GRIFFIN’S CAPITOL IT’S PLACE IN THE DESIGN OF CANBERRA AND THE CONNECTION WITH THE IDEAS OF LOUIS SULLIVAN Rosemarie Elizabeth Willett March 2009 A Thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Built Environment by Research ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to acknowledge the valued contribution to the management of my thesis by my supervisor Professor Robert Freestone, Planning Program, Faculty of Built Environment, UNSW, and co supervisor Professor Jon Lang, Architecture Program. I also wish to acknowledge advice from the late Professor Paul Reid and from Professor James Weirick, Urban Development and Design, Faculty of Built Environment, UNSW. Professor Dustin Griffin, the Department of English, New York University assisted me with introductions during my Chicago study tour in 2005. I feel honoured by the interest shown in the examination of my thesis by American Professor Paul Kruty, University of Illinois, and thank him for his advice and encouragement to perfect detail. At the Faculty of Built Environment UNSW, the Director of Research Students, Associate Professor Patrick Zou, his administrative assistant, Chrisanthi Emmanouilidis, and Built Environment Computer Unit have provided valued assistance. For my research I am indebted to Andrew Sergeant and the team in the Petherick Room at the Australian National Library, to the staff of the National Archives of Australia and to Mary McDonell, UNSW library. I have been encouraged by the Griffin Society, Canberra Chapter, Louise Dann, Fayne Mench, Haddon Spurgeon and Christopher Bettle. Rosemarie Willett. CONTENTS ABSTRACT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INTRODUCTION 1-2 8 SET IN CHICAGO: CHAPTER 1 29-71 DESIGNING THE CAPITOL, FOCUS OF THE FEDERAL CAPITAL CITY CHAPTER 2 72-108 LOUIS SULLIVAN AND HIS IDEAS CHA PTER 3 109-146 THE GRIFFINS, THE CHICAGO PROGRESSIVES AND SULLIVAN’S KINDERGARTEN SET IN AUSTRALIA: CHAPTER 4 147- 182 THE STRUGGLE FOR AN IDEAL CHA PTER 5 183-213 THE STRUGGLE FOR THE IMPLEMENTATION OFTHE IDEAL CONNECTIONS CHAPTER 6: 214-248 CONNECTIONS, THE CAPITOL AS SIGNIFIER CONCLUSION 249-257 BIBLIOGRAPHY 258-269 INTRODUCTION Walter Burley Griffin is widely known to Australians in association with the national capital, Canberra, and specifically acknowledged in the naming of Lake Burley Griffin. While many ordinary Australians know that Walter Burley Griffin won the Federal Capital Competition and was the original designer of Canberra, most have no idea that he planned something other than Parliament House for Capital Hill. After European settlement, Capital Hill was first named Mt Kurrajong, after the native Kurrajong trees which grew there, then named Capitol Hill by Griffin and later renamed Capital Hill by planners in the Federal Public Service.1 Those who knew Canberra before the construction of Parliament House, remember Capital Hill as bush covered, with a scenic lookout and a flag mast carrying the Australian flag. Few know of the building, conceptualized for Capitol Hill, which Griffin named the Capitol. The immediate idea of a Capitol is as the locus of political power exemplified in the Capitols of the United States of America. In the United States there are 51 cities that have Capitols and they usually house the government’s lawmakers.2 Griffin said the Capitol was not purely an American idea and referred to the Capitol at Rome. In the Roman Republic this was the Roman equivalent of the Greek acropolis or upper city – a gathering place for the citizens on occasions of great importance. Although the Capitol has slipped from the public mind and is not generally associated with Griffin’s design, this thesis engages Griffin’s plan with the Capitol. It is believed that this engagement shows the plan in a different light. Engagement, it is argued, shows that Griffin’s Capitol was the focus of an organic plan and the signifier of democracy, an organic values system which Chicago architect Louis Sullivan referred to as ‘Natures law for man’. In planning a city for a democracy, the beauty of an organic plan is that functional relationships are determined by human needs and respect for the natural environment, not dictated by powerful sectors to promote their interests and raise their profiles. Griffin’s organic plan was democratic in essence. The Capitol was arguably the critical concept of Griffin’s life’s work for its impact as the signifier of the vision which inspired his Federal Capital plan and his 1 struggle for its implementation.3 The vision interpreted the needs and purposes of Australia’s national capital, but subscribed to a set of ideals in so doing. Griffin as a young man renounced the processes for architectural design taught in the Schools, which he referred to as ‘the mill’. He accepted Louis Sullivan’s retraining of the mind with ‘nature as teacher’ and refocused his professional development on an individual, ideologically democratic and organic