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It was 1895. Wright, twenty-eight, had only recently set up his own practice, after being fired by Louis Sullivan for taking on outside commissions on the sly. [Marion] Mahony, herself, had recently been dismissed from the employ of her cousin, Chicago architect Dwight Perkins, during an economic downturn.
It can be argued that it was Mahony's distinctive renderings that created the public face that helped Wright's work command attention throughout the world. It could be speculated that Wright's work, itself, was influenced by Mahony's role in the spirited exchanges of ideas that went on in his studio, yet she is one a series of pioneering women architects and designers who have disappeared into the deep shadow of their male associates - Lill Reich in that of Mies van der Rohe, Aino Aalto in that of Alvar Aalto, and Mahony, in that of both Wright and her husband Walter Burley Griffin. Observes Jeanne Gang, part of a very different and more indelible generation of women architects, “They seem to get erased.”