Griffin, now widowed, spent a weekend in October 1937 revisiting sites of interest after a decade away from the new city. The Canberra Times reported she was particularly impressed with the growth of the suburbs.

There was no reason, she said, why Canberra should not become one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

It showed remarkable faith in a city which had broken the heart of her husband, Walter Burley Griffin. It was a city where bureaucratic cruelty had redrawn the plans Walter and Marion submitted and a utopian vision had been subjected to death by committee.

Now, 150 years on from her birth on February 14, 1871, Marion's contribution to the formation of Canberra is again in the spotlight - with lectures, events and the unveiling of a bust planned to mark the occasion.

But does Canberra need a more permanent and living reminder of the Griffins' vision?

Marion Lucy Mahony was the first licensed female architect in her home state of Illinois. The daughter of an Irish school teacher, she was the second woman to graduate with a qualification in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1894.

Her skill as a graphic artist was already well-developed at university, but it was her work in the studio of celebrated American architect Frank Lloyd Wright that revealed her power in making architectural dreams into dramatic drawn realities.

Debora Wood, who curated a 2005 exhibition of Griffin's work at Northwestern University in Illinois, writes the act of drawing was central to Griffin's practice. Her renderings show the influence of Japanese wood blocks and are central to how the public imagines Lloyd Wright's designs.

Of course, Griffin's work was overlooked. At the turn of the 20th century, ideas and genius were the domain of men. The names of men were attached to the pictures - even if the women who worked alongside them produced them.

In June 1911, 40-year-old Marion eloped with fellow romantic idealist Walter Burley Griffin, "short, round, blond, passive, imperturbable - a gentle philosopher". They were married on the Indiana Dunes on the shore of Lake Michigan, their favourite spot together.

Soon Marion was managing Walter's office - and architect Janice Pregliasco points out the "sudden maturity" in Walter's architectural drawing about the same time.

Two months before the pair married, an international competition for the design of a new capital in Australia was announced.

Walter's penchant for procrastination almost meant the couple's plans for a new city did not reach Australia in time. After Marion threatened to go on strike by not drawing anything, Walter was compelled into action.

Nine weeks of frenzied work between the home and the office culminated in a mad dash one winter's night to get the plans away.

The plans had to be rushed close to midnight to the last train able to meet the last boat to Australia. The Griffins' entry was the last to arrive.

In May 1912, a telegram arrived for Walter from Australia: "Your design awarded first premium. Minister Home Affairs."

Walter wired back: "Thanks for Notifications. Honor appreciated".

Walter told The New York Times the next month he didn't know to what extent his plan - for a city of 75,000 residents across 25 square miles - would be carried out by Australian authorities.

"The Australian authorities may merely adopt my ground plan and fill in the architectural details to suit themselves. However, if my plan is carried out in all its details, I think the Australian capital will be the most beautiful city in history," Walter Burley Griffin said.

He wasn't prepared to offer specific comments on what the architecture of the city may look like. Australia "has no architectural traditions. Its ideas of architecture are not influenced by any imported schools. ... I think in such a country, untrammeled by traditions, I ought to be able to evolve a very beautiful architectural type adapted to the needs of the climate and harmonizing with the topography. I should like to try it," Walter said.

When pressure mounted on Walter over the plans, Marion distanced herself. Bureaucrats and politicians circled, so unhappy with what was proposed and the American they were told to work with they were working on an alternative set of drawings.

The plans were "altogether the work of my husband - I had nothing whatever to do with it", she said in 1916.

It was nonsense, borne from modesty and a contemporary sense Marion had that she needed to support her husband. Marion's drawings were the element which won the competition: large-scale renderings on silk which gave a sense not only of the scale of the pictures but the colours of the environment. A remarkable achievement for an artist who had never before set foot in Australia.

That achievement has only been recognised more recently. As late as the 1980s, the entire competition entry was credited to Walter. (That decade, Canberra was also decried as a "eucalyptic Kremlin in the middle of nowhere".)

From Castlecrag in Sydney - where the Griffins' progressive vision for an expansive modern housing estate stalled and was misunderstood - to Lucknow, India - where Walter died in 1935 unable to achieve the grand commissions which had taken him there - Marion held up her husband's work and added to it with her own.