architecture. Sullivan’s architectural theory encompassed three main areas of thought: the nature of architecture as an art which reflected society, but could also influence it; the organic process of creative thinking for architectural design; and the development of a new democratic architecture for America, which would reflect the organic growth of a perfected form of democracy in the individual and society. Griffin took his professional direction from this architectural theory, extended the theory on the much larger scale of town planning, and perfected its application in the design of Canberra. In the thesis, the writings of Griffin and Sullivan are sought out for the convergence of ideas and the principles which enabled Griffin to create a democratic organic, city as a work of art: Unity, essential to the city, requires for so complex a problem a simple organism…organism is the significant term of Planning, implying unity, and simplicity, but requiring a degrees of comprehensiveness in an equation of the site conditions and the functions to which they are to be adapted sufficient for a logical place and setting for every need that ay eventuate.’ 4 The Approach Griffin’s Capitol and its engagement with the plan is the subject of the thesis argument. Dismissed as something that never could have been realized, it is an important concept in Australia’s political and social history and deserves considered interpretation. There are three aspects to the Capitol which are essential to the discourse, the Capitol as a place, the Capitol in relation to the Government Group, and the Capitol as signifier of the vision and focus and animus of the organic plan. None of this has been built – neither the Capitol building nor the Government Group ensemble; and Griffin’s plan has not 2 been followed as an organic construct. The engagement of Griffin’s Capitol with the plan is in all its aspects, an academic study and a study which relies on a visual imagination. The essential connections which support the argument - that Griffin’s Capitol as a place, its relationship with the Government Group and its place as focus of the design of Canberra were informed by the ideas of Louis Sullivan - can be reliably found in three works. These works were available to Griffin between 1900 and 1905 and there Sullivan explicates his theory which provided Griffin with the frame work for his practice of ‘landscape architecture’ and ultimately the development of his organic plan for Canberra. The three works by Sullivan which have been selected for detailed scrutiny for convergence with the expressed ideas of Griffin are: The Young Man in Architecture, Kindergarten Chats and Natural thinking: A Study in Democracy. There are no stylistic connections in the architecture of Griffin and Sullivan and no evidence of Griffin copying Sullivan – or anyone else. The approach taken has been to test the convergence of Sullivan’s theory in all his important writings, and in Griffin’s writings which refer to Canberra, and those writings which contain themes common with Sullivan’s writings. Griffin’s fidelity to his concept of the Capitol is tested in his struggle for his ideals with the Australian government and bureaucracy. In the final analysis the three works listed above, The Young Man in Architecture, Kindergarten Chats and Natural Thinking: A Study in Democracy were the essential three works needed to establish the convergence with the ideas and principles evident in Griffin’s writings. They are the works and principles used to make the connections put forward in the argument and assiduously made in the final chapter. Background Walter Burley Griffin was an American architect who described himself as a ‘landscape architect’. He meant that he created the forms and details of architecture and urban and community plans in response to the site conditions or environment as well as the human 3 requirements. It could have been another way of saying ‘organic architect’, which was used as a descriptive term by Sullivan and the Chicago progressives, but not widely used as a generic term in the profession of architecture until Frank Lloyd Wright identified his work with it in the 1930s. Griffin has been better known in Australia than in America, but that appears to be changing, with American scholars such as Paul Kruty believing that Griffin should be accorded a place near Sullivan and Wright. In Australia, as well as his design for Canberra, Griffin left major works in architecture and town planning, a few examples being: the original wing and refectory for Newman College and the Capitol Theatre in Melbourne, the original town plans for Griffith, Leeton and Port Stephens and the original development of the Sydney Suburb of Castlecrag. Walter Griffin was born at Maywood Illinois, an outer suburb of Chicago, on November 24, 1876, nine years after the birth of Wright in Wisconsin and twenty years after the birth of Louis Sullivan in Boston.