QUESTION: How would you describe Griffin as a landscape architect?

JAMES WEIRICK: Griffin as a landscape architect had a terrific technical facility of working with the land and working with the site inspired by, I think, in a Masonian sense of the inner spirit of a site and the inner spirit of nature, and certainly that second dimension is part of Wright's work as well. The way I think Griffin differs from Wright is that the house itself is seen as a pure distillation of forces, of immense sort of flux of the cosmos stabilized in an abstract crystalined form, which then through its distillation, particularly through the fragmented windows and fragmented porches and so forth which open out from the the house, suggests that the force of nature is something that can be lived with and can be endlessly explored.That was also implied in the Mason City work, that it was possible to live in harmony with the natural woods. And the idea that you could, in a sense, occupy it in this living world in an extremely intimate way.

QUESTION: How did he bring nature into his designs?

JAMES WEIRICK: Well, one of the things Griffin always incorporated in his design was the sense of the cycle of nature. When he was working with Frank Lloyd Wright, he developed this concept of the floral cycle that was literally a semi-circular planting which went through a whole series of seasonal change, so that the pattern of the year was physically expressed in the garden itself. And he would always use a site. So he would celebrate the passage of the sun through the day and this inner sense of change and flux does heighten everyday life. And if that capacity to take the basis of life and give it a noble and inspirational dimension really distinguishes Griffin's work.

QUESTION: Did the Griffins' spiritual beliefs emerge in their works?

JAMES WEIRICK: I think that at the time the Griffins' designed Canberra in 1911, the basis of the spiritual belief came out of the great tradition of American Unitarianism, the great tradition of American liberal protestantism. And this stream of ideas that comes to us from Emerson and Thoreau, in which there is a scene of the Divine in nature and the inspiration that it provided for the Griffins, was very much part of their own lived experiences. I think that what happened then in Australia was, they were very sorely tested by the experience of trying to get this thing built and they found their ideals really under-achieved with the city. And in Griffin's own case, he found that he imagined that he had found a democratic city but he could only build it if he was in total control. So that fundamental denial of his own principles to make his own project happen, I think caused an inner crisis.

QUESTION: How did people in Australia react to an American winning the design competition?

JAMES WEIRICK: When it was announced that an American had won the competition there was some resentment among local interests. But when Griffin did arrive in Australia, he was really well received, an extraordinary response. People were absolutely excited about what he had to say both in terms of his vision for Canberra and his vision for democratic architecture. I think the problem that he ran into was two-fold. First of all, within the group of people in the Commonwealth bureaucracy who had conceived a plan of the city, they really wanted to build it themselves and they didn't want Griffin around. So they did actually conspire against him and caused him a great deal of trouble, which ultimately resulted in a Royal Commission into the whole administration of the federal capital in 1916. At that Royal Commission, Griffin was vindicated. But by that time he had lost political support. He didn't have support of the minister and the reason for that was because another event had taken place. Of course, the First World War had broken out. And at that point the Griffins' really began to really diverge in their own values and opinions about what was happening in Australia, and couldn't understand the way in which the Australians had rallied to the cause of the British Empire and were prepared to sacrifice a generation of young men for Britian's cause. And they were also concerned about the actions of the Federal government of that time which introduced very restrictive legislation on civil liberties to fight the war. And in 1915, Walter Griffin stood up in a public meeting where he was the principle speaker in Melbourne and he criticized his own employer. He criticized the government saying, "If you impose these regulations, if you restrict the liberties you might as well have lost the war. And he said the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. So this didn't endear him to the conservative forces in the Australian government. He was denied any funding to carry out his ideas, and eventually when the government turned its' attention away from the major war effort and looked again to the period of reconstruction after the First World War, they decided it was time for Griffin to go.

QUESTION: What do we know of Griffin designs for the competition?

JAMES WEIRICK: Well, we know from various accounts that the production of the competition entry took place in nine weeks from September and December 1911, principally there in the loft on Van Buren Street; also with Griffin working at his family home in Elmhurst. We're not quite sure how it was orchestrated between those two venues, but Griffin's father described how in the family home Griffin put up the cycloramas which had been provided for the entries. We know from his father's description, he pinned up the cycloramas around the family home and lived literally in the cyclorama. And we also know that the team involved in rendering the drawings, supervised by Marion, but also involving Griffin's future brother-in-law, Roy Lippincort, his sister Gweneviere, Miles Sater, and others, were involved in this extraordinary rush to make these drawings; all of this came out of a period of procrastination that Griffin had been involved in.

QUESTION: When was the competition announced?

JAMES WEIRICK: Well, the competition was announced by the Australian government in April. By mid-summer, which is about the time that Walter and Marion married, we had the wonderful description of Marion where she threw down the gauntlet in the Indiana dunes and said, "Either you start on this project or I'll never be able to do the drawings." And at that point, he really began to make it himself. It was clearly formed in his mind.Unfortunately we don't have any of the preliminary drawings to follow that creative process of translating the concept into the fully resolved presentation drawings, but there's one other fantastic clue into the inspiration for this site. Griffin said that he got the idea for the city while he was canoeing with Marion on the Kankakee River, and I've always just wondered what that was all about.