Architecture

Marion Mahony Reconsidered by David van Zanten

Item: Marion Mahony Reconsidered
Author: Alasdair Mcgregor

by Alasdair McGregor •

November 2011, no. 336

University of Chicago Press, $57.95 hb, 168 pp

Architecture

Marion Mahony Reconsidered by David van Zanten

by Alasdair McGregor •

November 2011, no. 336

Marion Mahony (1870–1961) was that rare commodity in late nineteenth-century American society: a woman functioning as an equal in a professional world dominated by men. Born to progressive parents, and a household and wider circle of strong and socially engaged women, Marion Lucy Mahony was only the second woman to graduate from an American university (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1894) with a full degree in architecture, and the first to be licensed to practise under any state regulatory structure anywhere in the world (Illinois, 1898).

Alasdair McGregor

Painter, photographer, writer, and sometime architect Alasdair McGregor’s creative interests range from natural history to architecture and design, and the history of exploration. His books include: The Kimberley: Horizons of Stone (1992) and Australia’s Wild Islands (1997), both with Quentin Chester; Mawson’s Huts: An Antarctic Expedition Journal (1998); Frank Hurley: A Photographer’s Life (2004); Antarctica: ‘That Sweep of Savage Splendour’ (2011), and Grand Obsessions: The life and Work of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin (2009), which won the 2011 National Biography Award. Alasdair McGregor has staged numerous exhibitions of his paintings, and his work hangs in corporate and public collections in Australia and overseas.