UNTITLED LETTERWalter Burley Griffin
Federal Capital Administration. Report of the Royal Commission. (1.) Issues Relating to Mr. Griffin. Australia. Parliamentary Papers, 1914-15-16-17, No. 378, ordered to be printed 15 March 1917, Exhibit B8.
Walter Burley Griffin in Chicago learned of the report made public on November 25, 1912 by a board of departmental civil servants. The Minister for Home Affairs, King O'Malley, directed this group to examine and report on the prize-winning plans of the Australian Federal Capital competition. The Departmental Board's report stated that none of the designs was suitable and--instead--proposed one of its own. Among others, Walter L. Vernon, criticized this new design. Griffin avoided direct condemnation but skillfully defended his own design in this letter dated January 21, 1913.Honorable King O'Malley, Minister for Home Affairs, Melbourne, AustraliaIn a former letter, I expressed the feeling that the rank given my design for the Federal Capital was a recognition of advanced ideals, which I had hardly dared expect of any country. As a matter of fact, however, I had entered this Australian event to be my first and last competition, solely because I have for many years greatly admired the bold radical steps in politics and economies which your country has dared to take, and which must, for a long time, set ideals for Europe and America ahead of the possibility of their accomplishment.
So I have, in your city planning project, tried to express the development of fundamental principles which have suggested themselves to me during study of this experimental science from youth, principles deduced fully as much from the mistakes of modern cities as from their successes. And it must be admitted that the civilized nations of the world offer only pathologic examples for civic study, that modern cities everywhere are abnormal, cancerous growths on the landscape, intolerable community homes for a nature and liberty loving, to say nothing of art aspiring people.
Even the basis of your national ideals would hardly have thus sufficed to induce me to go in except for the evidence that seemed to appear between the lines, at least, in the "invitation to competitors" of a great constructive idealist in authority, and this same feeling leads me now to write you in the light of the so-called revised plan which has just come to hand through the press, purporting, in your opinion, in part, at any rate, to embody the primary ideas of the first prize plan.
The implication of this much of responsibility in the departmental design would make it only right for me to allow an exception to a general policy of refraining from criticism of other designers efforts. Moreover, I am in addressing you, speaking to your Capital construction department directly, and not to outsiders behind your backs. But destructive criticism is about as useless as it is easy, and it seems better to establish if possible, only the highest broadest standards for test and judgment.
The plan I submitted was, whatever else it may have been also, first and last an expression of functions. Regardless of the fact that the bulk of most modern designers work takes account directly of precedent and prototypes and has expressed itself in endless tiresome copy and repetition, I maintain and follow in my practice the conviction that these steps are irrelevant, if not unscientific, and that our work is a matter of adapting topography and materials straight toward the needs or functions these are to serve, just exactly as with mechanics and engineering, though the elements of the problem, especially social and esthetic [sic], are decidedly different.
Allow me again to submit to you the factors of your problem as first worked out in my scheme, and skeletonized in the synopsis and diagrams of accompanying explanation. In the light of your own methodical and scientific ways of organizing and keeping track of the affairs of your Home Department, as has been shown me, you will well be able to judge of the necessity or otherwise of the basic relationships established.
If you will grant that these are not thrown together haphazard, but are the product of a life investigation and thought, you will not be taking them too seriously, and you may be willing to give them the consideration their sincerity warrants.
In expressing these principles in the plan itself, I deliberately refrained from introducing many subordinate modifications in order to force the emphasis of the underlying ideas, since in a competition, the accompanying argument limited to formal statement, cannot sufficiently clarify a design embodying too many variable details of topography and use.
Neither do I claim to have comprehended all the details of your needs that may differentiate the operation of your State and city administration from ours, or your habits of living from those of modern urban communities in general, but we may safely assume that there are some few considerations common to all, and other principles varying from greater to less applicability, and that always the first rule of city planning, as of all architectural organisms, is to establish the terms of the problem as an equation of site condition, ways and means on the one hand, and functions or needs to be served, on the other.
If consistency with my plan, as claimed, is deemed desirable, please test these locally proposed modifications and alterations by this rational coordination to see how utterly destructive of it they are.
If consistency in the new design itself is requisite, it, should be capable of demonstration, similarly to mine in a comprehensible synopsis and argument, though the premises may be entirely different. In this latter case the new design should have been submitted in the original competition where it might have been judged simultaneously with all the rest on its merits alone, free from influence of immediate expediency and from local bias. For that purpose was the competition made secret as well as international.
