Frederick Law Olmsted (April 26, 1822 - August 28, 1903) is an American landscape architect, journalist, social critic, and public administrator. He is popularly regarded as the father of American landscape architecture. Olmsted is famous for designing alongside many of the city's famous parks with its senior partner Calvert Vaux, including Central Park in New York City and Cadwalader Park in Trenton.
Other projects involving Olmsted include the co-ordinated first and coordinated park and park system in Buffalo, New York; the country's oldest state park, the Niagara Reservation in Niagara Falls, New York; one of the first planned communities in the United States, Riverside, Illinois; Mount Royal Park in Montreal, Quebec; Emerald Necklace in Boston, Massachusetts; Highland Park in Rochester, New York; Thompson Park in Watertown, New York; Belle Isle Park, on the Detroit River for Detroit, Michigan; Large Garden Necklace in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Cherokee Park and the entire park and parkway system in Louisville, Kentucky; The 735-acre (297Ã, ha) Forest Park in Springfield, Massachusetts, features America's first public "wading pool"; George Washington Vanderbilt II Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina; master plan for University of California, Berkeley, University of Maine, and Stanford University near Palo Alto, California, as well as for The Lawrenceville School; and Montebello Park. Catharines, Ontario. In Chicago, the project includes: Jackson Park; Washington Park; Platifance Midway for the World Exposition of Colombia in 1893; the southern part of Chicago's "emerald necklace" boulevard ring; and the University of Chicago campus. In Washington, D.C., he works in the landscape around the United States Capitol building.
The quality of Olmsted's landscape architecture was recognized by his contemporaries, who showered him with a prestigious commission. Daniel Burnham said of him, "He painted with lakes and wooded slopes, with lawns and ledges and forest-covered hills, with mountains and sea views...." His work, especially at Central Park in New York City, a standard of excellence that continues to influence landscape architecture in the United States. He is an early and important activist in the conservation movement, including working at Niagara Falls; the Adirondack region in northern New York; and the National Park system; and although less well known, played a major role in organizing and providing medical services to the Union Armed Forces in the Civil War.
Video Frederick Law Olmsted
Biography
Early life and education
Olmsted was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on April 26, 1822. His father, John Olmsted, was a prosperous merchant interested in nature, people and places; Frederick Law and his younger brother, John Hull, also showed this interest. His mother, Charlotte Law (Hull) Olmsted, died before his fourth birthday. Her father remarried in 1827 with Mary Ann Bull, who shares her husband's strong love with nature and may have a more cultivated flavor.
When the young Olmsted was almost ready to enter Yale College, poisoning the sumac weakened his eyes, so he gave up his college plans. After working as an apprentice seaman, merchant, and journalist, Olmsted settled on a 125-hectare farm in January 1848 on the southern coast of Staten Island NY, a farm that his father helped him get. This farm, originally named Akerly Homestead, was renamed Tosomock Farm by Olmsted. It was later renamed "The Woods of Arden" by the owner Erastus Wiman. (The house where Olmsted lives still stands at 4515 Hylan Boulevard, near Woods of Arden Road.)
Marriage and family
On June 13, 1859, Olmsted married Mary Cleveland (Perkins) Olmsted, widow of his brother, John (who died in 1857). Daniel Fawcett Tiemann, the mayor of New York, inaugurated the wedding. She adopted her three children (nephew and niece), John Charles Olmsted, Charlotte Olmsted (Bryant) and Owen Olmsted. Frederick and Mary had two children together who survived in childhood: a daughter, Marion (born October 28, 1861), and a son of Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. Their first child, John Theodore Olmsted, was born on June 13, 1860, and died in infancy.
Maps Frederick Law Olmsted
Careers
Journalism
Olmsted has a significant career in journalism. In 1850, he went to England to visit public parks, where he was very impressed by Birkenhead Park Joseph Paxton. He later wrote and published the Walks and Talks of American Farmer in England in 1852. It supported him to find additional work.
Interested in the slave economy, he was commissioned by the New York Daily Times (now The New York Times) to begin an extensive research trip through South America and Texas from 1852 to 1857. His submissions to Times was collected into three volumes ( A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey Through Texas (1857), Travel in the Return Country in Winter 1853-4 (1860)) which remained the first social document to live in the pre-war South. A one-volume summary, Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom (1861), was published during the first six months of the American Civil War on the advice of English publisher Olmsted. For this he wrote a new introduction (on "The Present Crisis") in which he explicitly stated his views on the influence of slavery on the economic and social conditions of the southern states.
My own observation of the real condition of the people of our Slave Countries, gives me... the impression that cotton monopoly is in some ways more harmful to them than good; and although the written narrative of what I saw was not meant to establish this, after reviewing for this publication, I find the impression has become a belief.
He argues that slavery has made the slave country inefficient (the number of assigned jobs takes 4 times longer in Virginia as in the North) and retreats both economically and socially. The profit of slavery fell to no more than 8,000 large planters; a rather larger group has about the standard of living of a New York City policeman, but the proportion of very rich free white people as Northern workers is small. Slavery means that 'the proportion of men who improve their condition is far less than in any North society; and that the natural resources of the land were strangely unused, or used with a bad economy. '
Southern civilization is restricted to rich plantation owners; poverty from the rest of the South white population prevented the development of civilian facilities taken away in the North, he said.
