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Who2 Biography:

Frederick Law Olmsted

, Architect / Landscape Designer
Frederick Law Olmsted
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  • Born: 1822
  • Birthplace: Hartford, Connecticut
  • Died: 28 August 1903
  • Best Known As: The designer of Central Park

Frederick Law Olmsted has been called "the founder of American landscape architecture and the nation's foremost parkmaker" by the National Park Service. Olmsted was born into a well-to-do family and dabbled in various professions until being appointed superintendent of Central Park during the park's design phase in 1857. With fellow designer Calvert Vaux, he designed the 843-acre park and oversaw its early development. Central Park was a tremendous success, and established the themes which are now closely associated with Olmsted, especially his use of hills, trees and curved walkways to give visitors intriguing vistas and a feeling of serene isolation from the city. Olmsted and Vaux later formed a partnership and designed Brooklyn's Prospect Park as well as major parks in Buffalo, Louisville and elsewhere. Olmsted founded his own firm in 1883 in Brookline, Massachusetts and conceived Boston's "Emerald Necklace" of greenspaces. Among his many other projects, he played a major role in the 1870s redesign of the U.S. Capitol grounds and in the design of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Olmstead retired in 1895 and his firm was taken over by his son, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.

Olmsted's Brookline estate, "Fairsted," is now a national historic site... Prior to his landscape work, he was a journalist and co-founded The Nation magazine... Olmsted married his brother's widow in 1859.

 
 
Art Encyclopedia: Frederick Law Olmsted

(b Hartford, CT, 26 April 1822; d Waverly, MA, 22 Aug 1903). American landscape designer, urban planner and writer. Influenced by 18th-century English traditions of landscape design and by his own social beliefs in the importance of community and the civilizing role of aesthetic taste, Olmsted undertook a large number of public and private commissions. His commissions ranged from regional plans and scenic reservations to residential communities, academic campuses, and the grounds of private estates. With his partner CALVERT VAUX and later independently, he designed a series of city parks systems between 1858 and 1895 in which landscaped parks were integrated with other public spaces through broad interconnecting thoroughfares, or parkways, which incorporated drives, paths and areas of turf and trees. His major work includes Central Park (1858-77), New York, and the 'Emerald Necklace' series of public spaces in Boston (1880s). He believed in the power of landscaped scenery to exercise a restorative and civilizing influence.

See the Abbreviations for further details.


 
Biography: Frederick Law Olmsted

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), American landscape architect, was prominent in promoting and planning recreational parks across the country.

Frederick Law Olmsted was born at Hartford, Conn., on April 26, 1822. He did not matriculate at college because of weak eyes, but he attended lectures at Yale University intermittently and became an honorary member of the class of 1847. He also studied engineering. In 1844 Olmsted decided to become a farmer and, after getting practical experience, settled on Staten Island, where he operated a farm until 1854. In 1859 he married Mary Cleveland Perkins Olmsted, the widow of his brother; the couple had two children.

In 1851 Olmsted visited Andrew Jackson Downing, who with others had conceived the idea of creating a vast park in New York City. Before realizing his dream, Downing died. Olmsted kept the idea alive and in 1857 was appointed superintendent of what became Central Park. He and Calvert Vaux then won the design competition for the park, and in 1858 Olmsted was advanced to chief architect of Central Park. During the Civil War he resigned his appointment over political differences and in 1863 accepted the superintendency of the Frémont Mariposa mining estates in California.

When Olmsted returned to New York in 1865, he and Vaux were reappointed landscape architects for Central Park. The Olmsted firm became the foremost landscape architects in America. Their projects included Prospect Park, Brooklyn (1865); the village of Riverside near Chicago (1868); Mount Royal Park, Montreal (1873-1881); the grounds of the Capitol, Washington, D.C. (1874-1885); the Boston park system (1875-1895); Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif. (1886-1889); and Jackson Park, Chicago (1895). Olmsted's most important late work was the design for the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago (1890-1893).

Restless by nature, Olmsted traveled frequently and often published his diaries and talks. He wrote Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (1852), A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey through Texas (1857), and A Journey in the Back Country (1860).

Always interested in publishing, he and C. S. Sargent founded the journal Garden and Forest. Olmsted further encouraged park planning by publishing Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns (1871) and A Consideration of the Justifying Value of a Public Park (1881). He died on Aug. 28, 1903, having witnessed the enthusiastic development in American cities of public park systems.

