More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
In Europe, where land was viewed as finite, forest management was a centuries-old practice. But Olmsted was one of only a tiny group of Americans who were thinking about the subject, and he was intimately familiar with the other players.
In Europe, where land was viewed as finite, forest management was a centuries-old practice. But Olmsted was one of only a tiny group of Americans who were thinking about the subject, and he was intimately familiar with the other players. importance of maintenace
Horace Cleveland. Cleveland, who worked with Olmsted on Prospect Park and Chicago’s Washington Park, had built up about the only American landscape architectural practice to rival FLO’s.
Horace Cleveland. Cleveland, who worked with Olmsted on Prospect Park and Chicago’s Washington Park, had built up about the only American landscape architectural practice to rival FLO’s. Horice Cleveland
Olmsted hired Chauncey Beadle, a Canadian-born botanist who had studied at Ontario Agricultural College and Cornell.
Vanderbilt hit upon the name: Biltmore. It combines Bildt, the region in Holland from which his family hailed (and his name’s last syllable), with more, an old English term for rolling hills.
Olmsted typically fell ill and was laid up for several days with assorted maladies such as sciatica, lumbago, and facial neuralgia.
The Biltmore Estate was Olmsted’s first southern landscape architecture project, and in some ways he felt like he’d come full circle. Where he’d once chronicled the antebellum South’s moral turpitude for the New-York Daily Times, now he was creating something—with his planned model forest—of abiding social value in the same region.
An ambitious park system of his design was well under way in Rochester, New York. He also began working on a set of parks in Milwaukee. He was even laying out a subdivision on the outskirts of Denver, called Perry Park, though he would withdraw from the job after several visits.
Brace had been suffering from Bright’s disease, the same malady that killed Richardson.
“I want you to be prepared to be the leader of the van.”
Now in nearly all our work I am thinking of the credit that will indirectly come to you. How will it as a mature work of the Olmsted school affect Rick?
Now in nearly all our work I am thinking of the credit that will indirectly come to you. How will it as a mature work of the Olmsted school affect Rick? want son rick take over business
Burnham opted to assemble an all-star team of architects. In close consultation with Olmsted, Burnham began approaching various candidates. Hunt, Olmsted’s Biltmore collaborator, was a natural choice. So was Charles McKim of the New York firm McKim, Mead, and White. McKim was the son of James McKim, leader of the friendly Nation faction, the one that had supported Olmsted’s catholic approach during the publication’s earliest days. Early in his career, the younger McKim had worked for H. H. Richardson. Other possibles included Boston’s Robert Peabody as well as Chicago’s own Louis Sullivan and
...more
Burnham then launched into that memorable speech, quoted earlier, reflecting glory away from himself and onto Olmsted, describing Olmsted as an artist who “paints with lakes and wooded slopes,”
Even Olmsted’s Wooded Island achieved its aim, providing an oasis of calm. Irascible architect Louis Sullivan declared it the very best feature of the fair, high praise since he had designed one of the buildings. Sullivan’s young assistant spent many hours wandering around the island and was especially taken with the Japanese Ho-O-Don. The assistant’s name: Frank Lloyd Wright.
Chicago’s Jackson Park, designed by Olmsted and Vaux back in 1871.
Olmsted wrote, “Observe, inquire, read, discuss all such matters, all you can. Don’t be content with off-hand statements and explanations. Read, compare, inquire, cross-examine. Keep at this sort of work in every department, until you have sucked every source of information dry.... Make the most of the special Biltmore opportunity.”
Years in the future, following Vanderbilt’s death, 83,398 acres of the estate would be sold to the government for safekeeping. That land would become the core of North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest, one of the largest woodland preserves east of the Mississippi.
John and Rick were business partners. The new firm was called Olmsted Brothers. John was forty-six and had been a landscape architect for years. Rick was twenty-eight and had no formal training. Then again, neither did his father, nor anybody else in this era. Luckily, Rick turned out to share his father’s awesome ability for conceptualizing landscapes. Surely, parts of this talent were inherited. In the years ahead, he would create a whole other set of incredible spaces and places, scattered all over the United States.
At two o’clock in the morning on August 28, 1903, Olmsted died. He was eighty-one.
Olmsted designed more than thirty major city parks, the U.S. Capitol grounds, and such planned communities as Riverside, Illinois, and Druid Hills in Atlanta. His work on campuses included Stanford, Amherst, and American University in Washington, D.C., and assorted other places such as the grounds of Moraine Farm in Beverly, Massachusetts.
Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. fulfilled his uneasy destiny and truly became “leader of the van.” He helped Harvard, his alma mater, to set up the first university course in landscape architecture ever offered in America. Following in his father’s footsteps, he also became a pioneering environmentalist.
He also designed Forest Hills Gardens, a lovely and verdant 147-acre community smack in the middle of New York City (the community is not to be confused with nearby Forest Hills). This is Olmsted junior’s masterpiece as surely as Central Park is his father’s.
M. Stern, dean of the Yale school of architecture, recently described Forest Hills Gardens as “one of the finest planned communities ever.”
The name held considerable equity, enough to propel the firm to 1980—when the offices moved from Brookline to Fremont, New Hampshire—enough even to carry it all the way to 2000. In the final year of the millennium, the business finally shut down. By then, the impact on the American landscape of Frederick Law Olmsted and his successors was—quite simply—indelible.
Not one of these is an Olmsted park, yet his fingerprints—the naturalistic designs, emphasis on ease of use, bold feats of engineering when necessary—are all over them.
Walker has designed a vast array of spaces, including Burnett Park in Fort Worth, Texas; the grounds of a new airport in Bangkok; and the campus surrounding Pixar’s Emeryville, California, headquarters. In 2004, Walker’s San Francisco firm won a competition to design a memorial on the site of New York City’s World Trade Center. “With my work, I always keep in mind that the goal is creating something socially useful,” Walker told me. “I think that comes mostly from Olmsted. That social vision is the thing that defines his greatness.”
But this is so far beyond a mere work of landscape architecture. Looking around, I’m always struck by the variety of people—every income group, every nationality, young and old, enjoying a dizzying number of different activities. Here it is, the twenty-first century, and one of Central Park’s original purposes remains very much intact. In the truest sense, this place belongs to everyone.
