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This clip shows photographs of Walter Burley Griffin, his home and his architectural drawings, accompanied by a voice-over describing his family background, his involvement in the Chicago architectural scene and his design philosophies. It also shows photographs of the men who were key influences on him, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Donald Johnson, who was at the time of filming a senior lecturer at Adelaide’s Flinders University, contrasts the work of Wright and Griffin, with photographs of drawings and actual buildings illustrating this contrast. Johnson also notes the significance of Griffin’s success in being chosen to design Canberra.

Educational value points

• The clip provides background information and a wide range of visual resource material on a world-famous architect, American Walter Burley Griffin (1876–1937). After winning the 1912 Federal Capital Design Competition, which was held to choose a design for Canberra, Griffin moved to Australia, staying on after initial work on Canberra was complete to design the towns of Griffith and Leeton and a number of buildings, subdivisions and landscapes. He lived in Australia from 1913 to 1935, and died in India in 1937.

• Making a documentary about a historical figure of whom little media footage is available poses challenges for the filmmaker. This clip illustrates a range of techniques to deal with some of the challenges, including having an actor read from Griffin’s writings, interviews with relevant experts and using stills of photographs and drawings. The camera zooms in or out of the stills, guiding the viewer’s eye, with the extent and pace of this movement enhancing interest and varying the mood between more static and more dynamic.

• The architectural drawings and photographs paired with the voice-over serve a useful purpose in the clip, giving examples of Griffin’s special ability to infuse architecture with a sense of place and allowing viewers to appreciate distinctive features of Griffin’s style, such as his use of three-dimensional geometric shapes and heavy pylons or pillars, and the way he situated his built forms within their landscapes.

• The clip introduces important influences on Griffin and discusses Griffin’s place as an architect in relation to his contemporaries. While Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) is mentioned only briefly, his concept of architectural form following function became a key principle of 20th-century architecture and informed Griffin’s work. Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) is discussed more fully. He employed Griffin in Chicago and the two men influenced each other’s work, although Wright is said to have referred to Griffin as 'a draftsman’. Donald Johnson contrasts the work of Wright and Griffin using visuals to support his comments, with photographs of the men and their work bringing the documentary to life.

• Griffin won the competition to design Canberra with a stunningly rendered set of plans. Sensitivity to the site’s natural features was a key component of the design. However, the clip suggests that Griffin was considered a risky choice as he had previously only designed houses and landscapes. Indeed, disagreements and controversies led to various amendments being made to his original plan.

• The clip offers insights into modernism in architecture and Griffin’s role in 20th-century design. The evolution in Chicago of an architecture fluent in 'the democratic language of everyday life’, and supposedly unlike anything that had gone before, had an enormous influence on the development of modernism. The drawings included here demonstrate, however, that Griffin was clearly also influenced by classical forms, illustrating the difficulties of creating something entirely new in any area of art, especially when judged from the perspective of hindsight.

This clip is narrated over historical photographs of Chicago architects Walter Burley Griffin, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as sketches of their architectural plans, and photographs of the houses and buildings they designed, illustrating how the three each were influenced by the other.

Narrator Griffin made his start in Chicago on 24 November 1876. His father was an insurance broker and a city councillor. His mother was a social worker. In the 1880s, Chicago was the breeding ground of a totally new thinking in architecture. Griffin, with amazing luck, was born right into it.

Walter Burley Griffin My work has best been known in connection with the development of a type of architecture that is independent of classical, gothic or any other historic or academic basis and also free from effort to be original, eccentric or striking. This, in other words, is to treat architecture as a democratic language of everyday life.

Narrator Louis Sullivan was the forerunner and a strong influence.

Griffin Sullivan’s influence was always laid on the essential connection between the structure and the use to which it was to be put and the expression of it in form. In other words, form follows function.

Narrator Frank Lloyd Wright, the egocentric and creative genius behind the Prairie School, worked with Sullivan for seven years before setting up on his own. Griffin, in turn, went to work with Wright 18 months after he graduated from the University of Illinois. Donald Johnson compares the work of Wright and Griffin.

Donald Leslie Johnson, senior lecturer at Flinders University Wright’s work prior to 1900 and around the period of 1887, perhaps to 1900, was mainly in architecture that was involved around 2-dimensional patterns of circulation and these were then extended into 3-dimensional form, whereas the work of Griffin had just about, 1900 in fact with his first house in 1901, the Emery house, he evolved a strong, geometric, 3-dimensional pattern, and this was evolved by placing very large, heavy pylons at the corners of the principal form and then extending spaces outward and beside this principal form, and at the base of the house, he had brick, and then in the second storey had the lighter framework of stucco and timber frame.

This particular esquisse of Griffin’s, of the two heavy corner pylons and the heavy base, was carried into Wright’s work when Wright hired Griffin in 1901 to work for him, and it’s quite clear, for instance, in the Unity Temple at Oak Park of about 1904.

Immediately after Griffin left Wright’s office, he was influenced by the master, there’s no doubt about it, and his forms indicate this, but very slowly he evolved his own basic individual style of architecture which we can best see in an amalgam of the buildings at Rock Crest Rock Glen where he also infuses architecture with the sense and place of landscape and land planning, and there’s an interesting note to make here and that is that Griffin’s first real city planning commission was, in fact, Canberra. Prior to this, ah, he had only done what might be called traditional landscapes designs, that is, designs which were, ah, for all practical purposes, gardens.