in her. Five years later when Marion ad Walter became interested in each other, Marion gives some indication that she was the leader in the pair. There is some indication in Marion's own account that she was the instigator of the relationship between Walter and Marion. It didn't mean Walter didn't reciprocate, but he simply, at the beginning it was something that was not on his mind. QUESTION: Was Griffin satisfied with his position in Wright's studio? PAUL KRUTY: It seems clear that eventually it occurred to Griffin that there really wasn't a future for him with Frank Lloyd Wright, that Wright was never going to raise him to the level of a partner. Wright considered Griffin a partner to the extent the two of them worked on a building that ultimately was a Frank Lloyd Wright building. And that Wright thought of this as a matter of course and this is the way he designed through the rest of his career. Which of course leads to lots of confusion about people who worked for him saying they designed a particular building. Whereas to Frank Lloyd Wright, everyone was a pencil in his hand. QUESTION: When did Griffin decide to leave Wright's employment? PAUL KRUTY: Well this wasn't the future that Griffin saw for himself, and so presumably around 1905 or so, he considered after 5 years ready to work on his own. However it was not financially possible to do that for the longest time. And in 1905 Frank Lloyd Wright went to Japan for the first time, with his wife for 5-month trip. He left Griffin in charge of the Oak Park office. Griffin managed the office more than Wright expected. He in fact substituted some of his own designs and completed commissions, when Wright came back he was actually upset at the extent of liberties that Griffin had taken with some of his work. At the same time, Wright had no cash as he often did and proposed to pay Griffin in Japanese prints in lieu of five months salary. QUESTION: How did Griffin respond to this form of payment? PAUL KRUTY: Griffin didn't want the prints, but Wright eventually foisted them on him and considered the matter closed. Clearly at this point, in mid 1905, Griffin wished that he could practice architecture on his own. It was not until the following year that he received a commission to landscape Northern Illinois Normal School campus, now Northern Illinois University. After that he submitted his resignation and went to work for himself, in March of 1906. And it was only at the end of that year that he built his first house. QUESTION: So Griffin didn't immediately leave Wright when Wright returned from Japan? PAUL KRUTY: It seems clear that although Wright and Griffin did not see eye to eye after Wright return form Japan, there was no great dramatic scene and no great break. Part of Griffin's introverted nature perhaps that he decided at that point that he was going to go on his own as soon a he could. But it didn't require a great argument about it. We know that they remained at least professional associates in that Wright over the next two years asked Griffin to landscape several houses. And Griffin did as well as extensions to the landscaping at the Darwin Martin House and the William Martin House in Oak Park. QUESTION: What was the last project they worked on together? PAUL KRUTY: The last project that Wright and Griffin worked on together seems to be the landscaping plan from 1909, when Wright went to Europe, got involved in all the scandal to Mrs. Cheney and where there is a letter that is written in Italy in which Wright says that word has come to him that Griffin is complaining about the Japanese prints from five years before. It seems the great break up between Wright and Griffin dates from about this time. QUESTION: How did Wright react to the news about Walter and Marion? PAUL KRUTY: Wright clearly once he found out about Marion and Walter and their eventual marriage but certainly working together, that this was the point of no return for him. The two of them became "against him" as he began to perceive it. When Griffin won the international competition for the design of the capitol of Australia, Canberra, and was suddenly on the front page of the New York Times, while Wright had only been on the front page of the Chicago Tribune for having run off to Europe with Mrs. Cheney this also finalized the relationship, the termination of the relationship between Wright and Griffin, and Wright and Griffin never spoke again after the Canberra competition. And Wright for the next 45 years, whenever the subject of Griffin came up he did his best to downplay any achievement that Griffin might have received and any thing that Griffin might have given to Wright in the Oak Park Studio. The change between Wright and Griffin is also mirrored in the relationship between Wright and Marion Mahony. And she had nothing but praise for Wright when she worked for him. QUESTION: What happened after the break? PAUL KRUTY: Following the break up between Walter and Frank Lloyd Wright, she completely sided with Griffin and spent the rest of her life, castigating Wright as the person who betrayed architecture as well as herself and her husband. QUESTION: What were Griffin's contributions to architecture? PAUL KRUTY: One of Griffin's contributions to modern architecture in the Chicago area was the so-called "open plan"; the L shaped plan. This is a configuration where you take a simple square and divide it up into four parts with the fireplace in its center. The living room and dining room become the open, continual L-shape. Only the kitchen sits in other quadrant. Wright published the plan in 1907 in Ladies Home Journal as the Fireproof Home for $5000. However the first constructed example using it is a house by Griffin in 1906. And we find elements of it in earlier Griffin projects as well as projects Griffin did for Frank Lloyd Wright. It seems convincingly clear that this is a design inspiration of Walter Burley Griffin's imagination and not Frank Lloyd Wright's. Everything about it seems to suggest Griffin. The ideas of taking the complexities of the spatial revolution of Frank Lloyd Wright and making a simple