Issue Twelve
Frederick Law Olmsted and the Art of Unbending by Thomas H. Yorty
“Olmsted’s path through young adulthood into mid-life is one of the remarkable
19th century tales of American wanderlust.”
In 1836, when Frederick Law Olmsted was fourteen-years-old Ralph Waldo Emerson published his first book, Nature, in which he says, “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.” When Emerson wrote those words he was walking across Harvard Yard in the Town of Cambridge, Massachusetts. He goes on to say, “Within these plantations of God [city green spaces and rural wildernesses] we return to reason and faith…nothing can befall me in life…which nature cannot repair...I become a transparent eyeball; mean egotism vanishes; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”
Little did Olmsted know at the age of fourteen, under the tutelage of a Calvinist minister in Connecticut, that one day he would become America’s first and greatest landscape architect; he would design and build from coast to coast, north to south: urban parks, college campuses, and residential developments that would offer millions the very experience Emerson enshrined in his famous “transparent eyeball” essay.
Frederick Law Olmsted was born in 1822, the son of a prosperous Hartford, Connecticut retail merchant. His mother died when he was a young boy leaving him and his brother with a single parent until his father remarried and younger children arrived through the new union. As was the custom in such families, Frederick was sent to study with a parish minister who operated a kind of private academy for a dozen or so boys who lived in the attic of the church manse. While the experience was not pleasant and had questionable educational value, it made the young Olmsted independent and confident in his ability to face new situations–a capacity that would serve him the rest of his life.
Olmsted’s path through young adulthood into mid-life is one of the remarkable 19th century tales of American wanderlust. Notably, he did not arrive at his chosen career as a landscape architect (the profession he invented and named) until his mid-forties.
After temporary partial blindness prevented him from enrolling in Yale College, Olmsted, a classic late-bloomer, eventually found his footing operating a gentleman’s farm on Long Island, acquired and developed with his father’s financial support.
After his venture on Long Island, Olmsted worked aboard a merchant ship on a two-year voyage to China, traveled to England and Europe to study horticulture and city planning, toured the southern states and Texas (recording his experiences in a serialized column for a national publication), edited and published a literary journal, and designed and administered the construction of Central Park–America’s first major city park. During the Civil War, he served as Commissioner of the United States Sanitary Commission (predecessor to the American Red Cross) and oversaw thousands of workers bringing humanitarian relief to the battlefront. Before his leap of faith into what became the profession he established, he reorganized and ran a California gold mining operation in a dangerous frontier region.
Olmsted’s skill as an administrator was renowned. He was the equivalent of a modern day CEO-for-hire. His politics were moderate to liberal. He was not an abolitionist as were many of his New England friends and contemporaries, including Emerson, although he favored a planned and gradual end to slavery. His writings on the subject during his southern travels were highly influential in moving the north, including Lincoln, to ultimate opposition to slave holding and established him as a major literary figure. Olmsted possessed the intellectual curiosity of a social scientist in America’s rapidly changing society, yet he demonstrated the zeal of a reformer as he devoted the later half of his life to landscape architecture and city planning.
Almost ten years after designing Central Park (1858), Olmsted’s former partner, Calvert Vaux, wrote to his old friend in San Francisco urging him to return to New York where Vaux had secured a contract to design and build Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The project, Vaux said, was unencumbered by the politics and personalities that plagued their experience with Central Park and would allow Olmsted optimal artistic freedom. It is Calvert Vaux who gets credit for recognizing and naming Olmsted’s artistic genius before anyone else, perhaps even Olmsted himself.
What Vaux, the engineer, needed to undertake Prospect Park, was an artist. The timing of his invitation could not have been better. Olmsted had just finished his work at the gold mine and was temporarily occupied in the design of what would become the campus of the University of California at Berkley. His work in the Bay Area–which also included a cemetery–gave him an opportunity to experiment with what he had learned on his days of reflection and reverie away from the mining business in a spectacular location he discovered and developed that would later become Yosemite National Park. It was here that nature’s beauty resonated with his earliest memories of childhood–riding horseback on a pillow in his father’s lap as they went looking for picturesque scenery in western Connecticut. Olmsted’s own Type A personality was tempered by these excursions into the California wilderness and his first designs for the new college and cemetery were done with the goal of adapting the landscape as a source of peace and solace in a rapidly growing, sometimes rough, western metropolis. Vaux’s persistent encouragement and Olmsted’s fascination with the aesthetic dimension of landscape design led to a renewal of their former partnership.
What followed Olmsted’s return to the east was a career as prolific, original, and significant as that of any American artist including Frank Lloyd Wright. Central Park, beautiful as it is, by comparison to his post-Civil War work, lacks Olmsted’s mature artistry. The Brooklyn project–free from elected officials and oversight boards–was a breakthrough in landscape design. Other commissions for a wide range of clients quickly followed: private residences such as the Vanderbilt’s Biltmore Estate in western North Carolina; campuses for Yale, Cornell, Stanford and Columbia; a comprehensive design for parks, avenues and neighborhoods for Buffalo, New York; and national projects like the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition and the grounds of the U.S. Capitol. By themselves these were stunning achievements but together they earned Olmsted the undisputed reputation as America’s premier landscape architect.
