Note: This article is reposted from MIT Architecture via Instagram. See original post here.
In honor of International Women’s Day we remember the first woman to be professionally licensed in the United States, Marion Mahony Griffin (B.Arch 1894). In January 1898, Griffin passed the Illinois State Architects exam.
An original member of the Prairie School of Architecture, she worked with Frank Lloyd Wright and has become widely credited as the source for many of his office’s signature renderings.
In a 2008 New York Times piece about her memoir, Fred Bernstein wrote that, "Mahony’s drawings, retraced in ink, formed much of what came to be known as the Wasmuth Portfolio, a compendium of Wright’s designs published in Germany in 1910.
The portfolio not only established him as America’s reigning architectural genius but also influenced European Modernists like Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.” In addition to her representational contributions Griffin’s built work includes the Australian Federal Capital at Canberra, which she co-designed with her husband, and private homes in Decatur, Ill. that remain to this day.
Sources: Pioneering Women of American Architecture, MIT Museum, Places Journal Image: Places Journal