There is no doubt now that Marion Mahony Griffin was a founding member of the Prairie School of architecture - a leading graphic artist of her time, whose sympathy for nature and the environment feeds through her architectural work.

Associate Professor Christopher Vernon, an authority on the lives of Walter and Marion who teaches architecture at the University of Western Australia, says it's pointless to divide the labor between the pair.

"Each one contributed to the other. I don't think for one minute that Marion was just a hand that held the pencil and just did what Walter told her. I think she was making suggestions too. ... If you start to look at what's been published in the last decade or so, there is less hesitancy or reticence about crediting Canberra to the both of them," Vernon says.

Vernon says it is important to engage with the Griffins' material to truly understand the vision they had for Canberra - breaking from wishfully misinformed perceptions of their proposal.

"You see those beautiful renderings, the view from the summit of Ainslie, you get this idea of the city nestled in the bush so to speak when in fact the reality was, he was proposing densities for portions of the city that were a lot like Chicago. They weren't at all like the kind of sprawling, low-density city that some people think is what they were advocating," he says.

The pair deserve greater recognition and understanding in the city that was the pinnacle of their career - a perfect place to consider their contribution to architecture through the lens of Canberra, Vernon says.

Marion died in 1961 largely forgotten. Only in the decades since her legacy has been revived by scholars seeking out her work under the shadow of her husband's signature.

But membership of the ACT chapter of the Walter Burley Griffin Society has waned in recent years, and chapter chair Peter Graves is not certain Marion - or indeed Walter - have been afforded their rightful place in Canberra's history.

Previous efforts to erect some kind of large permanent memorial to the Griffins in Canberra have so far failed. A competition to design a memorial for the summit of Mt Ainslie organised by the National Capital Development Commission in partnership with the National Memorials Committee and the Administrator of US Bicentennial Activities in 1975 ground to a halt after the Whitlam government was dismissed later that year.

In 2004, the National Capital Authority - the body tasked with managing the national significance of Canberra since self government - published The Griffin Legacy, a series of propositions to protect the foundation's of the city's plan.

The eighth proposition was to establish a Griffin institute, where scholars and members of the public could access a central archive of the Griffins' work across America, Australia and India. The idea was to establish it as a centenary project, marking 100 years since the Griffins completed their Canberra plan in 1911-12. But the city is still waiting.

It's something Graves sees as integral to keeping the Griffins alive in the minds of Canberra's residents and planners. "It would be a permanent acknowledgement of Marion's artwork and architectural philosophy, in company with her partner Walter, so that we know who designed Canberra and we can remember them permanently," Graves says.

Sally Barnes, the chief executive of the National Capital Authority, says the authority needs to keep exploring the possibility of an institute.

"I think we need to get a variety of partners together. I think it will definitely be a partnership not just one agency. But there are a lot of willing people who would like to explore the idea," Barnes says.

The Griffins' vision is embedded in the work of the National Capital Authority, Barnes says. She says most planning meetings at the authority prompt someone to say the landscape needs to come first in considering whatever proposal is in front of them - just as the Griffins had done.

"I think it's timely that women came out and were recognised for their contribution and often they get lost in history. But if coming together for Marion's 150th birthday can allow more people to learn about her contribution, I think we've done our job," she says.

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Alasdair McGregor, the author of joint biography Grand Obsessions: The Life and Work of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, suggests the recognition need not be a physical reminder in the city they designed.

"Their monument is the way they lived their lives, the way they bestrode three continents, absorbing the wonder and magic in each environment - teaching, bewitching, badgering and cajoling all those with whom they mixed - never resiling from a belief that there is a better way for the individual, for communities, for humankind and for the planet," McGregor writes.

"We need the spirit of Walter and Marion more now than they could ever have imagined."

But the spirit of architects is a fragile thing. Planning missteps and letting apathy towards the city's history grow risks losing that spirit entirely.

Canberra would benefit from some place to nurture that spirit - a spirit of architecture and life intertwined, where construction works with the environment rather than against it.