Marian Cruger Coffin

Marian Cruger Coffin (September 16, 1876 – February 2, 1957) was an American landscape architect who designed gardens for members of the East Coast elite. As a child, she received almost no formal education but was home-tutored while living with her maternal relatives in upstate New York. Coffin was determined to embark on a career despite the social problems that it would cause for a woman of her class and enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied between 1901–4 as one of only four women in architecture and landscape design.

After graduating Coffin was unable to find work with established architectural firms, due to widespread prejudice against a woman working in a male-dominated field. She set up her own practice in New York City in 1905, starting out by designing suburban gardens on Long Island. She was one of the first American women to work as a professional landscape architect. Her increasing fame led to larger commissions from wealthy and powerful East Coast families. By the 1920s she was one of the most sought-after landscape architects in the eastern United States. Coffin's clientele included some of the wealthiest and most famous families in the country, including the Fricks, the Vanderbilts, the Huttons, and the du Ponts. She found the beautiful scenery of the area, set in the Finger Lakes of upper New York state, an inspiration; she later wrote, "even as a small girl, I loved the country, not so much gardens and growing things, for I had no experience with these ... but simply the great outdoor world."

Although the Coffins had little money, their life with Alice's upper-class relatives gave Marian an almost aristocratic upbringing that introduced her to high society on the East Coast and enabled her to make social connections that were to be extremely valuable in later life. However, she received almost no formal education, a deficiency that caused significant problems for her in her college years. She was instead tutored at home, where she also enjoyed the benefits of exposure to fine art and music and became an accomplished horse rider. She aspired to find a creative role but recognized the difficulties she faced, as she later wrote:

I secretly cherished the idea of being a great artist ... but that dream seemed in no way possible of realization ... [Although] my desire to create beauty was strong, I did not seem to possess talent for music, writing, painting or sculpture, at the time, the only outlet a woman had to express any artistic ability ... My artistic yearnings lay fallow until I realized it was necessary to earn my living. Women at the time were looking beyond the traditional female careers of school teacher, nurse and office clerk, but relatively few educational institutions admitted them to study in male-dominated fields such as architecture or horticulture. One of the exceptions was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which had begun admitting women in 1870, only nine years after its establishment. Coffin applied there but was initially refused entry, as she was not qualified to meet the admission requirements due to her lack of a formal education. However, several of the key faculty members were sympathetic and encouraged her to persevere. She undertook intensive tutoring in mathematics and enrolled at MIT in 1901 as a special student, She particularly excelled at botany and became friends with a fellow student, Henry Francis du Pont, with whom she later collaborated to design the gardens of Winterthur, Delaware.

Coffin's college years were nonetheless a "long grind", as she described it, with a seemingly unrelenting "long routine of hard work" relieved only by her summer abroad. She and the other three women in the program maintained a friendly competition with the male students which, she said, "put us on our mettle to prove that we, too, were serious students and competitors. This association with many types of boys and men I found very helpful as we had a fine spirit of camaraderies in the drafting room and many a helping hand was given me at a critical moment, though one had to steel oneself to hear many a severe criticism, which was perhaps even more valuable." Jekyll, an influential British horticulturist and garden designer, had a major influence on Coffin's subsequent work. On returning to America, Coffin found that the strongly male-dominated architectural firms were unwilling to employ a woman. Around 1905, Coffin set up her own office at the National Arts Club and began taking commissions, using her family connections to find work. She was ideally situated; it was the height of the Country Place Era, when wealthy East Coast Americans were eager to develop elaborate European-style gardens for their estates. Coffin was well-connected in such circles, widely traveled, came from a good family, was professionally trained and was known for her good taste. and by 1918 she had moved her office to larger premises at 830 Lexington Avenue. In 1910–11, she also designed gardens for Alfred Boardman in Southampton, New York and for her friend Elizabeth E. Farnum in Norfolk, Connecticut. A relative of the du Ponts, Hugh Rodney Sharp, gave her what was to become one of her best-known commissions in 1916, the creation of the gardens of the Gibraltar estate in Wilmington, Delaware.

Coffin's attempts to find business in the Midwest were thwarted by the well-established presence there of several notable landscape architects in Chicago but she was not short of commissions despite this failure. Her success was recognized by her being elected a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1918, and by the 1920s she was one of the most sought-after East Coast landscape architects.

Most of her commissions were carried out during the 12 years or so between the end of the First World War and the start of the Great Depression. She took on several major projects, including designing the landscape of the University of Delaware campus in 1919 at the recommendation of Sharp, who chaired the college's Buildings and Grounds Committee. From 1918 to 1952, Coffin was appointed the University of Delaware's landscape architect, a position which required Coffin to unite the university's two separate campuses (the former Delaware College to the north and the Delaware Women's College to the south) into one cohesive design. This was a challenge since the linear mall design of each was out of alignment with the other. Coffin solved this problem by linking them via a circle instead of curving the straight paths (the university's library faces this circle today) which rendered the misalignment unnoticeable to the pedestrian.

Other major projects included gardens for the Bayberryland estate in Shinnecock Hills on Long Island, the Marjorie Merriweather Post estate known as Hillwood in nearby Brookville (which is now part of the Long Island University Post Campus) and the huge Caumsett estate (now Caumsett State Historic Park) on behalf of Marshall Field III. Two projects carried out in the late 1920s, for Edgar W. Bassick in Bridgeport, Connecticut and Joseph Morgan Wing in Millbrook, New York led to her being awarded the Gold Medal of Honor by the Architectural League of New York in 1930.

Later career and death

Coffin's designs were distinguished by her use of "dramatic contrasts in color, inclusion of wildflowers and woodland plantings, and site unity through effective transition spaces." Her willingness to innovate made her a particularly sought-after designer as clients came to value a more adventurous approach to landscape architecture. She put into practice the idea put forward in 1918 by Elsa Rehmann that a garden should be a "manifestation of distinctive individuality, an expression of personality." By the 1920s, Rehmann's views had become fashionable and gardens became seen as a vehicle for expressing the private self. It was very fortuitously timed for her, as the Wall Street Crash of 1929 wiped out the fortunes of many of her clients and brought to an end the era of commissioning elaborate gardens for large country estates. Perhaps fulfilling Martha Brookes Hutcheson's prediction that having a career would be "matrimonial suicide" for a woman of her class, Coffin never married and had no children. Her papers, architectural plans and photographs of her gardens are preserved at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library.