Now the consistency which is the absolute and essential requisite of any design demands the individual designer; since no practical art in growing civilization can ever furnish more than the elements of a synthesis for each design. Unlike pure mathematics these practical arts and sciences are not entirely subjective and independent of externals but are determined as phenomena always changing and presenting new phases and elements to be marshalled according to an individual ideal. if they are ever to produce the unity that will make effective either a bridge or a building, or city that is to be created.
There is no advantage, and every disadvantage in trying to pull together the disassociated features or isolated ideas of various schemes that would exist in trying to put up a building or piers, columns, doors. windows, and cornices selected from the wreckage of a city block. The same limitations that apply to the altering of a building to produce a reconstruction, a thing which can never attain the unity, utility, or beauty of a new structure evolved from the ground up by the creative architect.
As stated to you in a previous letter, I cannot claim that my scheme is fully or finally evolved in the very short time, and with relative scant information as compared with a personal familiarity with the details of your governmental and administration methods, but I can claim, if the decision of your judges was competent, a better grasp of the more general and fundamental factors than had others with similar or even greater advantages in knowledge of those detail requirements. That fact should warrant your consultation in undertaking changes, and a chance on my part to weigh in the scales of the general unity of purpose and expression the many valuable suggestions for betterment and economies that might be expected from all sources--an opportunity to give the design the additional time that the event of its use would warrant to incorporate every real improvement that could be desired, maintaining all the while the basic unity and simplicity, absolutely vitally essential to effective design, as every trained designer recognizes. It must suffice here to emphasize only two of the salient points which determine all the rest in my design.
First: The scope and magnitude of your Capital, while no greater than in a hundred American cities, and not even equal to Washington, D:C. (laid out long before proprietorship of a continent, or any such things as railroads telephone, or electric transmission, or monumentally large units of activity, or any of the modern or social determinants could be foreseen) must be dictated by laws of growth, which these modern facilities have evolved, and give promise of. Failure to observe these dynamic determinants. results disastrously to any project in a very short while.
Second: Any arrangement looking a hundred years ahead has to be elastic, permitting street improvement and construction to proceed little by little, no faster than the city growth demands, but at the same time in a way that will be adequate ultimately without the constant shifting of site uses in the various sections, which has led to terrific waste through destruction of property in all our cities heretofore.
Provision for orderly cumulative growth can only be secured through thorough comprehensive systematic organization wherein sites on the one hand, and their communication lines on the other hand, are classified and related in accord with the actual tendencies of their requirements as evidenced in the most recent stages of modern city expansion. Only by such comprehensive provision can improvements be afforded, as they are needed uniformly and on a scale that will, from the beginning, signalize the Capital as an important, dignified, and completely equipped and finished city. This is real economy in the only sense admissible, for a national permanent enterprise. Adaptation to topography will thus be free to make the most of the unique advantages of the site, and not be the abject slave of its every incidental peculiarity.
I have accepted invitations offered by the wide interest in your Capital in the United States and Canada, to present publicly my ideas and the processes of working them out before the most competent judges, including The American Society of Landscape Architects, The American Civic Association, leading Universities, and chapters of the American Institute of Architects; all the groups of men actively engaged in city planning in this country, as well as a number from Europe and Australia, and including several who had entered your competition and were familiar with the conditions, and a few who had been able to visit and study the Capital site. With these and with the Australasian Society of America, I have discussed the problem thoroughly, and encouraged severe criticism and comparison with the other designs mentioned in your report, and all other standards. Keen interest and cordial approval, not merely for the design but for the underlying principles, have been accorded wherever they have been so presented. I had expected naturally, adverse comment from the press, especially foreign, but have been surprised at its scarcity, and its superficial nature, in every case showing unfamiliarity with the purposes as might be expected, in view of the European standards of crowding of even garden cities, as compared with conditions in most of America and Australia, and especially in the light of tendencies towards larger units of construction and occupation, and fast improving rapid transit facilities for the development of which opportunity must be afforded in the future under such favorable administrative possibilities as your new city will have.
Enclosed are a few comments of the professional press from the innumerable articles that have been brought to my notice, and in these I trust you may find time to glance at the marked portions, at least.
My work has been previously best known in connection with the development in this country of a type of architecture that is independent of classic, Gothic, or any other historic, or academic basis, and also free from effort to be original, eccentric, or striking, further than results from the contrast between the borrowed finery of applied academic architecture and a straightforward adaptation of present day labour-saving economic constructive methods, and materials to the essential, but often new, functions of our more complex activities. This, in other words, is to treat architecture as a democratic language of everyday life, not a language of an aristocratic, especially educated cult, as it has been in the modern world since the year 1500, when architecture as a natural expression and creative art died with the "Renaissance."
