Fishwick House

About

The Fishwick House is a heritage-listed private residence located at 15 The Citadel, Castlecrag, New South Wales, a suburb of Sydney, Australia. It was designed by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin and built during 1929. It is also known as The Fishwick House and Fyshwick House. The property is privately owned. It was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 15 December 2006.

Main articles: Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin Walter Burley Griffin was born near Chicago and trained at Nathan Ricker's School of Architecture at the University of Illinois, graduating in 1899. From 1901-1906, he worked as an associate of Frank Lloyd Wright at Oak Park. Griffin started his own practice in 1906 and within a few years established his reputation as an architect of the Prairie School. In 1911, Griffin married Marion Mahony, who had graduated in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked as Wright's head designer.

Inspired by the designs by Frederick Law Olmsted (often called the founder of American landscape architecture) of New York's Central Park and his "green necklace" of parks in Boston, landscape design was the career Walter Burley Griffin would have pursued had the opportunity offered. He had approached Chicago landscape gardener Ossian Cole Simonds for career advice before entering the University of Illinois in 1895. Apparently unsatisfied with the lack of relevant curriculum, Simonds urged him to pursue architecture and study landscape gardening on his own, as he himself had done. Griffin took what classes he could and, like Simonds and landscape gardener Jens Jensen, shared an approach to landscape design through architecture, an interest in civic design, urbanism and planning.

In 1902 there were only six "landscape gardeners" (and no landscape architects) listed in the Lakeside Annual Directory of the City of Chicago. In 1912 only two landscape architects and 13 landscape gardeners were listed.

Griffin's practice as a landscape architect was first featured in a public text in Wilhelm Miller 's "The Prairie Spirit in Landscape Gardening" (1915), which included Griffin as an exponent (along with Jensen, Simonds and architect Frank Lloyd Wright) of his proposed American regional "Prairie" style. Simonds, Griffin and Miller had all attended the first national meeting of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) in 1913 in Chicago.

By 1914 Griffin and his architect wife Marion Mahony had moved to Australia after winning the 1912 international design competition for the Federal Capital, Canberra with a scheme based on its topography, a distinctly non-prairie valley landscape of undulating hills. This was a project they had worked on together.

The Griffins' in Sydney and design legacy

By 1919, there were problems with the Canberra project and Griffin resigned his position as Federal Capital Director of Design and Construction. He then formed the Greater Sydney Development Association to purchase 263 hectares in Middle Harbour, which became known as Castlecrag. He devoted the next fifteen years to developing and promoting the area, while maintaining an architectural practice.

Griffin believed dwellings should play a subordinate role in the scheme of nature. His houses were small and intimate. He aimed toward the most natural use of land and the selection of indigenous plants. He also developed an economical construction system of pre-cast interlocking structural tiles, which he called "Knitlock", and used it widely, as well as stone, in the houses of Castlecrag. In the early 1930s, Griffin built incinerators for the destruction of household garbage in various cities and suburbs in the eastern states of Australia. They provided a canvas for experimentation with form and texture for the architect, but sadly few have survived.

Two Griffin incinerators survive in suburban Sydney: the Glebe Municipal Incinerator ( City of Sydney Local Environmental Plan 2000 local heritage item); and the Willoughby Incinerator.

Griffin's work took him to India in 1935 and he died there two years later of peritonitis.

Griffin's contribution to the development of the Wrightian / Prairie School style internationally has begun to receive attention from architectural historians in recent years. It is now increasingly acknowledged that Griffin contributed a number of fresh concepts to the Prairie School, most noticeably: his attention to vertical space (a development leading directly to the ubiquitous split-level style post-war houses); "open plan" living and dining areas dominated by a large central fireplace; and the extensive domestic use of reinforced concrete.

Griffin is also internationally renowned for his work as a landscape architect, especially the innovative town planning design of Canberra and Castlecrag, Griffith and Leeton.

Griffin's design approaches to landscape and architecture informed one another. Landscape itself, for example, crucially served as a basis for architecture - a conviction first made explicit in the Canberra publicity, Griffin noting (in Chicago) that: "...a building should ideally be "the logical outgrowth of the environment in which [it is] located"." In Australia, he hoped to "evolve an indigenous type, one similarly derived from and adapted to local climate, climate and topography." In Australia the scale and number of his landscape commissions grew considerably, including a number of town plans. Griffin signed many of his drawings with the term "landscape architect".

Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin had both worked in the office of the American Architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, where they gained an appreciation of the principles of organic architecture. Walter Burley Griffin arrived in Australia in 1913 to supervise construction of his winning design for the new Federal Capital at Canberra, his involvement with this project was over by 1918.

In 1919, the Griffins established the Greater Sydney Development Association (GSDA) and purchased 650 acres of land at Castlecrag for the sum of 25,000 pounds with the aim of developing the site as an exclusive harbour front residential enclave. The land was subdivided and some allotments sold at public auction. Marion Mahony Griffin privately sought owners for other allotments. The GSDA placed a covenant on the sale of sites in Castlecrag to ensure a consistency of architecture.

Walter Burley Griffin designed over 40 speculative houses for Castlecrag, the majority being large and lavishly finished to cater for the intended affluent clients. Only 14 residences were completed of which 13 remain. Of these, only the Fishwick house and Felstead house were built to the scale and budget, which allowed Griffin to fully, develop many of his design ideas.

By late 1922, the initial flurry of construction in Castlecrag was over. Griffin had by then designed and completed half the projects he was to build on the Estate and these were all either demonstration houses or speculatively built. His success in attracting private clients deteriorated markedly during the 1920s.

In 1929, when the Fishwick house was built, it had been three years since he had received a commission in Castlecrag. Only one small house, the Duncan house, was built in Castlecrag during the 1930s, it was completed in 1934, the year before Griffin left Australia for India. Thus, the Fishwick house was his last major project in Castlecrag.

The land at 15 The Citadel, Castlecrag was purchased in 1927 by Mrs Elizabeth Bell for 450 pounds. Mrs Bell sold the land in 1929 to Mr Thomas Wilson Fishwick, the Australian representative of Fowlers, a Leeds-based road making equipment manufacturing firm. Thomas Fishwick was interested in technology and innovation. He proved to be a client who not only had a very large budget but was also open to new ideas. In 1929, he commissioned Griffin to design a house and the Fishwick house was completed later that year at a cost of 3,000 pounds. Fishwick lived in the house with his wife until 1931.