Citizens of cotton countries, overall, are poor. They work a little, and that's a bit, bad; they produce little, they sell little; they buy little, and they have little - very little - from the comfort and general entertainment of civilized life. Their poverty is not only material; it's intellectual and it's moral... They are not generous and unfriendly and their conversation is not like a brave man.
Among his travels in Europe and the South, Olmsted served as editor for Putnam's Magazine for 2 years and an agent with Dix, Edwards and Co., before corporate bankruptcy during Panic of 1857. Olmsted provided financial support for, and sometimes wrote for, magazines The Nation , founded in 1865.
New York City <
Andrew Jackson Downing, a charismatic landscape architect from Newburgh, New York, was one of the first to propose the development of Central Park in New York in his role as a publisher of The Horticulturist magazine. A friend and mentor for Olmsted, Downing introduced him to the British-born architect Calvert Vaux. Downing has brought Vaux from England as his architect's collaborator. After Downing died in July 1852, in the widely publicized steamboat explosion on the Hudson River, Olmsted and Vaux entered the Central Park design competition together, against Egbert Ludovicus Viele among others. Vaux invited an inexperienced Olmsted to participate in a design competition with him, impressed by Olmsted's theories and his political contacts. Before this, in contrast to the more experienced Vaux, Olmsted never really designed and implemented landscape designs.
They were announced as winners in 1858. Upon returning from the South, Olmsted began executing their plans shortly. Olmsted and Vaux continued their informal partnership to design Prospect Park in Brooklyn from 1865 to 1873. It was followed by other projects. Vaux remains in the shadow of Olmsted's public prowess and social connections.
Central Park's design embodies social awareness and Olmsted's commitment to egalitarian ideals. Influenced by Downing and his own observations of social class in England, China and South America, Olmsted believes that the common green space must always be equally accessible to all citizens, and must be maintained against personal encroachment. This principle is now fundamental to the notion of "public park", but it is not considered necessary later. Olmsted's tenure as a park commissary in New York was a long struggle to defend the idea.
Leader of the Sanitation Commission
Olmsted took leave as director of Central Park to work as Executive Secretary of the US Sanitation Commission, a precursor to the Red Cross in Washington, D.C. He tended to be wounded during the American Civil War. In 1862 during the Union General Mining Campaign of George B. McClellan, Olmsted led a medical effort for the sick and injured at the White House in New Kent County, where a ship landed on the Pamunkey River.
In front of the house, Olmsted is one of six founding members of the Union League Club of New York.
In addition, Olmsted above helped to raise three colored regiments (African Americans) in New York City and held an exhibition that earned a million dollars for the United States Sanitation Commission.
In recognition of his services during the Civil War, Olmsted was elected a Third Class member of the Massachusetts Command of the Military Order of the Loyal United States (MOLLUS) on May 2, 1888, and was given the number 6345 badge. Olmsted MOLLUS election is important because he is one of the few elected civilians belong to an organization composed almost exclusively of military officers and their descendants. In 1891 he joined the Connecticut Society of American Revolutionary Children by the right descendants of his grandfather Benjamin Olmsted who served in the 4th Connecticut Regiment in 1775.
AS. garden designers
In 1863, he went west to become manager of the Rancho Las Mariposas-Mariposa mining plantation in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.
In 1865 Vaux and Olmsted formed Olmsted, Vaux & amp; Co When Olmsted returned to New York, he and Vaux set up Prospect Park; Riverside park on the outskirts of Chicago; garden system for Buffalo, New York; Milwaukee, a large garden necklaces in Wisconsin; and Reservation Falls at Niagara Falls.
Olmsted not only created many city parks throughout the country, he also understood the entire park system and interconnecting land routes to connect certain cities with green spaces. Some of the best examples of the scale at which Olmsted works are garden systems designed for Buffalo, New York, one of the largest projects; the system he designed for Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and park systems designed for Louisville, Kentucky, which is one of only four completed Olmsted garden systems in the world.
Olmsted is a frequent collaborator with architect Henry Hobson Richardson, for whom he designed landscape schemes for half a dozen projects, including Richardson's commission for the State of Buffalo Asylum.
In 1883 Olmsted established what was considered the first full-time landscape architectural firm in Brookline, Massachusetts. He calls the home and office complex of Fairsted . It is now the restored Frederick Law Olmsted National Site. From there Olmsted designed the Boston Emerald Necklace, the Smith College campus, Stanford University and the University of Chicago, and the 1893 World Exposition in Chicago, among many other projects.
