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Marion Mahony
Born in Chicago, Illinois in 1871, Marion Mahony (pronounced “May′-oh-knee”) was just the second woman ever to graduate from the architectural program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After graduation in 1894, she immediately began working with her cousin, architect Dwight Perkins in Chicago. The first woman to take an architectural license in Illinois, and one of the first – if not the first – to receive her license in the United States, she has played an important historical role in American Architecture - though one that has been unjustifiably neglected. Architect, Mahony came to work in Oak Park early in her career, at the Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright. An important collaborator on some of the most renowned buildings designed during Wright’s Prairie School period, she was also responsible for some of the finest decorative designs, art glass and furniture coming from Wright’s studio, and the Prairie School at large. Most of the beautiful, now-famous, architectural presentation drawings and water colors that helped Wright promote his practice, his building designs – and his career – were drawn or painted by Mahony. Mahony's Oak Park career came to an end when Wright left his studio, his family, and his Oak Park life behind. Wright sold his practice to Hermann von Holst. von Holst, inadequately equipped to do the job, in turn engaged Mahony to complete several of the unfinished projects. This brought her into an important new collaboration with Walter Burley Griffin, another former Wright collaborator, who later became her husband, and life-long architectural partner.
(right: Walter Burley and Marion MahonyGriffin)
Though her history, and her contribution to American Architecture and the Prairie School, has been largely and unfortunately overlooked until recent times, it is fair to say that without her collaboration (and that of several others), Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture - and Oak Park's architectural legacy - would never have received as much of the world-wide acclaim and lasting admiration that they have acquired. For more history of Marion Mahony, follow these links: Erasing a Woman: The Canon, Absence, and Gender
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