Marion Mahony Griffin - The Magic of America

News from The Art Institute of Chicago:

The Ryerson and Burnham Libraries are extremely pleased to announce the publication in electronic form of The Magic of America, Marion Mahony Griffin's autobiography and her biography of her husband, Walter Burley Griffin.

The digital facsimile, the electronic text and its scholarly apparatus can be found at www.artic.edu/magicofamerica/ .Marion Griffin's vast unpublished manuscript of 1400 pages and over 600 illustrations, which she donated to the Libraries in 1949 (she also donated drawings now in the Department of Architecture and Design), recounts her life in architecture and that of her architect husband in Chicago, Australia, and India from the 1890s through the 1930s.

It provides an extraordinary window into the architectural world of Chicago in the early years of the 20th century, where both Mahony and Griffin worked in the office of Frank Lloyd Wright and independently; Australia, where W.B. Griffin won the design competition for the new national capital of Canberra in 1912 and where the Griffins lived and worked up to 1935; and India, where Walter Griffin experienced a final brief period of creativity until his death in 1937. The document is also replete with social, philosophical, and personal content of great interest to many different audiences.