Olmsted Brothers

The Olmsted Brothers, the landscape architecture firm succeeding that of Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903), was led by John Charles Olmsted (1852–1920), Olmsted's nephew, adopted son, and partner since 1884, and his only biological son, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. (1870–1957). Both second-generation Olmsteds made important contributions to landscape architecture and planning through their design work, their writings, and their efforts to establish and further the nascent professions of landscape architecture and city planning.

John Olmsted was born near Geneva, Switzerland, to John and Mary Olmsted. After his father's death, his mother married his uncle, and the elder Olmsted's career as a landscape designer shaped John's childhood and adolescent experiences. After graduation from Yale, John entered apprenticeship in his stepfather's office, and supplemented his landscape experiences with architectural study on a trip to Europe in 1877–1878. As the senior member of the firm until his death in 1920, John organized the firm's national practice and established training and office procedures for a growing staff. Among his talents were his remarkable visual memory, his sensitivity to the integration of landscape and architectural design, and his desire to design for the present but plan for the future.

John Olmsted's younger half-brother, Frederick, known as Rick, apprenticed under his father, spending a summer of his Harvard years at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and a year after graduation at the Vanderbilt estate, Biltmore. In 1895, he entered the Olmsted firm and became partner to John upon his father's retirement in 1897. The Olmsted firm was active until Rick Olmsted's retirement in 1949.

Like John, Rick's contributions combined design training and talent with a commitment to the professions. As the bearer of his father's name, Rick inherited the mantle of leader of the landscape profession at an [Page 1011]early date, and he emerged as a central intellectual figure in the early city planning movement during the first decades of the twentieth century. He was the landscape architect appointed to the Senate Park Commission in 1901 (better known as the McMillan Commission), the group that proposed a plan for Washington, D.C., that reclaimed and further enhanced the formality and monumentality of the Mall, and in the process established a prototype of the city beautiful movement's civic center. He also served as manager of the Town Planning Division of the U.S. Housing Corporation during World War I. In addition, Rick Olmsted was instrumental in the founding of several professional groups, including the National Planning Conference and the American City Planning Institute. Both Rick and John Olmsted were founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects and both served terms as its president.

A number of the Olmsted Brothers' design guidelines were much emulated and discussed, and their work continues to have influence today. Their community designs—for example, Roland Park (1897–1914) in Baltimore, Maryland, and Forest Hills Gardens (1906–1911) in Queens, New York—evidence careful siting of structures in relationship to street and landscape; the clustering of public services in a neighborhood center; the separation of circulation and establishment of a hierarchy of street types; and a focus on the linkage of community with center city. In addition, the brothers stressed that once the initial design work was complete, diligent maintenance, aesthetic education, and regulations for residents were critical to the attractive maturation of a residential landscape. As ingenious as their integration of lot and house, street and landscape, was their practice of situating all community design within a larger topographical context, including adjacent city and natural region.

...