Paradise on Earth Postscript
On the 150th anniversary of her birth, Marion Mahony Griffin’s visionary art, architecture and design are celebrated in an immersive exhibition.
The collaborative role of female architects and designers working in creative partnership with their husbands was long under-recognized in the twentieth century. It is only in recent decades that due credit has been given to Ray Eames, Denise Scott Brown, Lella Vignelli, Marion Mahony Griffin and other talented women. The Museum of Sydney is shining the spotlight on Marion on the 150th anniversary of her birth. Its exhibition Paradise on Earth explores Marion’s approach to art, architecture and design, and her progressive ideals, fascination with nature and longstanding legacy.
Marion and her husband, Walter Burley Griffin, moved to Australia from America in 1914, having won the Federal Capital Design Competition for Canberra, Australia’s new capital city. While Walter received much of the credit for the design, Marion was a pioneering architect and artist in her own right. She was the second woman to graduate from architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the first licensed female architects in the world. Marion was also one of the longest-serving employees in Frank Lloyd Wright’s office, where she had designed her own buildings and presented Wright’s architecture as art, rendering his designs in watercolour and ink, with Japanese printmaking inspiring her style.
Marion’s illustrations reflected her love of nature, which permeated the Griffins’ work as they sought to create balance between the natural and built worlds. In 1920, they purchased land in Middle Harbour, Sydney, to develop their vision for an ideal suburb – Castlecrag. Their utopia maintained the bushland environment, with architecture being “subordinate to the natural beauty of the land.” Castlecrag attracted a dynamic community of like-minded people, providing a “paradise” for those who lived there.
Paradise on Earth presents Marion’s adoration of nature via an immersive, multisensory experience, Enchanted Valley. This installation reimagines Castlecrag’s Haven Amphitheatre, a bushland site in the Castlehaven Reserve, where Marion and Walter established a timber stage structure for Castlecrag residents to gather for performances and social occasions. Illustrations projected onto the walls of the museum’s installation capture the changing colours, textures, moods and sounds of the bush and draw on Marion’s exquisite Forest Portraits in her unpublished memoir, The Magic of America. These watercolour
“portraits” of trees that Marion encountered on her bushwalks depict the Australian landscape with fresh eyes.
Marion left Australia in 1938, following Walter’s unexpected death in India in 1937. “I left Castlecrag, truly a bit of Paradise on Earth, to take on the next adventure,” she wrote. She left behind a legacy of ideas that demonstrate how architectural, environmental and social ideals can exist in harmony. sydneylivingmuseums.com.au
Paradise on Earth is at the Museum of Sydney until 18 April 2021.