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While climate change and free trade agreements grabbed the G20 headlines, a UWA academic is delighted with a lesser item on the Indian Prime Minister's agenda.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi referred, in his speech to the Australian Parliament, and in talks with Barak Obama and Tony Abbott, to the little-known link between India, Australia and the US.

That link is Walter Burley Griffin and his wife and design partner Marion Mahony Griffin , American architects who designed the city of Canberra, then moved to India where they had a significant impact on the city of Lucknow and other cities on the sub-continent.

Landscape architect Christopher Vernon is an expert on the Griffins, and hopes that Prime Minister Modi's speech and his conversation with Obama and Abbott will renew interest in a memorial to the couple in Lucknow, where Walter is buried.

"Not many people realise that one of our architectural heroes spent his last 15 months in India and died and was buried there," Associate Professor Vernon said.

"I have been trying to get memorials to the Griffins both in Canberra and in Lucknow and I am greatly encouraged by this."

A/Professor Vernon's students in the School of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Art have designed memorials for both cities.

"They found them very challenging projects, to create what is essentially a monument to noble ideas, rather than to a person or an event, such as a tsunami," he said.

His students have designed a memorial garden that wraps around Mount Ainslie in Canberra, looking down onto the Griffins' beautifully-designed national capital. It is yet to be built.

More recently another group of students travelled to India with A/Professor Vernon and designed a memorial for the banks of the Gomti River in Lucknow, in northern India.

This was the seventh trip on which he has taken landscape architecture students to India.

"After studying the Griffins for a long time, I wanted to see where they lived, where Walter was buried, and the extent of their impact in India, so I went there for the first time in 2006.

"I fell in love with India and have been back about 20 times, taking students with me once a year."

The Griffins moved to Canberra from Chicago in 1914, after winning the design competition for the city. By 1935, the Depression meant they were getting very little work and Walter won a commission to design a library for the university of Lucknow.  He travelled there in October 1935 and, like A/Professor Vernon 70 years later, fell in love with the country.

Marion joined him and, together, they designed a staggering 50 projects in the next 15 months, ranging from private homes and gardens to housing projects and public buildings.

In February 1937, Walter had an operation for a perforated gall bladder, then died suddenly of peritonitis. Marion stayed in Lucknow for a few months to complete the couple's works in progress, then returned to Australia and, eventually, her native Chicago.

"Their architecture made as big an impact in Lucknow as it did in Canberra, which is why I am so keen for them to be remembered and honoured," A/Professor Vernon said. "People say that Canberra itself is a memorial to them, but I think we need more.

"In Lucknow, the residents also need to be reminded of the significance of the Griffins in the city's history.  Up until 1988, even Walter's grave lay unmarked until an architect from Canberra made the effort to find it."

In the lead-up to Canberra's centenary celebrations last year, A/Professor Vernon and the centenary director Robyn Archer took water from Canberra's Lake Burley Griffin and sprinkled it on his grave .

"I am perhaps more hopeful of a memorial being built in India than in Australia," A/Professor Vernon said. Unlike Canberra, with its lake and layout a constant reminder of the city's inspired designers, Lucknow has just one remaining building of the Griffins', despite their flourishing practice there.

Other projects A/Professor Vernon's students have taken on during trips to India included a design for a new landscape for the Australian High Commission in New Delhi .

He said his students had an unmatched cultural experience on their field trips to India, where they visit Walter's grave as well as the architectural wonders of the country.

"I can see some of them blossoming before my eyes, as India brings new perspectives into their lives," he said.

"I tell them that travel is the only thing you can buy that makes you richer."