One of the items on my list of things to do for many years has been to visit Castlecrag, residential area of Sydney in the leafy North Shore (a term that means a lot here and nothing anywhere else). What is the allure of Castlecrag? The original subdivision was planned and some of the houses designed built by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony. After they completed with their commission in designing and starting the lay out of Canberra, they spent time in both Melbourne and Sydney to practice their profession: architecture.
In Sydney they were commissioned to develop Castlecrag. The local historical association provides a map for the Griffith-Mahony work;
http://www.castlecrag.org.au/history/history.htm
I could not find a copy of Wanda Spathopoulos, The Crag – Castlecrag 1924-1936. Blackheath: Schlesigner, 2007.
William Morris in his novel News from Nowhere (1890) called for a reintegration of man with nature as the Industrial Revolution hummed along. For this work he has been accorded a place in the pantheon of Utopian thinkers. I have included it on syllabi more than once. Morris had some faint influence on Frank Lloyd Wright, if anyone can be said to have influenced that man of granite, and Wright was the mentor of Griffin and Mahony. The line of influence most probably ran through the Garden City movement of Ebenezer Howard, see his Garden Cities of Tomorrow.
News from Nowhere was serialized first and over time Morris re-worked before it finally appeared as a book. It was in good part a reaction to the mechanistic and materialistic image of the future offered by Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward (1887). Howard was aware of Morris’s book and published his own first edition shortly after News from Nowhere.
Moreover, the idea of a planned city build on a greenfield is a motif in utopian thinking about the New Jerusalem with a clean start, i.e., Canberra in this case.
So we decided to do it one rainy Friday. The rain was persistent but light and we have long since decided not to let the elements dictate to us in any but the more exceptional cases.
We saw an image of Griffin but not Mahony
We saw a number of unmistakeable houses integrated into the escarpment. Often overlooked by McMansions of more recent vintage.
Footnote on William Morris. I tried to read a biography of him but gave up reading the record of his endless petulant tantrums — precious, indeed! For a Green avant le mot he did good business. His designs founded the Morris Company which operated from 1875-1940 as Morris & Co. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_%26_Co.
One of the most loyal customers of Morris & Co. was the Carrick Family of South Australia. With the result that the South Australia Art Gallery and Museum have many items form Morris & Co., including some clothing. In addition, Carrick Hill offers many more Morris & Co. items in situ. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrick_Hill
When in Adelaide it is well worth a visit.
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