Secrets of a legendary couple

Was this the case 100 years ago? If so, Walter and Marion Griffin were suckers for punishment. When they arrived in Australia together in 1914 to oversee the building of their dream city, they had only planned to stay for a few years. But when they came to realise that they wouldn't be going back to their native Chicago any time soon, they packed up their office and had all their stuff shipped over. Literally shipped, that is, and literally all their stuff from their practice at home.

True, it was in the 1920s, with the First World War over, and the ship that carried their possessions wasn't in danger of being torpedoed by Germans, as was the case in the 1940s with Walter's brother-in-law. He was also an architect, and had set up a practice in New Zealand, but opted to return to America when his wife became ill. His office records ended up on the bottom of the ocean.

The Griffins', thankfully, did not, although it would be many years before this vast collection of office records would be seen by the public - nearly a century, in fact. Rare original plans, drawings, letters and handwritten notes from the hands of Walter and Marion are a kind of Holy Grail for Griffin aficionados, and yet for decades, these records were kept by the family of the Griffins' Australian partner, Eric Milton Nicholls, until the library acquired them in 2006.

They're now on show in a new exhibition at the National Library as part of Canberra's Centenary. The Dream of a Century: the Griffins in Australia's Capital puts a human face on the legendary design duo, Canberra's "original authors" who have achieved cult status around these parts.

Curator Christopher Vernon, Associate Professor of landscape architecture at the University of Western Australia, is an American who once lived and worked in Chicago, a place where anyone taking an interest in architecture will come across the work of Griffin.

"Back in 1995, I was a professor at the University of Illinois and I was doing research on Griffin, and he appealed simply because he was both an architect and a landscape architect," he says.

"For anyone who takes an interest in Griffin and looks at his output of his life, Canberra looms large … You have to see it, otherwise you don't feel like you're doing justice to understanding the work."

Vernon first came to Canberra as a tourist in 1993, fell in love with the place and emigrated to Australia in 1995, spending his first year here teaching at the University of Canberra.

"Once you start doing even finer-grain research, you kept encountering references to Eric Nichols and how his daughter and son had all office records," he says.

He became fixated on seeing the collection and, once he did, applied for an Australian Research Council grant to catalogue it, and eventually helped the National Library negotiate the collection's acquisition. Even before that, he said the idea of an exhibition based on the collection was in the air, and the Centenary was the perfect opportunity to put one together.

"The best thing about that collection, or the most satisfying thing, was that very few people had had the chance to see it, so it was that one of the best kept secrets," he says.

"One of the least accessible collections is now online and being displayed, so it's completely gone from one extreme to the other, in a good way."

The exhibition traces the life and work of the couple, from Walter's high school years in Chicago, when he first learned of Australia's Federation, and dreamed of designing its capital city. It follows on to 1911, when he and Marion - his new wife and business partner - entered the international competition to design this dream capital, which they won the following year.

Today we are all too aware that, far from being a dream made reality, the win would be overshadowed by controversy, argument and frustration. But many parts of the exhibition shed light on the prolific working life of the Griffins, maintained even as they battled bureaucracy in Canberra, and their later work in India.

The collection, Vernon says, is astonishing in scope and complexity, covering four decades and including more than 2500 items, such as maps, blueprints, slides, photographs, scrawled annotations, newspaper cuttings and all kinds of office-related paperwork.

"They're more or less legendary figures, and for me, anyway, it's the ephemera in the collection that puts a human face on them," he says.

"Things like an American Express receipt from Venice in 1914 when they changed their dollars to lira, or business cards from a trip to Paris, and little notations - 'I'll meet you at three o'clock here'."

He says the exhibition emphasises that the Griffins were, by the time they arrived in Canberra, a creative partnership.

"Convention has it that we want to ascribe or attribute greater heroic things to a single personality, so the Griffins kind of complicate things," he says.

"They were this sort of indivisible pair, and I've always thought that each of them had a better career with one another than either one would have on their own."

Even a casual visitor to the exhibition won't be able to resist wondering what Walter and Marion would think if they saw Canberra today, and Vernon says there are aspects of the original plan that were deliberately overlooked in Canberra's early days.

"One of the things that I think are deceptive about Marion's renderings, is that when you look at the ones where she did the view from Ainslie, it's a city set in a landscape," he says.

"But what's almost kind of camouflaged about it is that, make no mistake, one thing the Griffins would certainly notice is that there's no Chicago here, in the sense that it's all sprawling, suburban … If you look at the drawings with that in mind, you'll see there are four-storey apartment flats and things along those lines which were self-consciously rejected by Griffin's successors."

In putting the exhibition together, Vernon says he was keen to shed new light on the Griffins and their work, including the furniture they designed for the Cafe Australia in 1916. The show ends in 1937 with a recently widowed Marion making a final visit to Canberra before returning to America.

"I wanted to have, to be quite honest, a happy ending, rather than have this stereotypical view that the Griffins were treated horribly by bureaucrats and they were driven out of town," he says.

"Of course, The Canberra Times interviewed her, and she was saying it's beautiful, so she left on a happy note. And even Walter, his last visit was in 1934, about a year before they went to India and journalists said Walter gave the impression of an artist that was happy with the city even though it wasn't 100 per cent in conformity with his ideas."

Nevertheless, the pathos of the Griffin's experience of Australia is inescapable.

"I think there still is the wonderful soulful story of the artist being misunderstood. At the end of the day I think they both realised they did something important. Really, part of the significance at least in the American context was of all the architects in the Griffins' orbit, even Frank Lloyd Wright, the Griffins were the only ones that went on and did something on the scale of a city, that they did the most substantial achievement," he says.

He says as a couple, the Griffins were formidable and intriguing figures.

"I think particularly in the 21st century, especially for women, a lot of women just cannot get their head around the fact that this woman chose to subsume herself to him, and that just boggles the mind. But from everything I've ever seen, that's exactly what she did," he says.

"I've tried to convey that. It's not an explicit focus but, it is curious."

He quotes Walter's brother-in-law, who wrote, after a visit to the Griffins in Australia, that "Marion worshipped Walter but she was jealous of every minute of his life that was spent out of her sight".

"In any event, I think it is an incredible relationship, and I think we can get a better picture of who Marion was and who Walter was, because Walter is always this silent person in the background and Marion's doing all the talking," he says.

He refers to a photograph showing people attending a lecture at Castlecrag, the utopian suburb they built in Sydney.

"Marion's there looking like a fireball and Walter's in the background looking lost," he says.

"I think at the end of the day, they had a remarkable life together. The sad thing for me is that when you know that Marion worshipped him, that he died and she went on and was on her own for longer than they were ever together."

■ The Dream of a Century: the Griffins in Australia's Capital opens at the National Library on March 8 and runs until June 10.

■ The 17-minute restored footage of Canberra's 1913 naming ceremony is now available on DVD from the National Film and Sound Archive, along with the opening of Parliament House in 1927, a 1958 Guide to Canberra and springtime around a very new Lake Burley Griffin in 1965.

See nfsa.gov.au for more details.