Welcome to the Walter Burley Griffin Society of America

Photo by Mati Maldre

Welcome to the Walter Burley Griffin Society of America web site. Our mission is to preserve the legacy of architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin and the Prairie School of Architecture.

Please enjoy our site.

NINETEENTH ANNUAL MEETING
SATURDAY/SUNDAY, 23-24 JUNE 2018
JOIN US IN PARK RIDGE, ILLINOIS

MEETING: The nineteenth annual meeting of the Walter Burley Griffin Society of America will be held in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge on the weekend of 23-24 June 2018. The morning session will be held at the Pickwick Theater, 5 S. Prospect Ave, Park Ridge, 60068. Doors will open at 8:30 with the meeting beginning at 9:00. Parking is available behind the theater complex and across the street in the lot of the public library. A guided tour of the building will follow the lectures, with box lunches arriving at noon. The afternoon tour, which includes open houses by Bruce Goff, Barry Byrne and Harold Zook and a late church by Lloyd Wright, will begin at 1:00 and end at 4:30, followed by a reception at the Iannelli Studios Heritage Center, 255 N. Northwest Highway, lasting until 6:00. On Sunday morning, we are offering an additional treat: the owner has graciously agreed to let us visit Bruce Goff’s Ruth Ford house at 404 S. Edgelawn Ave. in Aurora. In addition, the traveling exhibition “In Her Own Right: Mahony Mahony Griffin” now at the Kenilworth Historical Society, 415 Kenilworth Avenue, Kenilworth, will be open especially for the Griffin Society on Sunday afternoon beginning at 3:00pm, as well as open during regular hours on Monday, 25 June, from 9:00am to 5:00pm, for those who did not see this beautiful exhibition last year in Elmhurst or Mason City.

ACCOMMODATIONS: The cluster of hotels in Rosemont near O’Hare airport offer out-of-town members a choice of nearby accommodations, any of which are some ten minutes (depending on traffic) from the Pickwick Theater. Because of the changing daily offers of most of these hotels, as well as individual membership programs, it was not effective to get a group rate. But we heartily recommend staying at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, 9300 Bryn Mawr, Rosemont, 847-955-9102, designed by the “neo-futurist” John Portman in 1969, and renovated in 2006. It’s a hoot.

If you are attending theAnnual Meeting, please fill out the REGISTRATION FORM, indicating your choice of sandwich and beverage for lunch, and return it to
the Griffin Society’s headquarters. Please be sure to include your email address. The cost will be $35 for the Saturday/Sunday meeting and tours, $12 for the
box lunch and, of course, registrants must also have paid their annual dues of $25 to the Society.

The Walter Burley Griffin Society of America
is proud to announce...

NEW BOOK:
On His Own: Walter Burley Griffin’s
First Two Houses
The Gables, Diamonds and Flowing Spaces
of 1906 and 1907

By Paul Kruty, with contributions by:
Tannys Langdon, Paul E. Sprague and Richard H. Berry

The latest book published by the Walter Burley Griffin Society of America, On His Own: Walter Burley Griffin’s First Two Houses; The Gables, Diamonds and Flowing Spaces of 1906 and 1907, is now available. The book includes essays by Paul Kruty, Paul E. Sprague, Richard H. Berry, and Tannys Langdon. With over seventy illustrations, and a dozen color plates, it presents detailed histories of the Harry V. Peters house, built in 1906-07 in Chicago’s Mayfair neighborhood, and the Ralph D. Griffin house, designed in 1906 and constructed in 1910 in Edwardsville, Illinois. Forays into the stories of the clients, social and aesthetic contexts for the houses, and close analysis of historical photographs, contribute to a clearer understanding of two of Griffin’s most important buildings.

By focusing on Griffin’s first two years of independent practice, Kruty reveals Griffin’s initial experimentation with the gabled roof, a form that was to preoccupy him, despite his precocious use of flat roofs, for the rest of his life: “The two buildings are part of an initial creative endeavor that flowed from Griffin’s imagination, pent-up as it was during the last year of his fraught relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright.” As Kruty elaborates, “Two other designs, which remained unbuilt projects, complete a quartet of compositions comprising Griffin’s first foray into a completely self-controlled design vocabulary” which “show the young architect striving to develop a new vocabulary of form employing symmetrical designs composed of two rectangular masses crossed at right angles, covered with gabled roofs producing raised ceilings and diamond windows, and an inventive used of open, flowing interior space.”

In addition to Kruty’s essays on each house, architect Tannys Langdon presents an engaging look into modern life in the Peters house, while homeowner Richard Berry reveals the travails and successes of living with the architectural masterpiece that is the Ralph Griffin house. Paul Sprague provides a careful analysis of the landscape plan for the Griffin house. All in all, a worthy addition to library of all lovers of Griffin, Wright, the Prairie School, Chicago and Illinois history, and the glory of American architecture.

“The Society’s new book is fascinating, with many insights and images new to me.” James Weirick, University of New South Wales.

“Reading it has been a pleasure. Excellent research, great illustrations, and reasonable analyses.” Donald Leslie Johnson, author The Architecture of Walter Burley Griffin.

On His Own: Walter Burley Griffin’s First Two Houses; The Gables, Diamonds and Flowing Spaces of 1906 and 1907 by Paul Kruty, with contributions by Tannys Langdon, Paul E. Sprague, and Richard H. Berry. St. Louis, MO: Walter Burley Griffin Society of America, 2017. $25. ISBN 0-9793588-3-3.

Published by the Walter Burley Griffin Society of America. 1152 Center Drive,
St. Louis, MO 63117. info@wbgriffinsociety.org www.wbgriffinsociety.org

See the Publications page for pricing and ordering information.