Olmsted, Frederick Law b.April 26, 1822; Hartford, Connecticut d.August 28, 1903; Belmont, Massachusetts
Most influential landscape architect of his time, who took a lead in introducing the German concept of “public parks” to the United States. Olmsted’s unconventional career path intersects in various ways with German culture and features collaborations with Germans.
He came to his different careers (journalist, scientific farmer, and landscape architect) as an autodidact. Without the benefit of a college education, he worked at a dry goods importing firm, a stint that did not last long. He then sailed to China in 1843 and, upon his return, took some classes at Yale College with physicist Benjamin Silliman. Active in the abolitionist movement, he went to the American South, securing support for antislavery German settlers in Texas and writing articles on slavery for the New York Daily Times. These influential essays were published as A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, with Remarks on Their Economy in 1856. He established a sound reputation as a journalist, served as managing editor of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, a leading literary and political magazine, for two years (1855-1857) and in 1865 co-founded the Nation, a magazine of political commentary that still exists today.
In 1847 Olmsted’s father bought him farmland, first in Connecticut and then on Staten Island, where he experimented with farming. In 1850, around harvesting time, Olmsted left his farm to accompany his brother John and a childhood friend, theologian and social reformer Charles Loring Brace, to Europe. His first encounter with public parks and gardens took place there, and his interest in the democratic values that he saw realized in German public parks was sparked. Fascinated by the mingling of all social classes in these public parks, Olmsted, as well as other American travelers, felt the necessity for such a democratic “green lung” in the United States.
Olmsted’s attempt at experimental farming and his success as a journalist prepared him well to become the most influential landscape architect of his time. A prolific author, he often accompanied and defended his designs with articulate essays. His eloquence proved particularly helpful when he became interested in scenic preservation; he helped to save Niagara Falls from commercial pursuits and launched Yosemite Valley to become a national park. Two aspects are characteristic of his career as a landscape architect: First, the range of his commissions was extraordinarily broad, involving designs for parks and parkways, as well as landscape designs for the government, private estates, college campuses, suburban residential communities, and even grounds for mental hospitals. Second, throughout his career, he collaborated with German gardeners and relied heavily on their botanical knowledge, as well as on their artistic sensibilities.
Olmsted’s first and certainly most famous project was his design for New York’s Central Park. When approached by Calvert Vaux, a British-born architect, to enter the competition to design America’s first large public park in 1857, Olmsted reluctantly obliged. The resulting design, “Greensward,” won against thirty-two other competitors and made Central Park immediately one of New York City’s hallmarks. Relying on German garden theory for his social vision and on German garden practice for his aesthetics, Olmsted appointed German gardeners such as Wilhelm L. Fischer and Ignaz Anton Pilat, to leading positions. He consulted with them and respected their artistic input and implementation of ideas. Characteristic of the design for Central Park were the succession of three-dimensional landscape paintings, sweeping meadows, curving roads separated by their function (walking, horseback riding, carriageways) and—most remarkable—the sunken transverse roads. They lowered the roads that cut through the park below other features so as not to disrupt the serenity of the landscape.
Other commissions quickly followed. To name but a few of the seventeen parks Olmsted created in the United States, in New York alone he designed Riverside Park, Morningside Park, and Prospect Park with Vaux, Fischer, and Pilat. Another major achievement was his park system in Boston, where Wilhelm Fischer was his second in command. The so-called Emerald Necklace consists of several different parks connected by parkways—that is, by tree-lined avenues that give the impression of being in a park already.
Olmsted designed more than parks. In keeping with his conviction that the capitol and its grounds must help “to form and train the tastes of the Nation” (Beveridge and Rocheleau 1995, 188) he created the U.S. Capitol grounds in Washington, D.C. Olmsted was further responsible for designing campuses at the nation’s most distinguished schools, such as Yale University, Columbia University, Stanford University, and Amherst College.
In an increasingly urbanized nation, Olmsted’s concern was to preserve the communal feeling he perceived was easily lost in the hustle and bustle of city life. As an antidote, he and Vaux planned sixteen suburbs, their most important suburban residential community being in Riverside, Illinois. In 1868 they redesigned 1,600 acres along the Des Plaines River, taking the existing scenery into account, preserving and enhancing it, building parks, and providing a healthful, communal, and near-rural life close to the city of Chicago.
The most famous commission Olmsted received for a private estate was Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. In 1888 Olmsted convinced George W Vanderbilt that the vast estate was not entirely suited for a park and suggested building a modest park, small but luscious gardens, and devoting 120,000 acres to a “well organized and systematically conducted attempt in forestry” (Beveridge and Rocheleau 1995, 225). The last private commission in Olmsted’s career, it was also the first that Olmsted devoted to scientific forestry.
During the seven years he worked on this major project, he was ably assisted by German forester Karl Shultze. While designing this distinguished private estate, Olmsted simultaneously concluded his career with his most prestigious public commission: he was asked to plan the landscape for the Great White City of the 1893 World’s ColumbianExposition, which he did in conjunction with German gardener Rudolph Ulrich. Due to a mental illness, Olmsted spent his last five years at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, which he had helped design thirty years earlier.
Franziska Kirchner
See also Central Park; Landscape Architects, German American
References and Further Reading
Beveridge, Charles E., and Paul Rocheleau.
Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing the American Landscape. New York: Rizzoli, 1995.
Beveridge, Charles E., and David Schuyler. The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted. Vols. 1-6, Suppl. Ser. Vol. 1. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University, 1977-1997.
Kirchner, Franziska. Der Central Park in New York. Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 2002.
Stevenson, Elizabeth. Park Maker: A Life of Frederick Law Olmsted. New York: Macmillan, 1977.
Zaitzevsky, Cynthia. Frederick Law Olmsted and the Boston Park System. Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1992.