Further Reading

There is no definitive study of Olmsted's work. Important as source material is Frederick Law Olmsted: Landscape Architect, edited by F. L. Olmsted, Jr., and Theodora Kimball (2 vols., 1922-1928), which contains many of his papers and emphasizes Central Park. Julius G. Fabos and others, comps., Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr.: Founder of Landscape Architecture in America (1968), is a brief, well-illustrated survey of Olmsted's career; it contains illustrations of his projects, an appendix listing his major works, and a chronology of his life. See also Broadus Mitchell, Frederick Law Olmsted: A Critic of the Old South (1924).

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Frederick Law Olmsted

(born April 26, 1822, Hartford, Conn., U.S. — died Aug. 28, 1903, Brookline, Mass.) U.S. landscape architect. He traveled throughout the American South in the 1850s and won fame for several books describing its slaveholding culture. During an extended vacation in Europe, he became profoundly impressed with English landscaping, which he described in Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (1852). In 1857 he was hired as superintendent of New York City's newly planned Central Park. With the architect Calvert Vaux (1824 – 95), he won a competition to design the park, and he became its chief architect in 1858. The result was a nature-lover's paradise incorporating lawns, woods, ponds, and meandering paths; it represented one of the first attempts in the U.S. to apply art to the improvement of nature in a public park. Other Olmsted parks include Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York City; a Niagara Falls, N.Y., park project; an extensive system of parks and parkways in Boston; and the World's Columbian Exposition (later Jackson Park) in Chicago. As chairman of the first Yosemite commission, he helped secure the area as a permanent public park.

For more information on Frederick Law Olmsted, visit Britannica.com.

 
Architecture and Landscaping: Frederick Law Olmsted

(1822–1903)

One of the most important landscape-architects of C19 after Downing's death, he developed the C18 English Picturesque style of landscape, and was an innovator in the design of public parks, much influenced by Paxton's Birkenhead Park, Ches. (1847), as is clear from his admiration for English landscape-design, expressed in his Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (1852).

With Calvert Vaux (who had been associated with Downing) he created Central Park, NYC (from 1858), an ingenious scheme with a wide variety of types of landscape, including rock-work with cascades, meadows and water, and traffic-routes sunk from view, with paths over and under them as the grade required. He designed the campus for the College of California at Berkeley, Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, CA (1864), and proposed creating a nature-reserve in the Yosemite Valley, a precedent for the National Parks movement. Again with Vaux he designed Prospect Park, Brooklyn (1865–73), resumed work on Central Park, and planned Riverside, near Chicago, IL (1868), which proposed dwellings around common land, parks, and the beginnings of a scheme that anticipated pedestrian routes. He began the landscaping around the Federal Capitol, Washington, DC (1874), his work being completed by his son F. L. Olmsted, jun. (1870–1957), in the 1920s, who continued to practise with the elder Olmsted's adopted stepson, John Charles Olmsted (1852–1920).

Persuaded to settle in Massachusetts by H. H. Richardson (with whom Olmsted had collaborated on the design of the State Asylum for the Insane, Buffalo, NY (1871), and on other projects) in 1881, Olmsted had commenced designs for the system of parks in Boston in 1878, a brilliant scheme forming a meandering trail of greenery and water connecting Charles River to Franklin Park. He contributed to the designs of the campus of Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA (1886), worked with Vaux on the Niagara Falls Reservation, NY (1887), and designed the Louisville Park system, KY (1891). His last large scheme was the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago (1893), where he created a sylvan setting for the Neo-Classical buildings of McKim, Mead, & White, Daniel Burnham, and others. Olmsted's system of transport, roads, and jetties for water-borne visitors was, like most of his work, forward-looking, imaginative, and inventive. He was a prolific writer, and published numerous works of considerable importance.

