Olmsted, Frederick Law (1822–1903)

U.S. landscape architect and writer

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) was an influential landscape architect and writer, widely acclaimed as the dean of American landscape architecture. Best known for his design of Central Park with architect Calvert Vaux (1824–1895), Olmsted's work as a designer of parks and suburbs and as an advocate of city and regional planning was sophisticated and influential. To the design of landscape, then largely an aesthetic endeavor that brought English forms to U.S. soil, Olmsted contributed a regional sensitivity in his choice of plant materials and landscape manipulation. Most important, Olmsted proposed that the city be treated as an interrelated system of transportation arteries and infrastructure, parks, and commercial, industrial and residential zones. This systematic approach to landscape design, which acknowledged the mutual effect of physical and social forces, is evident in Olmsted's writings, designs, and executed plans, whether Central Park, the World's Columbian Exposition (1890), his community schemes for Berkeley (1866) and River-side (1868), or George Vanderbilt's North Carolina estate, Biltmore (1888).

Prior to his long and successful career in landscape design, Olmsted had chosen farming as a career, which led him to botanical and agricultural study. A native of Hartford, Connecticut, Olmsted took a trip to England in 1850, after which he retained his interest in the plant world but turned his attentions to writing and landscape design. In 1852, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England was published to favorable reviews, followed by four volumes of travel accounts through the slaveholding states of the American South. In 1857, he was appointed superintendent of Central Park, which at the time was only a large tract of land with a plan to create the park. His position consisted of supervising a labor force that was clearing the land and managing the early stages of the park's creation. The following spring Olmsted, with architect Calvert Vaux (1824–1895), won the competition for the design of the park with their entry “Greensward.” Central Park and the subsequent design of Prospect Park in Brooklyn combined a diversity of open space, lush plantings, separated circulation paths, and spaces that permitted retreat from the pollution, noise, and speed of the city.

Olmsted's specific ideas concerning community design are best demonstrated in his design (with Vaux) for Riverside, Illinois, a speculative development west of Chicago on the Des Plaines River. Asserting that the sub-urb's design must support both the private aspects of domesticity and community identity and activities, Olmsted proposed placement of homes on large lots, screened by trees and plantings, but partially visible from the road. The public spaces of the road were designed to promote leisure and enjoyment, and facilitate the social aspects of movement to a public destination or outlook. Careful design of roads and lots would engage a third zone, that of the distant view. To link this spatially complex landscape to the city, of which it was a part, Olm-sted proposed a wide planted parkway that combined—as did his suburban street designs—beauty, efficiency, and technical precision.

Olmsted's preferred aesthetic for the suburb was a picturesque or naturalistic treatment of curving roads and lush plantings of trees and shrubs, and in this [Page 1010]regard, he owed a debt to the horticulturist and landscape architect Alexander Jackson Downing (1815–1852), and to a general trend that viewed nature as a palliative to the ills of the city. However, the specificity of Olmsted's site designs and planting programs, and his textual and graphic analyses of the suburb as an integrated physical and social system, itself one aspect of the larger urban system, were his major contributions to the evolution of U.S. planned community design.

An aerial view of Manhattan in March 1984. Central Park, designed by Olmsted, is the rectangular patch in the center of the island.

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