FOREWORD

There is an ornamental lake in the center of the city of Canberra, the federal capital of Australia: Lake Burley Griffin. It was named to commemorate the American architect and urban planner Walter Burley Griffin, who in 1912, with his collaborator and wife, Marion Mahony, won an international competition to design the nation’s future capital city. As Burley Griffin later emphasized, his plan for Canberra was for an ideal city where the beauty of nature and the needs of community would be met in the harmony of landscape and town planning. It was the Prairie School philosophy brought to the Antipodes, an approach to urban design and architecture associated with the Griffins but also Frank Lloyd Wright. Unfortunately, the Canberra commission ended badly, with Griffin protesting in national newspapers a breach of faith. He eventually departed Australian shores, but not before leaving an indelible impression on Australian culture by raising the appreciation of native flora and redesigning parts of the city of Sydney, including the suburb of Castlecrag, where his philosophy was to integrate houses with native trees and local sandstone landforms.

The story of the Griffins in Australia involves vast physical distances traveled and vast cultural distances encountered, especially their experience of the gap between progressives and traditionalists. A parallel story is told here in this revelational book by Roy Behrens of how Walter Burley Griffin, Marion Mahony and their more famous associate Frank Lloyd Wright also bridged the cultural divide between the metropolis and margins to bring modernism to Mason City, Iowa. The triumphs, battles and disappointments of these visionary architects are a large part of the story that unfolds under the analytical and often witty pen of the author. Readers will learn how, from 1908 to 1912, the Griffins and Frank Lloyd Wright left the mark of the Prairie School on a bank, a hotel and a neighborhood and how, in order for Griffin to accept the Canberra commission, he had to leave in abeyance the design of a neighborhood of houses in Mason City known as Rock Crest/ Rock Glen.

In this book, the author deftly weaves the various threads that make up the remarkable story of how America’s great architects enriched the aesthetics and social life of Mason City. He reveals a palimpsest woven of folklore, history, politics and culture. He shows us the context for the architectural languages written over the city by Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony and erased by the foibles of progress, only to be restored and rescued in recent times. For Behrens, though, the restorations are “a breathtaking triumph in building design that reaffirms human achievement.”

In this book, the clear and engaging voice of Roy Behrens gives us much more than broad strokes: he intrigues through a historian’s fascination with coincidences, events and surprises, and he enlightens with a designer’s fascinated eye for space, forms, materials and illusions. Mason City, as told by Behrens, is a passionate story emanating from a scholar who is himself immersed in the landscape and history of Iowa. We reach the end of the book with a sense of the wholeness of history, not dissimilar to the concept of the total work of art that informed the Prairie School.

—ANN ELIAS

Dr. Ann Elias is associate professor in art theory at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, Australia. Her research interests include camouflage as a military, social and aesthetic phenomenon; flowers and their cultural history; and coral reef imagery of the underwater realm. Her books include Camouflage Australia: Art, Nature, Science and War (University of Sydney Press, 2011); Useless Beauty: Flowers and Australian Art (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015); and Camouflage Cultures: Beyond the Art of Disappearance, edited by Ann Elias, Ross Harley and Nicholas Tsoutas (Sydney University Press, 2015).