Bibliography

  • Beveridge (1995)
  • Burley et al. (1996)
  • C. Cook (1972)
  • I. Fisher (1986)
  • L. Hall (1995)
  • LeG&S (1996)
  • McLaughlin (ed.) (from 1977)
  • Olmsted & Hubbard (eds.) (1973)
  • Placzek (ed.) (1982)
  • Roper (1973)
  • E. Stevenson (2000)
  • Sutton (ed.) (1979)
  • Todd (1982)
  • Jane Turner (1996)
  • W&S (1994)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

 
Spotlight: Frederick Law Olmsted

From our Archives: Today's Highlights, April 26, 2006

Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed NY's Central Park, was born on this date in 1822. Also a journalist, Olmsted researched and reported on slavery in the US's southern states, finding it economically inefficient as well as morally abhorrent. He was a founder of The Nation and wrote several books. Among the other sites Olmsted designed are the Niagara Reservation in Niagara Falls, NY; Mount Royal Park in Montreal; Jackson Park in Chicago, IL; and the grounds surrounding the Capitol building in Washington, DC.
 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Olmsted, Frederick Law,
1822–1903, American landscape architect and writer, b. Hartford, Conn. Although his Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England had appeared in 1852, Olmsted first attained fame for journalistic accounts of his travels in the American South during the early 1850s. In these works, published in book form as A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey through Texas (1857), A Journey in the Back Country (1860), and Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom (1861), he painted vivid pictures of the evils of slaveholding society. During the Civil War he served as secretary to the U.S. Sanitary Commission and pioneered various concepts of public health.

When Central Park in New York City was projected (1856), Olmsted and Calvert Vaux prepared the plan that was accepted two years later, and Olmsted superintended its execution. The well-planned public park was a new departure, which Olmsted developed in many other parks and cities, e.g., Prospect Park, Brooklyn, N.Y.; South Park, Chicago; Mt. Royal Park, Montreal; park systems in Buffalo and Boston; and the grounds of the Capitol, Washington, D.C. One of his most spectacular achievements was the laying out of the grounds for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which he afterward redesigned as Jackson Park. Olmsted also took an interest in the creation of college campuses, e.g., Berkeley (1864), and state and national parks. In addition, he designed parkways and was involved in city planning.

His son, Frederick Law Olmsted, 1870–1957, b. Staten Island, N.Y., grad. Harvard, 1894, was also a landscape architect and city planner. He studied with his father and began practice in 1895. He taught (1900–1914) Harvard's first course in landscape architecture. As a city planner he served on many committees and government boards. In 1901 he was influential in the plan for beautifying Washington, D.C.

Bibliography

See F. L. Olmsted's Forty Years of Landscape Architecture: Central Park, ed. by F. L. Olmsted, Jr., and T. Kimball (1928, repr. 1973); The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, ed. by C. C. McLaughlin and C. E. Beveridge (5 vol., 1977–97); biographies of the elder Olmsted by L. W. Roper (1974) and W. Rybczynski (1999); studies by J. G. Fabos et al. (1968), E. Barlow (1972), and C. E. Beveridge and P. Rocheleau (1995).

 
Works: Works by Frederick Law Olmsted
(1822-1903)

1852Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England. The first of the landscape architect's accomplished travel books. Later works would include A Journey in the Seabord Slave States (1856), A Journey Through Texas (1857), and A Journey in the Back Country (1860).
1856A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, with Remarks on Their Economy. A collection of travel letters previously published in the New York Times and new observations made by the author as he again traveled from Virginia to Louisiana. The book includes an impartial look at the economic effects of slavery. Olmsted, the landscape architect who would design Central Park, Golden Gate Park, Boston's "Emerald Necklace," and the Stanford University campus, is known for his unbiased travel books.
1860A Journey to the Back Country. The third volume in a series of observations and ruminations based on the author's travels through slave states. It is a significant contemporary comment on the state of affairs and way of life in the antebellum South.
1861The Cotton Kingdom. A compilation of Olmsted's earlier travel books--A Journey to the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey Through Texas (1857), and A Journey in the Back Country (1860)--known for their evenhanded descriptions of the South. This two-volume edition is much praised by the North American Review for "enabl[ing] the reader with a much smaller expense of time, not only to acquaint himself with Mr. Olmsted's generalizations, results, and conclusions, but to examine specimens of each class of observations."

 
Wikipedia: Frederick Law Olmsted
Frederick Law Olmsted
FLOlmstead.jpg
Frederick Law Olmsted and TOM
Born April 26 1822(1822--)
Hartford, Connecticut
Died August 28 1903 (aged 81)
Belmont, Massachusetts
Occupation Architect
Spouse Mary Olmsted
Parents John and Charlotte Olmsted

Frederick Law Olmsted (April 26, 1822 – August 28, 1903) was an American landscape architect, famous for designing many well-known urban parks, including Central Park and Prospect Park in New York City. Other project include the country's oldest coordinated system of public parks and parkways in Buffalo, New York, the country's oldest state park, the Niagara Reservation in Niagara Falls, New York, Mount Royal Park in Montreal, the Emerald Necklace in Boston, Massachusetts, Cherokee Park (and the entire parks and parkway system) in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as Jackson Park, Washington Park, Midway Plaisance in Chicago for the World's Columbian Exposition, Detroit's 982 acre Belle Isle park, the landscape surrounding the United States Capitol building, Piedmont Park in Atlanta, and George Washington Vanderbilt II's Biltmore Estate in North Carolina.