Strangely enough, the plan to which your jury awarded second prize was the work of possibly the most distinguished worker along similar lines in northern Europe, where the effort started by Architect Louis H. Sullivan, in Chicago, twenty odd years ago, has been taken up on the Germanic countries.
It is, as the exponent in practice of this same ideal set by Sullivan, that I am being more and more recognized in America and Europe--exacting responsibility of such significance and opportunity in affecting the future development of architecture as to make me, even after the adverse public expression of your departmental Capital Board, hesitate to leave this country in order to take active measures to present my case for a scientific plan for your city.
I do not, however, fail to recognize that yours is the greatest opportunity the word has afforded for the expression of the great democratic civic ideal. Your advantages are not only in the characteristic Australian idealism and interest in Government activity, but in the fundamental land policy of the Capital. This, at the outset, when you have only a population of 25,000, would, on the basis of average American city land values ($1,000 to.$l,500 per head), lead me to predict for the Federal Capital an annual income from land rentals of £250,000 to £300,000 per year. without taking account of any property taxes or profits from Public Service operations. The fiscal side is not the strongest phase either, because, freed from land speculative selfish interest the natural instincts of the community will guarantee higher artistic and seasonal standards, as already instanced by one at the city site, an attitude of fear of spoiling the landscape, such as is not at all to be found in "boom" towns.
If I could be on the ground in consultation with your board for a short while, as suggested in my earlier letter, there would need be no misunderstanding of aims nor loss of necessary unity and simplicity in working out the unsolved plan problems, and because of your unparalleled civic advantages I would willingly make considerable personal sacrifice, if needed to render possible a personal presentation and to meet all objections and suggestions in a rational and sympathetic way such as may be expected of an architect towards clients, who must necessarily understand the designers reasons, which must, in turn, be conclusive under those circumstances, if he is to expect their adoption. I am willing to admit being wrong in any proposition if, after full and free discussion the client, in the form of a joint commission or board, interested only in obtaining the best results, fails to concur.
It is for a careful study of the points of the herewith enclosed explanations, and for an open hearing, that I ask your favorable consideration.
Very respectfully yours,
WALTER BURLEY GRIFFIN UNTITLED LETTER
Walter Burley Griffin
Federal Capital Administration. Report of the Royal Commission. (1.) Issues Relating to Mr. Griffin. Australia. Parliamentary Papers, 1914-15-16-17, No. 378, ordered to be printed 15 March 1917, Exhibit B8.Walter Burley Griffin in Chicago learned of the report made public on November 25, 1912 by a board of departmental civil servants. The Minister for Home Affairs, King O'Malley, directed this group to examine and report on the prize-winning plans of the Australian Federal Capital competition. The Departmental Board's report stated that none of the designs was suitable and--instead--proposed one of its own. Among others, Walter L. Vernon, criticized this new design. Griffin avoided direct condemnation but skillfully defended his own design in this letter dated January 21, 1913.
Honorable King O'Malley, Minister for Home Affairs, Melbourne, Australia
In a former letter, I expressed the feeling that the rank given my design for the Federal Capital was a recognition of advanced ideals, which I had hardly dared expect of any country. As a matter of fact, however, I had entered this Australian event to be my first and last competition, solely because I have for many years greatly admired the bold radical steps in politics and econo mies which your country has dared to take, and which must, for a long time, set ideals for Europe and America ahead of the possibility of their accomplishment.
So I have, in your city planning project, tried to express the development of fundamental principles which have suggested themselves to me during study of this experimental science from youth, principles deduced fully as much from the mistakes of modern cities as from their successes. And it must be admitted that the civilized nations of the world offer only pathologic examples for civic study, that modern cities everywhere are abnormal, cancerous growths on the landscape, intolerable community homes for a nature and liberty loving, to say nothing of art aspiring people.
Even the basis of your national ideals would hardly have thus sufficed to induce me to go in except for the evidence that seemed to appear between the lines, at least, in the "invitation to competitors" of a great constructive idealist in authority, and this same feeling leads me now to write you in the light of the so-called revised plan which has just come to hand through the press, purporting, in your opinion, in part, at any rate, to embody the primary ideas of the first prize plan.
The implication of this much of responsibility in the departmental design would make it only right for me to allow an exception to a general policy of refraining from criticism of other designers efforts. Moreover, I am in addressing you, speaking to your Capital construction department directly, and not to outsiders behind your backs. But destructive criticism is about as useless as it is easy, and it seems better to establish if possible, only the highest broadest standards for test and judgment.