Conservation
Olmsted is an important early leader of the conservation movement in the United States. An expert in California, he is probably one of the men of "luck, taste and refinement" proposing, through Senator John Conness, that Congress designates the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove as a public reserve. This is the first land set aside by Congress for the common good. Olmsted served a one-year appointment to the State reserve board of commissioners, and his 1865 report to Congress on board recommendations laid the ethical framework for government for public land reserves, to protect their "value for posterity". He described the landscape as "sublime" and "magnificent", stressing that the landscape's value is not in any individual waterfall, cliff, or tree, but in "miles of scenery where terrible high cliffs and massive stones and staining and very beautiful, flanked and hung and shadowed and overshadowed by the gentle foliage of beautiful and beautiful trees and shrubs, reflected from the most tranquil pools, and linked to the quietest meadows, the most delightful rivers, and every kind of gentle and peaceful pastoral beauty. "
In the 1880s he was active in efforts to preserve the natural wonders of Niagara Falls, threatened with industrialization by the construction of power plants. At the same time, he campaigned to preserve the Adirondack region in northern New York. He was one of the founders of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1898.
Olmsted is also known to oppose a park project on the grounds of conservation. In 1891, Olmsted refused to develop a plan for the Presque Isle near Marquette, Michigan, saying that "should not be undermined by the intrusion of artificial objects."
Death and inheritance
In 1895, senility forced Olmsted to retire. In 1898 he moved to Belmont, Massachusetts, and took up residence as a patient at McLean Hospital, for reasons he had proposed a design that had never been executed. He remained there until his death in 1903. He was buried in the Old North Cemetery, in Hartford, Connecticut.
After Olmsted's retirement and death, his sons John Charles Olmsted and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., continue their corporate work, doing business as Olmsted Brothers. The company lasted until 1980. Many of the Olmsted children's works were mistakenly credited to Frederick Law Olmsted today. For example, the Olmsted Brothers Company undertook a park plan for Portland, Maine, in 1905, created a series of links between existing gardens and suggested improvements to the parks. The oldest park, Deering Oaks, was designed by City Engineer William Goodwin in 1879 but is now often described as a park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted.
Excerpts from Olmsted's friends and colleagues, Daniel Burnham could serve as tombstones. Referring to Olmsted in March 1893, Burnham said, "An artist, he painted with lakes and wooded slopes, with lawns and banks and forest covered in hills, with mountain sides and sea views."
The residence hall at the University of Hartford is named in his honor. Olmsted Point, located in Yosemite National Park, was named after Olmsted and his son Frederick.
Olmsted design principles
Describing the influence of British landscaping and gardening, Olmsted's design principles, in general, encourage the full use of the naturally occurring features of a given space, its "genius"; subordination of individual details as a whole so that the decorative element is not preferred, but the whole space; concealment of design, design that does not pay attention to itself; designs that work on the unconscious to produce relaxation; and utilities or goals above ornamentation. Bridges, pathways, trees, pastures: each and every element is put together to produce a certain effect.
Olmsted is designed primarily in pastoral and beautiful style, each to achieve a certain effect. The pastoral style displays a vast expanse of green with small lakes, trees and clumps and produces a calming restorative effect on the audience. This beautiful style includes a rocky and damaged terrain with dense bushes and vines and attacks the audience with a sense of natural wealth. Beautiful style is played with light and shadow to lend a landscape of mystery.
Scenes are designed to enhance the feeling of space: the boundaries are not clear using plants, brushes and trees as opposed to sharp ones; interplay of light and shadow closing and detail blurred further. A very wide green spread at the end is a yellow poplar grove; a path that curves through a bit of landscape and intersects with another, dividing the terrain into a triangular island from a new view in a row.
Subordination seeks to use all objects and features in the design services and intended effects. This can be seen in the subtle use of natural plants throughout the garden. Non-native species planted for their own uniqueness defeats design objectives, because the uniqueness draws attention to itself where the goal is to allow relaxation: usefulness above all else. Separation applies to areas designed in different styles and different uses enhance security and reduce interference. The main feature of Central Park is the use of sunken roads that pass through the park and are specifically dedicated to vehicles that are contrary to the winding roads specially designed for pedestrians.
A wonderful example of this fusion principle is seen at Park's Mall in Central Park New York, a large promenade that leads to Bethesda Terrace and a single formal feature in the naturalistic design of Olmsted and Vaux. The designers wrote that "'main promenade' is 'an important feature of the metropolitan park'"; However, its formal symmetry, its style, although there is something distorted, is designed in such a way that it becomes lower than the natural view that surrounds it. The rich passengers were left from their carriages at the southern end. The train then goes around to the Terrace, which overlooks the Lake and Ramble to pick them up, saving them the trouble of needing to double back on foot. The Promenade is lined with sleek elms and offers views of Sheep Meadow. The rich New Yorkers, who rarely take a walk in the park, mix with the less fortunate, and all enjoy the escape from the hustle and bustle of the surrounding city.
Olmsted in popular culture
At Erik Larson's Devil in the White City, Olmsted is featured as one of the most important figures who participated in the design of Columbus World Exposition Chicago in 1893. In this book, his personality and actions are given significant coverage. In addition, his interest in designing exhibitions is highlighted (for example, his part in choosing geographical locations and his bureaucratic involvement in planning the exhibition).
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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