Olmsted’s love for city planning and park design gave him his deepest fulfillment as a shaper of America’s future and revealed his gift as a visionary. After the Civil War, the nation entered a period of increasing optimism. By the end of the century an unfettered confidence in the nation’s ability to invent, design, produce and manage a close to perfect society prevailed. Olmsted’s passion and vision as a landscape architect not only reflected this progressive spirit, but gave life to it.
Olmsted’s aesthetic genius and principles for landscape architecture though born of the 19th century continue to speak to the 21st century urban experience. For today’s city dwellers and suburbanites it is hard to imagine what life in antebellum, pre-Central Park, urban America must have been like. With the Industrial Revolution came a dramatic change not only in the landscape, atmosphere and fresh water tributaries, but also a major shift from the easy patterns of village living to an impersonal, dehumanizing regimentation of life in the city. In response to this new age, Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote Nature, and Frederick Law Olmsted designed and built urban landscapes.
Olmsted’s vision for urban living embodied new ideas about the unconscious as well as a growing belief in the possibilities of social engineering. These theories did not originate with Olmsted but his application of them to landscape design was innovative and fresh. Scenery, he said, works by an unconscious process–like listening to music–that enables the viewer to relax or “unbend.” Life in the modern industrial city was rife with mental distraction. Pleasing, peaceful scenery mitigated the strain and noise of the city. The effect of surrounding scenery, Olmsted believed, like a soothing symphony, got “behind” thought and could not be articulated in words.
Olmsted’s positioning of plants, shrubs and trees as well as rolling meadows, woodlands, streams and lakes created a single coherent plan. He was one of the early proponents of “form follows function” and disdained the use of ornamentation for its own sake.
In Olmsted’s view, parks were a noble expression of the democratic experiment–accessible to all. Women, subject to the demands of household work and care of children could find relief from debilitating fatigue. The poor, unable to escape the city, had in the park, a place of solace and refreshment. Parks helped to keep people in the city who would otherwise move away and attract those to it who would have remained elsewhere.
While visitors to Olmsted’s parks and campuses may not feel themselves becoming “transparent eyeballs” at one with the Universal Being, there is a discernable relaxation if not serenity awaiting anyone who strolls into one of his landscapes. In a society suffering from terrorist threats, road-rage and the accessibility of recreation and prescription drugs to ease the body and mind, Olmsted’s vision of using landscape to regain personal equilibrium may be as valuable now as ever. The next time you’re stressed-out why not pick up a copy of Emerson’s Nature, locate the nearest Olmsted Park, find a bench and renew your soul.
Little did Olmsted know at the age of fourteen, under the tutelage of a Calvinist minister in Connecticut, that one day he would become America’s first and greatest landscape architect; he would design and build from coast to coast, north to south: urban parks, college campuses, and residential developments that would offer millions the very experience Emerson enshrined in his famous “transparent eyeball” essay.
Frederick Law Olmsted was born in 1822, the son of a prosperous Hartford, Connecticut retail merchant. His mother died when he was a young boy leaving him and his brother with a single parent until his father remarried and younger children arrived through the new union. As was the custom in such families, Frederick was sent to study with a parish minister who operated a kind of private academy for a dozen or so boys who lived in the attic of the church manse. While the experience was not pleasant and had questionable educational value, it made the young Olmsted independent and confident in his ability to face new situations–a capacity that would serve him the rest of his life.
Olmsted’s path through young adulthood into mid-life is one of the remarkable 19th century tales of American wanderlust. Notably, he did not arrive at his chosen career as a landscape architect (the profession he invented and named) until his mid-forties.
After temporary partial blindness prevented him from enrolling in Yale College, Olmsted, a classic late-bloomer, eventually found his footing operating a gentleman’s farm on Long Island, acquired and developed with his father’s financial support.
After his venture on Long Island, Olmsted worked aboard a merchant ship on a two-year voyage to China, traveled to England and Europe to study horticulture and city planning, toured the southern states and Texas (recording his experiences in a serialized column for a national publication), edited and published a literary journal, and designed and administered the construction of Central Park–America’s first major city park. During the Civil War, he served as Commissioner of the United States Sanitary Commission (predecessor to the American Red Cross) and oversaw thousands of workers bringing humanitarian relief to the battlefront. Before his leap of faith into what became the profession he established, he reorganized and ran a California gold mining operation in a dangerous frontier region.
Olmsted’s skill as an administrator was renowned. He was the equivalent of a modern day CEO-for-hire. His politics were moderate to liberal. He was not an abolitionist as were many of his New England friends and contemporaries, including Emerson, although he favored a planned and gradual end to slavery. His writings on the subject during his southern travels were highly influential in moving the north, including Lincoln, to ultimate opposition to slave holding and established him as a major literary figure. Olmsted possessed the intellectual curiosity of a social scientist in America’s rapidly changing society, yet he demonstrated the zeal of a reformer as he devoted the later half of his life to landscape architecture and city planning.
