Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) designed the grounds of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., and other parts of that city; Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York; Belle Isle Park, in Michigan; portions of the campus of Stanford University near San Francisco, California; the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina; and many other instances of what might be called “mediated landscapes” throughout North America. Until recently, he was little remembered outside the textbooks, but he was famous in his own day, cheered as a pioneer of a particularly American kind of garden and landscape design.
Olmsted was a man of the city, and, though he loved the countryside, he labored first of all to make America’s cities—then grim, smoky, congested, and often dangerous places—more livable. (That remains a challenge for designers, planners, and environmentalists today.) Along the way, by bringing it within their reach, he instructed city dwellers in the pleasures and value of nature, incorporating a sense of the wild in all his designs. All this helped ease the way to the development of a national park system in the closing years of his life, and it is no accident that the greatest architect of that system, Theodore Roosevelt, was a New Yorker who admired what is perhaps Olmsted’s most famous creation, Central Park, and sought out his opinions on how to protect some of America’s most scenic places.
Like Roosevelt, Olmsted packed many careers, wide travel, and deep learning into a long life. He came from a good family, but he was restless, and his father worried that young Frederick, who showed indications of straying from respectable commerce into the arts, was destined to be a dabbler and wastrel. To prove him wrong, and to escape whatever remedy his father might try to apply—an apprenticeship or clerkship, perhaps—Olmsted signed on as a hand on a China-bound freighter, and he served his young years as a common sailor.
His shipboard service, which steered him into many storms and required backbreaking labor, convinced Frederick that the seafaring life was not for him. It did nothing to cure his wanderlust, however. He spent time in Europe, studying art and touring monuments and ruins. He managed, briefly and disastrously, a California gold mine. He crisscrossed the country many times over, writing reports and articles, and worked as an editor for the New York Daily Times and The Nation, where he polished the prose of Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Finally, during the Civil War, he became the administrator of a hospital unit, where he witnessed horrors and bureaucratic ineptitude.
His experiences in the war helped settle Olmsted somewhat. Having seen so much destruction, he was now determined to serve the cause of beauty. He developed a vision of America’s landscape, with its broad vistas and open skies, as a means of shaping the national character. He labored to make America’s urban spaces speak to that promise, bringing trees and scenery into the congested grid of urban streets. He inserted wilderness and pastoral settings into the heart of North American cities such as Montreal, Boston, and Chicago, preferring a small human scale and the randomness of real life to European public spaces, with their imposing architecture and nothing-out-of-place formal gardens.
His program of parks, broad avenues, and greenways would, Olmsted argued, serve a public good by connecting city dwellers to the natural world—and, more practically, by relieving the city’s grim monotony of concrete and metal. And he was right: New York without a Central Park would be a different, and far poorer, place.
It is worth looking at Central Park in detail, for it well illustrates Olmsted’s ideas on what a great public space should be. Working with and often arguing with a formally trained partner for the duration of the project, Olmsted insisted that lawns, trees, and water be the park’s three great elements, punctuated by small plantings of flowers rather than the great, elaborate flowerbeds favored in classic European landscape design. Olmsted used trees as a painter uses colors, mixing different species in different combinations against big, grassy foregrounds. That pleasure in mystery is reflected in Central Park’s playful, mazelike paths, glades, tunnels, and bridges, which enable dwellers in what is certainly America’s most crowded city to find little spots to get away from other people. His other urban parks fill much the same need, offering both private spaces for harried urbanites and large open areas where they could meet en masse to play, see sports events, listen to concerts, and enjoy the sun.
Olmsted also took away from his hospital experiences the notion that planning was the key to success. Whereas most Americans of his time lived from year to year, bound to the cycles of agriculture and business, he considered what his projects might look like a hundred years and more in the future. He carefully plotted the placement of statues, fountains, ponds, benches, and flowerbeds alike, and he drew and erased and measured and drew again before putting anything on the ground—a very good practice for any gardener or home-improvement buff to take up.
Olmsted insisted on being allowed to act independently to achieve his vision. His clients usually complied, though they didn’t always pay him on time. It is hard to imagine any designer being given as much autonomy today, for now endless commissions, interest groups, and municipal offices turn every project into a design by committee—which may be one reason why modern gardens, parks, and public spaces seem formulaic and uninteresting in comparison to his creations.