The plan I submitted was, whatever else it may have been also, first and last an expression of functions. Regardless of the fact that the bulk of most modern designers work takes account directly of precedent and prototypes and has expressed itself in endless tiresome copy and repetition, I maintain and follow in my practice the conviction that these steps are irrelevant, if not unscientific, and that our work is a matter of adapting topography and materials straight toward the needs or functions these are to serve, just exactly as with mechanics and engineering, though the elements of the problem, especially social and esthetic [sic], are decidedly different.
Allow me again to submit to you the factors of your problem as first worked out in my scheme, and skeletonized in the synopsis and diagrams of accompanying explanation. In the light of your own methodical and scientific ways of organizing and keeping track of the affairs of your Home Department, as has been shown me, you will well be able to judge of the necessity or otherwise of the basic relationships established.
If you will grant that these are not thrown together haphazard, but are the product of a life investigation and thought, you will not be taking them too seriously, and you may be willing to give them the consideration their sincerity warrants.
In expressing these principles in the plan itself, I deliberately refrained from introducing many subordinate modifications in order to force the emphasis of the underlying ideas, since in a competition, the accompanying argument limited to formal statement, cannot sufficiently clarify a design embodying too many variable details of topography and use.
Neither do I claim to have comprehended all the details of your needs that may differentiate the operation of your State and city administration from ours, or your habits of living from those of modern urban communities in general, but we may safely assume that there are some few considerations common to all, and other principles varying from greater to less applicability, and that always the first rule of city planning, as of all architectural organisms, is to establish the terms of the problem as an equation of site condition, ways and means on the one hand, and functions or needs to be served, on the other.
If consistency with my plan, as claimed, is deemed desirable, please test these locally proposed modifications and alterations by this rational coordination to see how utterly destructive of it they are.
If consistency in the new design itself is requisite, it, should be capable of demonstration, similarly to mine in a comprehensible synopsis and argument, though the premises may be entirely different. In this latter case the new design should have been submitted in the original competition where it might have been judged simultaneously with all the rest on its merits alone, free from influence of immediate expediency and from local bias. For that purpose was the competition made secret as well as international.
Now the consistency which is the absolute and essential requisite of any design demands the individual designer; since no practical art in growing civilization can ever furnish more than the elements of a synthesis for each design. Unlike pure mathematics these practical arts and sciences are not entirely subjective and independent of externals but are determined as phenomena always changing and presenting new phases and elements to be marshalled according to an individual ideal. if they are ever to produce the unity that will make effective either a bridge or a building, or city that is to be created.
There is no advantage, and every disadvantage in trying to pull together the disassociated features or isolated ideas of various schemes that would exist in trying to put up a building or piers, columns, doors. windows, and cornices selected from the wreckage of a city block. The same limitations that apply to the altering of a building to produce a reconstruction, a thing which can never attain the unity, utility, or beauty of a new structure evolved from the ground up by the creative architect.
As stated to you in a previous letter, I cannot claim that my scheme is fully or finally evolved in the very short time, and with relative scant information as compared with a personal familiarity with the details of your governmental and administration methods, but I can claim, if the decision of your judges was competent, a better grasp of the more general and fundamental factors than had others with similar or even greater advantages in knowledge of those detail requirements. That fact should warrant your consultation in undertaking changes, and a chance on my part to weigh in the scales of the general unity of purpose and expression the many valuable suggestions for betterment and economies that might be expected from all sources--an opportunity to give the de sign the additional time that the event of its use would warrant to incorporate every real improvement that could be desired, maintaining all the while the basic unity and simplicity, absolutely vitally essential to effective design, as every trained designer recognizes. It must suffice here to emphasize only two of the salient points which determine all the rest in my design.
First: The scope and magnitude of your Capital, while no greater than in a hundred American cities, and not even equal to Washington, D:C. (laid out long before proprietorship of a continent, or any such things as railroads telephone, or electric transmission, or monumentally large units of activity, or any of the modern or social determinants could be foreseen) must be dic tated by laws of growth, which these modern facilities have evolved, and give promise of. Failure to observe these dynamic determinants. results disastrously to any project in a very short while.
Second: Any arrangement looking a hundred years ahead has to be elastic, permitting street improvement and construction to proceed little by little, no faster than the city growth demands, but at the same time in a way that will be adequate ultimately without the constant shifting of site uses in the various sections, which has led to terrific waste through destruction of property in all our cities heretofore.
