martinhouseclr

169 4 // ANALYSIS & EVALUATION nationally significant on its own in the area of Landscape Architecture under National Register criterion C, as embodying one of the earliest, and the largest and most elaborate American works of internationally recognized landscape architect Walter Burley Griffin. 15 However, as the landscape does not currently retain integrity of materials (with respect to the abundant Griffin- designed horticultural/vegetative features), it is recommended that the significance of the landscape as a contributing feature to the overall property be similarly attributed to Walter Burley Griffin under National Register Criteria C, due to his direct association with its design and construction, his interaction and relationship with Martin, and his collaborative contribution to Wright’s compositional integration of architecture and landscape. The Martin House designed landscape was the earliest and most realized garden design of Wright’s Prairie period. A matrix of spaces in the landscape composed by Wright’s architectural arrangement and detailed by Griffin, the landscape was developed at a time when tradition dictated that cultivated domestic landscapes were accepted as an afterthought to architecture. Additionally, the now-celebrated relationship between house and landscape pioneered by Wright was not fully expressed with garden design and vegetative material until the Martin House, as landscape design itself “was not routinely included within the scope of the 15 For more on Griffin’s life and the context supporting this significance, see the section: Background: Walter Burley Griffin, the Prairie Spirit and a Conservation Ethos. commissions for [Wright’s] ‘prairie houses’.” 16 Prior to the Martin House design, this connection between house and site was achieved largely by “analogous, architectural means, e.g. ‘out- reaching walls’ and ‘low terraces,’” as opposed to the inclusion of extensive and detailed garden designs. 17 These characteristic low terraces and out-reaching walls are prevalent in the Martin landscape, yet, it is the integral elements of the whole landscape design – the extensive naturalistic shrub massings, vast Gertrude Jekyll- inspired perennial borders, and the uniquely conceptualized Floricycle display – that define the garden as exceptionally significant among Wright’s prairie style compositions and Griffin’s American landscape design career. Entirely lacking of the extravagant and elaborate ‘carpet bedding’ or captivating specimen exotics and annual displays of the Victorian era, the Martin House gardens were a distinctly more natural and informal style combined with well integrated formal constructs entirely relating to the architectural design. It was influenced by the ideas being advocated by garden writers and designers of late 19 th century Britain (Gertrude Jekyll, et al.), the Progressive Era transcendentalist response to impacts of the industrial revolution, as well the new found appreciation in the inspiration and subtle beauty found among the in situ ecology and forms of 16 Christopher Vernon, “’Expressing natural conditions with maximum possibility’: the American landscape art of Walter Burley Griffin,” Journal of Garden History, 15:1, 27. 17 Ibid., 27. the American landscape being explored and promoted by a growing group of ‘Prairie School’ thinkers in the Midwest – Wright and Griffin among them. The Martin House garden design was a mingling of semi-formal design elements tucked in close to the house, populated by naturalistic perennial borders, with an arrangement of outdoor rooms defined at the boundaries by distinctively naturalistic shrub massings. The garden was spatially and visually related to the architecture and interior spaces of the house. The Floricycle, unique in concept itself as a rigidly-designed and highly experimental month-by-month display of diverse blooms and seasonal interest, shared direct association (both visually and spatially) with the indoor and outdoor spaces of the verandah and Unit Room (library, living room, dining room). Relative to Wright’s more fixed architectural creation, the importance of the garden on Martin’s life is perhaps manifest in the fact that, as scholar Jack Quinan observes, Martin never documented his appreciation of the house, adding that, “if the play of sunlight filtered through art glass onto the walls or Wright’s architectonic uses of color delighted him, he never wrote about it.” 18 While Martin’s expressive writing on the landscape (as opposed to his plentiful business-like examination of its design details) is limited and brief, he does record in 18 Jack Quinan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House: Architecture as Portraiture, New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2004, 202.