Updating the Griffin model

Walter Burley and his architectural partner, Marion Mahoney, moved into their own house on the Castlecrag Estate in 1925. I will show you their house in a later post. My point is that 1925 is a while ago, and only 15 of their designs were made manifest. So, was it a vision, or a mere fancy?

What I am endeavouring to do, is to show you how the Griffins imbibed - for folk from Chicago - a foreign landscape, and made it their own. I have shown you the prestigious 15 The Citadel, and teased you with smears of landscape. Today, I want to show you how glimpses of the Griffin legacy can still be seen in architecture around Castlecrag through the decades since the Griffins moved to India in 1935. Did I mention that the suburb that is Castlecrag today, was originally three development estates - Castlecrag Estate, Sunnyside Estate, and Wireless Estate - with decreasing levels of involvement by the Griffins or by their business partners? Needless to say, I live on the old Wireless Estate. The median house price in Castlecrag is $1.75m.

Anyways, to my untrained architectural eye, there is an whiff of Griffin to each house illustrated. What is missing is a splash of humility, even in the face of natural beauty. But humility is a sparse commodity nowadays.

The knack of being inconspicuous ...

In 2007 I took a 4WD tour from Adelaide to Uluru for 10 days. There were 10 of us in the long-wheel base vehicle, including the driver. I was the only Australian on the tour, the other 8 were mostly European backpackers, with a couple of tourists thrown in. In general, Australians do not value, nor respect, their environment. They use it, for their recreation, but don't put a value on it.

Walter Burley Griffin [1876 - 1937] and Marion Mahoney Griffin [1871 - 1961] were Americans from the mid-west, who having won the design competition, lobbed in Australia in 1912 to bring their vision for our National Capital to fruition. Anyone who knows Canberra today, will acknowledge that Canberra is perfectly sited within its landscape. The design - drawn by Marion - uses the natural landscape to perfection. Each hillock has its special purpose and the river running through it echoes that same narrative.

The Griffins attempted to do the same with the Castlecrag peninsula, which was and is, a landscape of a totally different ilk. And the era was different. The Greater Sydney Development Association [GSDA], purchased an interest in the Castlecrag estate in 1921, and the Great Depression began to bite in 1928/9. However, the Griffin's love of the harbour landscape, its hilly precipices, its mossy gullies, and its water glimpses saw them develop designs that endeavoured to squat their domestic buildings into that landscape.

The last gasps of summer

I did not know if my figure in the landscape was male or female. I did not know if the gulls were being whispered to, or the harbour swell. What I read was the 'oneness' between man and nature. We can do it sometimes, you know.

Taken, on this first weekend in Autumn, at Watson's Bay harbourside beach, which is immediately inside South Head.