Life and career

Youth and journalistic career

Olmsted was born in Hartford, Connecticut. His father, John Olmsted, a prosperous merchant, took a lively interest in nature, people, and places, which was inherited by both Frederick Law and his younger brother, John Hull. His mother, Charlotte Law (Hull) Olmsted, died when he was scarcely four years old, to be succeeded in 1827 by a congenial step-mother, Mary Ann Bull, who shared her husband's strong love of nature and had perhaps a more cultivated taste. When he was almost ready to enter Yale College in 1837, sumac poisoning weakened his eyes and he gave up college plans. After working as a seaman, merchant, and journalist, Olmsted settled on a farm on Staten Island that his father helped him to acquire in January 1899. This farm, named Tosomock Farm by Olmsted, was renamed "The Woods of Arden" by future owner Erastus Wiman. The house in which Olmsted lived still stands today at 4515 Hylan Blvd, near Woods of Arden Road.

Olmsted also had a significant career in journalism. In 1850 he traveled to England to visit public gardens, where he was greatly impressed by Joseph Paxton's Birkenhead Park, and subsequently published Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England in 1852. Interested in the slave economy, he was commissioned by the New York Daily Times (now the New York Times) to embark on an extensive research journey through the American South and Texas from 1852 to 1857. Olmsted took the view that the practice of slavery was not only morally odious, but expensive and economically inefficient. His dispatches were collected into multiple volumes which remain vivid first-person social documents of the pre-war South. The last of these, "Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom" (1861), published during the first six months of the American Civil War, helped inform and galvanize antislavery sentiment in New England. Olmsted also cofounded the magazine The Nation in 1865. On June 13, 1859, he married Mary Cleveland (Perkins) Olmsted, the widow of his brother John (who had died in 1857), and adopted her three sons, among them John Charles Olmsted. Frederick and Mary had two children who survived infancy: a daughter and a son, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.

New York City's Central Park

Olmsted's friend and mentor, Andrew Jackson Downing, the charismatic landscape architect from Newburgh, New York, first proposed the development of New York's Central Park as publisher of The Horticulturist magazine. It was Downing who introduced Olmsted to the English-born architect Calvert Vaux, whom Downing had personally brought back from England as his architect-collaborator. After Downing died in a widely publicized steamboat explosion on the Hudson River in July 1852, in his honor Olmsted and Vaux entered the Central Park design competition together—and won (1858). On his return from the South, Olmsted began executing the plan almost immediately. Olmsted and Vaux continued their informal partnership to design Prospect Park in Brooklyn from 1865 to 1873,[1] and other projects. Vaux remained in the shadow of Olmsted's grand public personality and social connections.

The design of Central Park embodies Olmsted's social consciousness and commitment to egalitarian ideals. Influenced by Downing and by his own observations regarding social class in England, China and the American South, Olmsted believed that the common green space must always be equally accessible to all citizens. This principle is now so fundamental to the idea of a "public park" as to seem self-evident, but it was not so then. Olmsted's tenure as park commissioner can be described as one long struggle to preserve that idea.

Civil War

Olmsted took leave as director of Central Park to work as Executive Secretary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a precursor to the Red Cross in Washington D.C. which tended to the wounded during the American Civil War. In 1862, during Union General George B. McClellan's Peninsula Campaign, a failed attempt to capture the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, he headed the medical effort for the sick and wounded at White House in New Kent County, where there was a ship landing on the Pamunkey River.

On the home front, Olmsted was one of the six founding members of the Union League Club of New York.

U.S. park designer

In 1863, he went west to become the manager of the Mariposa mining estate in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. For his early work in Yosemite Valley, Olmstead Point near Lake Tenaya is named after him. In 1865 Vaux and Olmsted formed Olmsted, Vaux and Company. When Olmsted returned to New York, he and Vaux designed Prospect Park; suburban Chicago's Riverside; Buffalo, New York's park system; Milwaukee, Wisconsin's grand necklace of parks; and the Niagara Reservation at Niagara Falls.

