La búsqueda de una identidad propia. Una práctica global al margen. Marion mahony griffin y walter burley griffin. 1912-1937

Abstract

After the analysis of the residential communities of Rock Crest / Rock Glen in Iowa and Castlecrag in Sydney, carried out between 1912 and 1937 by Marion Mahony Griffin and Walter Burley Griffin, the hypothesis of this research is established, considering them as those in which an own architectural language is defined, as well as an alternative social model based on the link between culture, leisure, and nature. Their personal path must be understood as a trip in which multiple links are established between several characters, projects, and ideas, studying the different modifications they make over their referents. Heirs of the nineteenth-century ideals, they propose a personal approach to architecture, where each individual and the way he acts in his environment, becomes a single element. The universal nature that emerges from their attitude, is the result of the influences derived from a global practice developed in four different continents. Their ability to condense and reinterpret those references, from the urban scale, construction process and the symbolism of their built objects, generate a coherent architecture as a whole. Its true meaning is over the singularity of each part on their own. Aside from the architectural mainstream at the beginning of the 20th century, the distance they voluntarily adopt gives them the freedom needed to explore and develop alternatives to what was commonly accepted as the only way. Anonymous as second-order characters, their architecture hints, over its weirdness, a path where reason and emotion are considered as entities inherent to it. Both reflected in the materiality of its construction and also in the experiential act of inhabiting it. Showing the human condition, as something ephemeral on Earth.