Kevin Howells was shoveling snow in front of his new house in Rogers Park when some neighbors rumbling by in a silver SUV stopped to ask whether he knew about the celebrated architect who had lived there. He had to admit he didn’t.
At the time female architects were few and obscure, and their designs were primarily collaborative efforts. Sophia Hayden, who graduated four years ahead of Mahony, couldn’t find a job until she won the competition to design the Women’s Building for the World’s Columbian Exposition. She was paid a fraction of what her male colleagues made, saw little of her vision come to fruition, and collapsed under the pressure. “The newspapers wrote that she had a nervous breakdown. She didn’t complete any projects after that,” says Jennifer Masengarb, an education specialist at the Chicago Architecture Foundation.
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Griffin, who by this time had his own practice at Steinway Hall, handled the landscape design on the Mueller project as a favor to Mahony. In “The Magic of America,” she writes, “I was first swept off my feet by my delight in his achievements in my profession, then through a common bond of interests in nature and intellectual pursuits, and then with the man himself. It was by no means a case of love at first sight, but it was a madness when it struck.”
During the Depression they turned to industrial design, mainly in Sydney, creating municipal incinerators that, in the words of Peisch, gave “powerful form and remarkable beauty to a structure whose purpose was neither inviting nor aesthetically challenging.” Major commissions in India followed, and as Gri°n created exhibition buildings, a university library, and maharajah palaces, he reached a new apex in his career. Mahony stayed in Australia to run their practice but left it in the hands of proteges after surmising her husband needed a bit of help. “Mrs. Griffin follows her man,” she wrote to him. Eight months later, Griffin fell from a scaffold while working on the library. He died a week after the accident, in February 1937.
Mahony found solace in writing “The Magic of America,” a 1,100-page autobiographical manuscript she called “my sort of biography of Walt.” Organized into four parts, detailing battles the couple faced personally and professionally in India, Canberra, Sydney, and Chicago, her prose failed to draw the attention she’d hoped for.
In the years since their deaths, recognition of the Griffins has gradually increased. In 1981 the city named a string of Griffin homes Walter Burley Gri°n Place. John Notz, a Prairie School historian and trustee of Graceland Cemetery, arranged to have Mahony’s cremated remains moved from an unmarked grave to a columbarium that now bears a plaque with her name and one of her flower renderings.
