Olmsted and Landscape Design

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) is the father of the landscape architecture profession in the United States. Prior to Olmsted's time, individuals designing gardens were known as landscape gardeners and similar terms. Olmsted is most well noted for designing Central Park in New York City. He went on to be not only a great park maker, but designer of important landscapes for public buildings and universities, the 1893 Columbian World's Fair and estates of notable individuals. He was a social progressive, who incorporated these ideas into the functionality of his designs, and an organizational genius, exceptionally driven in his passion for his work and devoted to the preservation of the Union during the Civil War.

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Olmsted was both an avid reader and one that enjoyed walking in the picturesque country side of New England. As a very young man, he became a surveyor's apprentice, then worked as an apprentice clerk, both would serve him well in later years.

Early Life
Yearning for adventure, Olmsted became a sailor and signed on to a voyage to China at the age of 20. He was fortunate to survive both typhoid fever and scurvy. For the next several years, after some formal education, he tried his hand at farming on Staten Island supported financially by his father. Here he experimented with various farming practices and crops and considered it a scientific undertaking making numerous improvements both aesthetic and practical in the property. During this period, he was in contact with America's leading landscape gardener Andrew Jackson Downing of Newburg, New York, who had authored several books on gardening design and rural architecture, and who published a horticultural periodical. Olmsted contributed articles and mentored under Downing.

Again he became restless and traveled through England and parts of Europe. He took extensive notes of his travels. He was impressed with, and saw the value of, the great pleasure grounds on numerous estates and in the city parks of London, something that was missing at the time in the United States. Upon return, he wrote a book in 1852.

Impressed with his writing, the editor of the New-York Daily Times, a precursor to the New York Times, hired Olmsted to travel through the south to record farming practices. During two trips, he wrote dozens of letters which later became the basis for several books publishing in the late 1850's. Olmsted analyzed and wrote about the failures of slavery not only as inhumane treatment but as a failed economic system. He would later weave his social values in the functionality of his landscape designs.

Career Exploration
When the Central Park Commission offered a design competition to choose the park's lay out, Olmsted collaborated with Architect Calvert Vaux and won by incorporating pastoral lawns and vistas, water features and public activity spaces, taking advantage of natural rocky outcrops. There were numerous design innovations such as sunken carriage ways that would be out of sight and pedestrian pathways ways would curve around to offer the feeling of greater space. Olmsted's design purpose was "to supply to the hundreds of thousands of tired workers, who have no opportunity to spend their summers in the country, a specimen of God's handiwork that shall be to teem, inexpensively, what a month or two in the White Mountains or the Adirondacks is, at great cost, to those in easier circumstance." After the Central Park project, Olmsted and Vaux worked together for 14 additional years on other significant projects across the country.

In an effort to serve in some capacity during the Civil War, Olmsted brought his managerial and organizational skills to the U.S. Sanitary Commission as executive secretary. This organization coordinated a vast amount of relief supplies to the benefit of the health and comfort of U.S. soldiers and even included hospital ships.
After two years of service, Olmsted took another sidebar from a prospective career as a landscape architect to be more practical financially and accepted a job as a superintendent for a mining company in California. While this was more of a misadventure financially, he had an opportunity to design several projects in Oakland, California, and served on the Yosemite Commission that managed the land grant that included the Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias.

Olmsted was indeed a visionary and authored an extensive report in 1865 detailing his thoughts on the importance of time spent in nature's beauty, which he felt was vital to human health and happiness. He called it 'restorative' with this concept being well documented by science today. He felt that special places such as Yosemite and the Mariposa grove needed to be preserved from private ownership and development by a very few individuals, but preserved for the goodness of the great mass of society.

Olmsted's firm designed parks for numerous cities across the country including Buffalo, NY, Prospect Park in Brooklyn , NY, the park system in Baltimore, MD and Boston's 'emerald neckless' system all with the intent of improving the quality of life. Other projects included parkways, residential communities, landscapes for private residences, university and hospital grounds and several government sites including the U.S. Capitol 1874-1892. During Olmsted's life more than 500 commissions were carried out operating with a multidisciplinary approach involving specialized professions such as horticulturists, architects and engineers.

A Design for Capitol Grounds
With the completion of the new House and Senate chambers and the new dome along with the disruption to the grounds during the Civil War the landscape surrounding the expanded Capitol desperately needed to be modernized. In 1873, Vermont Senator Justin Merrill, then Chairman of the Senate Commission for Public Grounds asked Olmsted to bring his design success to the seat of America's representative government. His design called for the landscape to enclose the Capitol and to support the architectural importance and symbolism of the structure. He would oversee the project for nearly 20 years followed by his son's firm Olmsted Brothers assessing and recommending landscape alterations in 1904.

Other Major Projects
Olmsted's final years brought two major projects, in 1890 'Biltmore' the expansive estate of George Vanderbilt, III in western North Carolina and the 1893 the Columbian Exposition in Chicago celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas. At Biltmore extensive formal gardens were designed to balance the massive chateaux style residence which transitioned to informal gardens and 'natural' areas to replanted forests which were managed by America's first trained forester Gifford Pinchot. Olmsted was a key planner for The Columbian Expo which was to be 4 times larger than the previous fair in Paris and would show that America as a nation had 'come of age'. Architectural styles emulated ancient Greece and Rome with the temporary structures painted gleaming white, hence the popularized 'White City'. A spin off of the organized siting of buildings and landscape was the 'City Beauty' movement which brought inspired urban design, planning, and cohesive architectural styles in the renewal of cities across the country. In Washington this was manifested in the work of the McMillian Commission modernizing the monumental core returning to the original L'Enfant design geometry.

Later Years
As Olmsted grew older his faculties began to fail and he was committed to the McLean Asylum in Waverly Massachusetts and facility which he had provided a landscape years earlier. He died at 81 in 1903 having trained dozens of students and practitioners and leaving his business in the capable hands of his two sons who went on to make a significant contribution to urban planning and completing thousands of commissions well into the 20 century.