Here is Marion Mahony. Gardening. It might be the only surviving image of her tending to a garden. Taken in 1918 in a Melbourne suburb, we see her holding a watering can in her right hand, her husband and partner Walter Burley Griffin is to her left with a digging shovel. They are in front of the only home they ever built for themselves: Pholiota. Named after a mushroom. A fungus that grows on trees. Was this a metaphor for how humans should inhabit the world? Pholiota was a single-room dwelling. A tiny square. 20′ x 20′. In the decades that followed, Marion Mahony lectured and wrote extensively on the need to evolve a lighter human footprint on the land. At the heart of this program, was an effort in communal living, and we see a hint of that in the background of this photograph. Another person’s child roams freely in the land beside Pholiota.

Born in 1871 in Chicago, Marion Mahony earned an undergraduate degree in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1894. She spent the next five decades working across illustration, architecture, urbanism, and public education in the United States, Australia, and India.

Shiben Banerji,
Assistant Professor, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Image Credit: Photograph of Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin gardening in the backyard of “Pholiota”, Heidelberg, Victoria, 1918. PIC Box P490 #P490/7. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.