A Feminist Monument (For Marion Mahony)

A Feminist Monument (For Marion Mahony)

Susana Torre

This project was submitted in 1975 to an international competition for a memorial to Walter Burley Griffin, the American architect who designed Australia’s capital city, Canberra. It was to be built on the summit of the highest mountain in the area. Griffin (1876-1937) worked with Frank Lloyd Wright and practiced in Chicago, but settled in Australia in 1914, after winning the Canberra commission. He was the husband of Marion Mahony (1871-1961), who collaborated with him in the Canberra competition; her drawings in photodyes and watercolor on satin reputedly won him the prize.

Mahony graduated in architecture from MIT in 1878 and was the first woman licensed to practice architecture in Illinois. In 1895 she entered Wright's Oak Park studio, earning a meager $10 per week designing ornamental work and details. Her extraordinary renderings in the famous Wasmuth Portfolio established Wright’s international fame and influenced Bauhaus and De Stijl designs. In 1909 she became chief designer in Wright’s office, but received no public recognition. Many of her designs were subsequently attributed to Herman von Holst. (In her unpublished memoir, Mahony obliterated von Holst’s name from drawings of this period, sometimes writing her own over the erased area.) She collaborated on a number of Griffin’s projects when they married in 1911, but remained in his shadow. After his death she returned to the U.S. and designed two major community planning projects (unexecuted), commissioned by Lola Lloyd, a pacifist, feminist and co-founder with Jane Addams of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

The monument here is based on a series of spatial metaphors considered archetypally female in our culture, in honor of the presence and influence of Marion Mahony, who was not chosen to be honored by the organizers of the competition.

The visitor is led through a passage aligned with the city’s land axis into the observatory’s tridimensional facade, where three windows open on the city's main axes and civic monuments. The passage is partially contained within one-half of a circular pool and entered through a pink marble doorway. After seeing the city below from the conceptual perspective composed by the windows, the visitor descends to the lower level of the observatory. There, enclosed by a pink marble "room" dug into the mountain, whose entrance is on the level above, is Griffin’s effigy. Water from the upper-level fountain cascades around the marble room into the half-circle fountain that surrounds the observation platform one level below. From this vantage point, the city is again viewed, framed by the stairs, which are aligned with its diagonal axes. Thus the city (the public realm of action) is seen from within two enclosures: the "house" above (woman as social being) and the "cave" below (woman’s body).

Since Mahony was not a feminist and did not demand recognition for her talent and work, this building —a metaphor for woman’s body as a physical, nurturant receptacle and as a spiritual and intellectual vessel — most accurately represents her role. Its symbolic elements are water, earth (as primal shelter and last sanctuary), door/passage, "window," circular composition, pink marble doorway and interior "room." The memorial can also be conceived as an anti-monument, in that the building is not meant as a monument to a man but as a means to focus the observer’s attention on the idea of the city as a monument of culture.