Olmsted not only created city parks in many cities around the country, he also conceived of entire systems of parks and interconnecting parkways which connected certain cities to green spaces. Two of the best examples of the scale on which Olmsted worked are one of the largest pieces of his work, the park system designed for Buffalo, New York, and the system he designed for Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

For a list of Olmsted designed parks in Buffalo, New York, please see Buffalo, New York parks system.

Olmsted was a frequent collaborator with Henry Hobson Richardson for whom he devised the landscaping schemes for half a dozen projects, including Richardson's commission for the Buffalo State Asylum.

In 1883 Olmsted established what is considered to be the first full-time landscape architecture firm in Brookline, Massachusetts. He called the home and office compound Fairsted, which today is the recently-restored Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site. From there Olmsted designed Boston's Emerald Necklace, the campus of Stanford University and the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago among many other projects.

Death and legacy

Frederick Law Olmsted, oil painting by John Singer Sargent, 1895, Biltmore Estate, Asheville, North Carolina
Enlarge
Frederick Law Olmsted, oil painting by John Singer Sargent, 1895, Biltmore Estate, Asheville, North Carolina

In 1895, senility forced Olmsted to retire. In 1898 he moved to Belmont, Massachusetts and took up residence as a resident patient at McLean Hospital, which he had landscaped several years before. He remained there until his death in 1903, and was buried in the Old North Cemetery, Hartford, Connecticut.

After Olmsted's retirement and death, his sons John Charles Olmsted and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. continued the work of their firm, doing business as the Olmsted Brothers. The firm lasted until 1950.

A quotation from Olmsted's friend and colleague architect Daniel Burnham could well serve as his epitaph. Referring to Olmsted in March, 1893, Burnham said, "An artist, he paints with lakes and wooded slopes; with lawns and banks and forest covered hills; with mountain sides and ocean views." (quoted from Larson's The Devil in the White City)

Academic campuses designed by Olmsted and sons

Between 1857 and 1950, Olmsted and his successors designed 355 school and college campuses. Some of the most famous are listed here.

Other notable Olmsted commissions

[2]

Olmsted in popular culture

In Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, Olmsted is featured as one of the most important figures participating in the design of the 1893 Chicago World's Colombian Exposition. In the book, his personality and actions are given significant coverage. In addition, his importance in designing the fair is highlighted (e.g., his part in picking the geographic site and his bureaucratic involvement in planning the fair).

See also

References

  • Beveridge, Charles E; Paul Rocheleau (October 1998). Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing the American Landscape. New York, New York: Universe Publishing. ISBN 0-7893-0228-4. 
  • (2003) Guide to Biltmore Estates. Asheville, North Carolina: The Biltmore Company. 
  • Hall, Lee (1995). Olmsted’s America: An "Unpractical" Man and His Vision of Civilization. Boston, MA: Bullfinch Press. 
  • Olmsted, Frederick Law (1856). A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States; With Remarks on Their Economy. 
  • Rybczynski, Witold (June 1999). A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and North America in the Nineteenth Century. New York, New York: Scribner. ISBN 0-684-82463-9. 
  • Sears, Stephen W., To the Gates of Richmond: the Peninsula Campaign (1992) Ticknor and Fields, New York, NY ISBN 0-89919-790-6
  1. ^ Lancaster, Clay (1972). Handbook of Prospect Park. Long Island University Press, 51 - 66. ISBN 0-913252-06-9. 
  2. ^ Commissions which are within New York City are all from:White, Norval & Willensky, Elliot; AIA Guide to New York City, 4th Edition; New York Chapter, American Institute of Architects; Crown Publishers/Random House. 2000. ISBN 0-8129-31069-8; ISBN 0-8129-3107-6.
  3. ^ a b http://www.halcyon.com/tmend/OlmstedNW.html#Portland

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Who2 Biography. Copyright © 1998-2008 by Who2, LLC. All rights reserved. See the Frederick Law Olmsted biography from Who2.  Read more
Art Encyclopedia. The Concise Grove Dictionary of Art. Copyright © 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.  Read more
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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Architecture and Landscaping. A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Copyright © 1999, 2006 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
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Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Frederick Law Olmsted".  Read more

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From Today's Highlights
April 26, 2006

My favorite place is Central Park because you never know what you're going to find there. I also like that when I look out the windows of surrounding hotels, it seems like I'm looking out over a forest.
- Haley Joel Osment

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