By Sarah Downey
“Yes, quite close to perfect, isn’t it?” Martini muses as he strides ahead. “And you can see that it’s a bit beyond the range, so it’s never been an issue for our golfers.”
Butt runs a top-drawer design firm in Canberra that specializes in solar-powered homes. A member of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, he points out that Griffin’s successes owe much to a strong work ethic: “He slogged it on. He struggled and he didn’t allow mediocrity to rule. He didn’t become mediocre. He understood all the technicalities of how these industrial buildings worked, and then he’s got the function and the beauty of it. That’s all the mark of a great architect.”
Griffin had built homes along Lake Michigan. Many of them remain addresses with cachet today, including the Bovee House in Evanston and the Orth houses in Kenilworth. Nearby in Winnetka, Griffin designed the Trier Center neighborhood on nine acres just west of New Trier High School.
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He was soon tapped to join a group of architects at Steinway Hall. The building on East Van Buren is gone now but it was an incubator for innovators in the city’s architectural heyday before World War I. Dwight Perkins and Myron Hunt worked there, and so did Webster Tomlinson, who went on to become a partner of Frank Lloyd Wright. Tomlinson occasionally scouted for talent there, and at age 24 Griffin landed a job at Wright’s Oak Park studio.
Griffin was developing his own take on the Prairie style. In 1902 he beat out his boss in his first try for a solo commission, the William Emery House in Elmhurst. “Wright was rejected because he was considered too uncompromising,” H. Allen Brooks writes in his 1972 book, The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and His Midwest Contemporaries.
More artist than architect, Mahony had been a regular at the Oak Park studio since 1895. She designed some buildings of her own–most notably, the 1903 All Souls Church in Evanston (now demolished)–but her primary task was sketching Wright’s most prominent commissions. These included Henry Ford’s home in Dearborn, Michigan, and the Mueller houses in Decatur. She dabbled in stained glass, furniture, and mosaics. But drawing was her singular talent–even Wright conceded Mahony was his better at the drafting table.
