page_title: Marian Cruger Coffin
section_title: Inter-war career
hierarchical_section_title: Marian Cruger Coffin / Inter-war career
caption_attribution_description: View of the Gibraltar gardens and mansion in Wilmington, Delaware
context_page_description: Marian Cruger Coffin was an American landscape architect who became famous for designing numerous 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.
context_section_description: Among Coffin's significant commissions during this period were the design of a garden for William Marshall Bullitt's Oxmoor estate in Glenview, Kentucky in 1909, probably due to a recommendation from Henry du Pont. The Bullitt commission led to two similar commissions nearby in 1911.  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. She designed it in an Italianate Beaux-Arts style as a series of "rooms" to parallel the layout of the mansion. It has a strongly geometric layout profusely planted in a style reminiscent of an informal English garden. Numerous architectural and decorative elements such as fountains, statues, urns and hand-forged iron gates provide additional ornamentation.
  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. Her work was widely featured in popular magazines and professional journals, at Coffin's own instigation as part of an overt marketing strategy. She sought to reach the wealthy and powerful women who made up an important part of the readership of publications such as the Garden Club of America's Bulletin. Coffin commissioned some of America's leading landscape photographers to take photographs of her creations and promoted her work through slide lectures. Her marketing was highly successful and led to a steady stream of commissions.
  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.
  In 1926, Coffin fell ill with a serious hip infection that forced her to curtail much of her physical activity and required a lengthy stay in hospital. She moved to a newly acquired house in New Haven, Connecticut, although she continued to maintain her office in New York and commuted there daily. Coffin often entertained guests in New Haven (and recruited several Connecticut notables as new clients), holding teas, cocktail parties, musical events and buffet suppers. The garden, which she had laid out herself, became the site of garden parties in the summer months. She preferred the company of young architects, artists, musicians and
caption: The gardens of Gibraltar (Wilmington, Delaware), designed by Coffin between 1916–23
exif: {"Image Make": "NIKON CORPORATION", "Image Model": "NIKON D300", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Ver.1.03", "Image DateTime": "2009:03:19 13:44:05", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image Tag 0x5012": "1", "Image ExifOffset": "2444", "Image XPKeywords": "[87, 0, 105, 0, 108, 0, 109, 0, 105, 0, 110, 0, 103, 0, 116, 0, 111, 0, 110, 0, 48, 0, 57, 0, 0, 0]", "Image CustomRendered": "Normal", "Image ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "Image WhiteBalance": "Manual", "Image DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "Image FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "36", "Image SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "Image GainControl": "Low gain up", "Image Contrast": "Normal", "Image Saturation": "Normal", "Image Sharpness": "Normal", "Image SubjectDistanceRange": "0", "Image Padding": "[]", "Image OffsetSchema": "4100", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "2876", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "2486", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/200", "EXIF FNumber": "71/10", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "400", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2009:03:19 13:44:05", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2009:03:19 13:44:05", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "4", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "18/5", "EXIF MeteringMode": "CenterWeightedAverage", "EXIF LightSource": "Flash", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire", "EXIF FocalLength": "24", "EXIF SubSecTime": "68", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "68", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "68", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "4288", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2848", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area"}