formula out of it; condensing it into a simple square to allow builders to build it without complicated forms. Griffin was very much interested in low cost housing and mass-produced housing. These are ideas that Frank Lloyd Wright was not interested in during the early parts of his career. Only later did he turn to these subjects. Just as he turned to landscape architecture later in his career. Yet when Marion Mahony drew the ravishing drawings of the house, and Frank Lloyd Wright published the plan under his name in 1907, it was immediately credited to him and Griffin's role has remained completely unknown and un-recovered. QUESTION: Are there other projects? PAUL KRUTY: Another project that we know Griffin did in Wright's studio was to design a brass wall sconce in 1904, that Griffin first used in his Emery House, which was just being completed in 1904. This fixture also appears in quite a few Frank Lloyd Wright houses at the time, including the Little House in Peoria and the Dana Thomas House in Springfield. This was designed while Griffin was working for Wright. In a sense, it was a design for Wright but it clearly was not designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. And, of course, this is fixture that these days is taken out of Wright houses and sold as a Wright design for enormous amounts of money. QUESTION: Wasn't Wright at a low pointing in his career just as Griffin's was taking off? PAUL KRUTY: In 1909, it is clear that Frank Lloyd Wright felt personally that he had come to the end of what he could get out of his Prairie Style. Whatever the personal crisis was in his life which precipitated leaving his family; he was also coming to the point where he was having an artistic crisis. He simply couldn't function or pay attention to his work. He couldn't make himself focus on his work. And he had found that he had simply run out of ideas for what to do with the Prairie style. It's ironic that at this same moment, Griffin having been in practice for three years was just finding his own personal style of architecture. Griffin's buildings between 1906 and 1910 for all of their great interest are very much based on Wright's personal modern style. What we call Wright's Prairie Style. In 1910 we found a rapid evolution had taken place, what one might call his second modern style of his second Prairie Style of architecture, which is very different than this earlier style. So in a sense at a point in which Wright had finished with one phase of his career, but seemed to not know which direction the career was about to take, Griffin was just finding his truly important phase of his career. QUESTION: Can you explain that further? PAUL KRUTY: What Griffin's seems to have discovered in 1910 or have evolved through is architecture of much greater simplicity. He is now completely bereft of overhanging eaves, the great hovering roof of his own work, and of course Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings without those terminations. Flat room buildings where the roof garden suddenly becomes a new space to live in. And the first fully formed example to be constructed was a house that was called "Solid Rock" which was actually built completely out of reinforced concrete. One of the very first houses in the world built out of reinforced concrete. QUESTION: Where did this concept come from? PAUL KRUTY: Perhaps as a legacy of Griffin's education at the University of Illinois. He was always very much interested in what was called new materials at the time. This means mostly construction through hollow tile, concrete block and reinforced concrete, all of which were in their infancy in the first decade of this century. In each case he built buildings out of these materials before Frank Lloyd Wright, including the Bovee flats out of hollow tile and Solid Rock out of reinforced concrete. This seems to have been the catalyst to the similar abstraction of his style of thinking of these great big cubic solids, which is a direction that Frank Lloyd Wright also went in, both in the interest in such materials and the visual expression as simple geometry. But he did so after Griffin had done it. So, for example, we can say that without a doubt that Laura Gale's House (Wright) dates to 1909 and the Bovee House (Griffin) dates to 1907. Shouldn't we, therefore, say that Wright was obviously influenced by Griffin? QUESTION: Can you talk about the Bovee House a little more? PAUL KRUTY: The Bovee House is made out of hollow tile construction with concrete surface applied to it. It's said to have inspired Griffin to simplify the forms that the coating on the concrete unites the forms to a continuous skin. But it also simplified the masses at this point. The building still has the overhanging hipped roof, part of Griffin's and Wright's Prairie Style, but they're placed so high on the building and they are such a mass of concrete wall, you are almost unaware of these. Really the building appears to have a flat roof. It seems in many respects to be a harbinger of his later style. QUESTION: How about Marion Mahony's influence on Griffin? PAUL KRUTY: The problem with the citing what part of Griffin's maturing of his form might have come from his new relationship with Marion Mahony can not be easily solved. However by looking at all Griffin's work up to 1910 and then looking at the work that follows it, and looking at Mahony's work up to 1910 and the work that follows it, there is no way that one can honestly conclude that Griffin's work is changing because it is moving closer to Marion Mahony's work before 1910 - including the houses at Decatur. There is a change in Griffin's work, but a change that can be accounted for in his own work. I think, in a very real sense, finding Marion, the two of them finding each other, becoming "the Griffins" as the Australians call them all the time, must have had a great effect on his whole aesthetic outlook, his personal life, and therefore his creative life. But in terms of specific elements, actual design of the buildings, the work still is Walter Burley Griffin's work as far as I'm concerned. |
   |
