Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted

by Justin Martin

The quads and arcades were meant to create unity, architecturally, but they also served a subtler social-engineering goal. Olmsted was intent on providing ample common space, where students in diverse fields of study—literature, mathematics, philosophy—could meet and mingle their ideas. This was a hallowed Olmsted notion; he’d even coined a term for it: communitiveness. Mixing disciplines was the key to his professional success and the crux of his plan for Leland Stanford Jr. University. To bump up this concept further, Olmsted suggested that the students live in cottages. Intermingled with the student housing would be cottages available to people who weren’t attending the university, forming a still larger sense of community. This was an idea revived from Olmsted’s long-ago, shelved-then-lost plan for the university that became Berkeley.