Almost ten years after designing Central Park (1858), Olmsted’s former partner, Calvert Vaux, wrote to his old friend in San Francisco urging him to return to New York where Vaux had secured a contract to design and build Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The project, Vaux said, was unencumbered by the politics and personalities that plagued their experience with Central Park and would allow Olmsted optimal artistic freedom. It is Calvert Vaux who gets credit for recognizing and naming Olmsted’s artistic genius before anyone else, perhaps even Olmsted himself.
What Vaux, the engineer, needed to undertake Prospect Park, was an artist. The timing of his invitation could not have been better. Olmsted had just finished his work at the gold mine and was temporarily occupied in the design of what would become the campus of the University of California at Berkley. His work in the Bay Area–which also included a cemetery–gave him an opportunity to experiment with what he had learned on his days of reflection and reverie away from the mining business in a spectacular location he discovered and developed that would later become Yosemite National Park. It was here that nature’s beauty resonated with his earliest memories of childhood–riding horseback on a pillow in his father’s lap as they went looking for picturesque scenery in western Connecticut. Olmsted’s own Type A personality was tempered by these excursions into the California wilderness and his first designs for the new college and cemetery were done with the goal of adapting the landscape as a source of peace and solace in a rapidly growing, sometimes rough, western metropolis. Vaux’s persistent encouragement and Olmsted’s fascination with the aesthetic dimension of landscape design led to a renewal of their former partnership.
What followed Olmsted’s return to the east was a career as prolific, original, and significant as that of any American artist including Frank Lloyd Wright. Central Park, beautiful as it is, by comparison to his post-Civil War work, lacks Olmsted’s mature artistry. The Brooklyn project–free from elected officials and oversight boards–was a breakthrough in landscape design. Other commissions for a wide range of clients quickly followed: private residences such as the Vanderbilt’s Biltmore Estate in western North Carolina; campuses for Yale, Cornell, Stanford and Columbia; a comprehensive design for parks, avenues and neighborhoods for Buffalo, New York; and national projects like the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition and the grounds of the U.S. Capitol. By themselves these were stunning achievements but together they earned Olmsted the undisputed reputation as America’s premier landscape architect.
Olmsted’s love for city planning and park design gave him his deepest fulfillment as a shaper of America’s future and revealed his gift as a visionary. After the Civil War, the nation entered a period of increasing optimism. By the end of the century an unfettered confidence in the nation’s ability to invent, design, produce and manage a close to perfect society prevailed. Olmsted’s passion and vision as a landscape architect not only reflected this progressive spirit, but gave life to it.
Olmsted’s aesthetic genius and principles for landscape architecture though born of the 19th century continue to speak to the 21st century urban experience. For today’s city dwellers and suburbanites it is hard to imagine what life in antebellum, pre-Central Park, urban America must have been like. With the Industrial Revolution came a dramatic change not only in the landscape, atmosphere and fresh water tributaries, but also a major shift from the easy patterns of village living to an impersonal, dehumanizing regimentation of life in the city. In response to this new age, Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote Nature, and Frederick Law Olmsted designed and built urban landscapes.
Olmsted’s vision for urban living embodied new ideas about the unconscious as well as a growing belief in the possibilities of social engineering. These theories did not originate with Olmsted but his application of them to landscape design was innovative and fresh. Scenery, he said, works by an unconscious process–like listening to music–that enables the viewer to relax or “unbend.” Life in the modern industrial city was rife with mental distraction. Pleasing, peaceful scenery mitigated the strain and noise of the city. The effect of surrounding scenery, Olmsted believed, like a soothing symphony, got “behind” thought and could not be articulated in words.
Olmsted’s positioning of plants, shrubs and trees as well as rolling meadows, woodlands, streams and lakes created a single coherent plan. He was one of the early proponents of “form follows function” and disdained the use of ornamentation for its own sake.
In Olmsted’s view, parks were a noble expression of the democratic experiment–accessible to all. Women, subject to the demands of household work and care of children could find relief from debilitating fatigue. The poor, unable to escape the city, had in the park, a place of solace and refreshment. Parks helped to keep people in the city who would otherwise move away and attract those to it who would have remained elsewhere.
While visitors to Olmsted’s parks and campuses may not feel themselves becoming “transparent eyeballs” at one with the Universal Being, there is a discernable relaxation if not serenity awaiting anyone who strolls into one of his landscapes. In a society suffering from terrorist threats, road-rage and the accessibility of recreation and prescription drugs to ease the body and mind, Olmsted’s vision of using landscape to regain personal equilibrium may be as valuable now as ever. The next time you’re stressed-out why not pick up a copy of Emerson’s Nature, locate the nearest Olmsted Park, find a bench and renew your soul.