Walter Burley Griffin is chiefly remembered for his design for Australia's National Capital, even though it has scarcely been realized in the detail he envisaged. The essential elements - the great triangle of avenues, the Land Axis, the Lake and the use of the topography to dramatise the city's development - have endured in the heart of Canberra which has grown to more than four times the population of the city he had planned.
Griffin worked as an architect in three continents - America, Australia, and India - but apart from a few distinctive houses, a university college, several incinerators and some office buildings, he has left little behind other than his design for Canberra to demonstrate his genius.
Griffin was born on 24 November 1876 at Maywood, Chicago, the eldest son of four children born to George Griffin and Estelle Burley. His father was a young insurance broker and city councillor who was able to provide a comfortable upbringing for his son.
In 1892, when Griffin was 16, the family moved to the rural suburb of Elmhurst and Griffin was able to frequently visit the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, being held to mark the 400th anniversary of the discovery of Americas. Griffin was impressed by the transformation of a sandy waste beside Lake Michigan into a beautifully landscaped site with terraces, lagoons and monumental pavilions. He resolved then to become an architect when he graduated from high school.
Walter Burley Griffin went on to study architecture at the University of Illinios and graduated in 1899. Between 1900 and 1905, Griffin worked in the office of Frank Lloyd Wright, and his early work was much influenced by the approach of a man who would become one of America's foremost romantic architects. Also working in Wright's office at that time was Marion Mahony, renowned for her talents as an artist and architectural delineator. In June 1911, only a short while after he had started work on his designs for Canberra, Griffin married Mahony. It is said that thereafter Griffin and Wright never talked to each other and that Wright spoke of his former associate only as 'a draftsman who went to Australia'.
After Griffin won the competition, he returned to the United States and continued work in Chicago as an architect and urban designer.
Griffin returned once again to Australia and continued to practice as an architect for the next 15 years, designing the NSW towns of Leeton and Griffith, Newman College and some houses and office buildings in Melbourne, as well as supervising the construction of the new Sydney suburb of Castlecrag.
The subdivision faltered and Griffin was often in conflict with the local Council and with the onset of the Depression, he was reduced to designing municipal incinerators. His Willoughby Incinerator (1934) which steps down a hillside has been classified by the National Trust as worthy of preservation. Griffin left Australia for India in 1935 where he was appointed designer of the United Provinces Exhibition at Lucknow and commissioned to design a university library, houses and press building. In the remaining 9 months of his life, Griffin's work was spectacular, with much of the effort concerned with the design of 60 buildings for the 160 acre site for the United Provinces Exhibition.
Griffin died in India at the age of 60 on 11 February 1937 after an operation for peritonitis. Marion Mahony Griffin returned to Castlecrag, remaining about a year in Australia, finding that Griffin's estate was heavily in debt. She returned to Chicago where she lived for another 24 years. Dying in 1961 at the age of 91.