Provision for orderly cumulative growth can only be secured through thorough comprehensive systematic organization wherein sites on the one hand, and their communication lines on the other hand, are classified and related in accord with the actual tendencies of their requirements as evidenced in the most recent stages of modern city expansion. Only by such comprehensive pro vision can improvements be afforded, as they are needed uniformly and on a scale that will, from the beginning, signalize the Capital as an important, dignified, and completely equipped and finished city. This is real economy in the only sense admissible, for a national permanent enterprise. Adaptation to topography will thus be free to make the most of the unique advantages of the site, and not be the abject slave of its every incidental peculiarity.
I have accepted invitations offered by the wide interest in your Capital in the United States and Canada, to present publicly my ideas and the processes of working them out before the most com petent judges, including The American Society of Landscape Architects, The American Civic Association, leading Universities, and chapters of the American Institute of Architects; all the groups of men actively engaged in city planning in this country, as well as a number from Europe and Australia, and including several who had entered your competition and were familiar with the con ditions, and a few who had been able to visit and study the Capital site. With these and with the Australasian Society of America, I have discussed the problem thoroughly, and encouraged severe criticism and comparison with the other designs mentioned in your report, and all other standards. Keen interest and cordial approval, not merely for the design but for the underlying principles, have been accorded wherever they have been so pre sented. I had expected naturally, adverse comment from the press, especially foreign, but have been surprised at its scarcity, and its superficial nature, in every case showing unfamiliarity with the purposes as might be expected, in view of the European standards of crowding of even garden cities, as compared with conditions in most of America and Australia, and especially in the light of tendencies towards larger units of construction and occupation, and fast improving rapid transit facilities for the development of which opportunity must be afforded in the future under such favorable administrative possibilities as your new city will have.
Enclosed are a few comments of the professional press from the innumerable articles that have been brought to my notice, and in these I trust you may find time to glance at the marked portions, at least.
My work has been previously best known in connection with the development in this country of a type of architecture that is independent of classic, Gothic, or any other historic, or academic basis, and also free from effort to be original, eccentric, or striking, further than results from the contrast between the borrowed finery of applied academic architecture and a straightforward adaptation of present day labour-saving economic constructive methods, and materials to the essential, but often new, functions of our more complex activities. This, in other words, is to treat architecture as a democratic language of everyday life, not a language of an aristocratic, especially edu cated cult, as it has been in the modern world since the year 1500, when architecture as a natural expression and creative art died with the "Renaissance."
Strangely enough, the plan to which your jury awarded second prize was the work of possibly the most distinguished worker along similar lines in northern Europe, where the effort started by Architect Louis H. Sullivan, in Chicago, twenty odd years ago, has been taken up on the Germanic countries.
It is, as the exponent in practice of this same ideal set by Sullivan, that I am being more and more recognized in America and Europe--exacting responsibility of such significance and op portunity in affecting the future development of architecture as to make me, even after the adverse public expression of your departmental Capital Board, hesitate to leave this country in order to take active measures to present my case for a scientific plan for your city.
I do not, however, fail to recognize that yours is the greatest opportunity the word has afforded for the expression of the great democratic civic ideal. Your advantages are not only in the characteristic Australian idealism and interest in Government activity, but in the fundamental land policy of the Capital. This, at the outset, when you have only a population of 25,000, would, on the basis of average American city land values ($1,000 to.$l,500 per head), lead me to predict for the Federal Capital an annual income from land rentals of £250,000 to £300,000 per year. without taking account of any property taxes or profits from Public Service operations. The fiscal side is not the strongest phase either, because, freed from land speculative selfish interest the natural instincts of the community will guarantee higher artistic and seasonal standards, as already instanced by one at the city site, an attitude of fear of spoiling the landscape, such as is not at all to be found in "boom" towns.
If I could be on the ground in consultation with your board for a short while, as suggested in my earlier letter, there would need be no misunderstanding of aims nor loss of necessary unity and simplicity in working out the unsolved plan problems, and because of your unparalleled civic advantages I would willingly make considerable personal sacrifice, if needed to render possible a personal presentation and to meet all objections and suggestions in a rational and sympathetic way such as may be expected of an architect towards clients, who must necessarily understand the designers reasons, which must, in turn, be conclusive under those circumstances, if he is to expect their adoption. I am willing to admit being wrong in any proposition if, after full and free discussion the client, in the form of a joint commission or board, interested only in obtaining the best results, fails to concur.
It is for a careful study of the points of the herewith enclosed explanations, and for an open hearing, that I ask your favorable consideration.
Very respectfully yours,WALTER BURLEY GRIFFIN
Selected, scanned, edited, provided with headnotes, and formatted as a web document by John W. Reps, Professor Emeritus, Department of City and Regional Planning, West Sibley Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA. Tel: (607) 255-5391, Fax: (607) 255-6681, E-mail: jwr2@cornell.edu To Top of Page To Homepage