With its proximity to the cultural hub of New York City and its quieter suburban and rural landscapes, Connecticut was fertile ground for artists and writers in the period of Modernist movements between 1913 and 1979. Many of these cultural figures are well known through biographical and critical studies. Creative Places seeks to show how place played a significant role in creative work, and how in turn the artists and writers influenced communities in Connecticut.
Marian Cruger Coffin
Architecture/Design
1876 – 1957
One of the leading women landscape architects of the early twentieth century. The grounds at Springbank are an exceptionally well-preserved and documented expression of the smaller residential landscapes that were her specialty in the later half of her distinguished career. Although she rose to prominence in the 1920s as a designer of major country estates, most notably Winterthur, the Henry Francis du Pont residence in Delaware, with these suburban gardens, Coffin made professional landscape design, once the exclusive province of the wealthy, available to a wider audience. As can be demonstrated, the garden at Springbank relied on the same design principles that Coffin espoused throughout her career and popularized through her publications (Cunningham).
- Biography/Description of Work
Marian Cruger Coffin’s career spanned several stages in the development of American landscape architecture. The field that she entered in the early 1900s was just coming of age as a profession. The great wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution had produced several generations of multi-millionaires who built extravagant country houses which called for equally lavish landscaped grounds, often based on European models. Coffin received her training in landscape architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1901-1904), where she studied under Guy Lowell, the Beaux Arts-trained architect who designed the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. MIT was one of the few places where professional training was available in this field, but few women were accepted as degree candidates. Having received little previous formal education, Coffin was tutored to be accepted and completed the course work as a special student, one of two women in landscape architecture in the graduating class of 500, only to find that established firms were unwilling to employ her. Before the country-estate era ended, Coffin had worked on some 50 estate gardens for members of America’s wealthiest families, including the Vanderbilts, Fields, Pricks, and du Ponts, and also found clients among the newly rich bourgeoisie. By the 1930s, the market crash of 1929 and the new federal tax burdens had taken their toll; few could afford the costly and elaborate high-maintenance gardens they once had expected Coffin and other landscape architects to design. While many practices went out of business in this period, Coffin survived by turning to the design of smaller residential gardens and by seeking out institutional clients. Among them were New York Botanical Gardens, Connecticut College for Women, the University of Delaware, and Hopkins Grammar School. (Cunningham).
- Sources view
- See NR nomination for Springbank, Old Lyme: Cunningham, Jan. Springbank National Register Nomination No. 01000880, National Park Service, 2001, http://pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NRHP/Text/01000880.pdf http://pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NRHP/Photos/01000880.pdf
- Associated Resource(s)