Biography frederick law olmsted

Hoffman and Charles E. Frederick Law Olmsted was the father of American landscape architecture. He is credited with planning, designing, and constructing public parks throughout America, including New York City's Central Park, and for designing the landscaping of the grounds for the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina , for the U.

Capital in Washington, D. Malcolm Jones, Jr. More than any other American of his generation, Olmsted represented a belief in the power of landscape to provide a refuge for urban residents. At a time when most urban land was in the hands of private speculators, he symbolized a belief in the civic good and the necessity of urban planning. According to Charles Beveridge, writing in Natural History, Olmsted was "the most influential landscape architect in the history of the United States.

Olmsted was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on April 26, , the son of a prosperous dry-goods merchant. His family's material wealth and deep roots in the community gave Olmsted both the economic freedom and the personal confidence to pursue a leisurely course toward his major life works. His mother died when he was four years old and he was raised by a stepmother, Mary Ann Bull.

From an early age, his family encouraged Olmsted to have a love for nature. He was sent away to various schools in New England , where he often combined his studies with walks in the countryside. When he was fourteen years old a severe case of sumac poisoning partially blinded him, and for several years thereafter he had poor eyesight. Doctors recommended that he do little reading, so he postponed entering college as he had planned to do in He attended lectures at Yale University intermittently, studying agricultural science and engineering, and then undertook practical training as a farmer on Staten Island acres purchased by his father.

As he became absorbed with scientific agriculture, Olmsted began to publish articles on rural subjects and drifted toward a career as a writer. A period of intense travel began in , when Olmsted sailed aboard the Ronaldson for China in search of adventure; he was to spend a year in China before returning to New England. In , he and his brother spent several weeks on a walking tour of England and the Continent.

Olmsted's account of the journey, Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, was published in The book was well received and demonstrated his aptitude for keen social observation. It is also significant that Olmsted was quite favorably taken with the landscape and rural life of the country, reflecting his continuing interest in the scenic.

Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times, then commissioned Olmsted to travel to the Southern states and write about his impressions of slavery for his Northern readers. Olmsted was chosen because of his connections among rationalist intellectual circles, his moderate antislavery views, and his established literary reputation. Although the publisher of the New York Times was himself a moderate Free-Soiler, Olmsted was not chosen primarily because of his views on slavery but because of his reputation as a perceptive observer who could produce an objective report on the "peculiar institution," as slavery was sometimes called by Northerners.

Accordingly, in December of , Olmsted began a fourteen-month tour that took him through much of the South and as far as Texas and across the Rio Grande. He sent back lengthy letters over the signature "Yeoman," which were published on the first page of the newspaper, beginning in February, These were followed by several volumes under various titles, which were finally distilled into his classic two-volume work, The Cotton Kingdom.

Olmsted's works were immediately hailed by contemporaries as the most important sources of objective information about the life and customs of the slaveholding states and became significant references as Europeans discussed the relative merits of the Northern and Southern causes in the American Civil War. Olmsted's works remain essential sources for modern historians, who regard them as classic contemporary portrayals and analyses of the plantation slavery system of the antebellum South.

If Olmsted had done nothing else, his descriptions of slavery would have established his lasting reputation, but, remarkably, even as he was producing these works, he was embarking upon a second career for which he would become even better known. In , because of his continuing interest in landscape, Olmsted accepted the position of superintendent of the preparatory work on Central Park in New York City.

Soon after, with his partner Calvert Vaux , Olmsted won the competition to provide a new design for the park. He signed his plans with the title "Landscape Architect" under his name, supposedly becoming the first to use this title formally. In , he became the park's chief architect and began to implement his and Vaux's plan to make the park both materially and artistically successful.

His work was interrupted during the Civil War as Olmsted received an appointment as general secretary of the U. Sanitary Commission, a forerunner of the American Red Cross , then went to California as administrator of the forty-four-thousand-acre Mariposa Estate. While there he became a leading figure in the movement to set aside the Yosemite and Mariposa "big tree" reservations which culminated in the establishment of Yosemite Park.

Yosemite eventually became part of the national park system. When he returned to New York in , he and Vaux were reappointed landscape architects for Central Park. In his design for Central Park, Olmsted started from the premise that it is essential for man to maintain a balance between civilization and nature in his life and that for the city dweller, particularly, it is imperative that places should be provided as a retreat from the pressures of overcrowded, overly civilized urban existence.

While he had an appreciation for nature in the raw, "wilderness," Olmsted's real preference was for the pastoral, a natural environment which was ordered, designed, structured, but which provided the illusion of nature's own handiwork. Central Park "represented a major shift from the traditional style of landscape gardening ," explained Vicky Hallett in U.

News and World Report. Prior to this, in contrast with the more experienced Vaux, Olmsted had never designed or executed a landscape design. Their Greensward Plan was announced in as the winning design. On his return from the South, Olmsted began executing their plan almost immediately. Olmsted and Vaux continued their informal partnership to design Prospect Park in Brooklyn from to 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 his 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, and was to be defended against private encroachment.

Biography frederick law olmsted

This principle is now fundamental to the idea of a "public park", but was not assumed as necessary then. Olmsted's tenure as Central Park commissioner was a long struggle to preserve that idea. Sanitary Commission , a precursor to the Red Cross. He tended to the wounded during the American Civil War. In , during Union General George B. He worked for the Sanitary Commission to the point of exhaustion: "Part of the problem was his need to maintain control over all aspects of the commission's work.

He refused to delegate and he had an appetite for authority and power. He works like a dog all day and sits up nearly all night In , Olmsted went west to become the manager of the newly established Rancho Las Mariposas—Mariposa gold mining estate in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. The mine was unsuccessful. In , he was appointed to the first board of commissioners for managing the newly established Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove land grants.

Olmsted conceived of entire systems of parks and interconnecting parkways to connect certain cities to green spaces. Some of the best examples of the scale on which he worked are the park system designed for Buffalo, one of the largest projects; the system he designed for Milwaukee, and the park system designed for Louisville, Kentucky , which was one of only four completed Olmsted-designed park systems in the world.

Olmsted was a frequent collaborator with architect 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 , 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.

Olmsted was one of the planners of the National Zoo in Washington, D. Olmsted was an important early leader of the conservation movement in the United States. An expert on California, he was likely one of the gentlemen "of fortune, of taste and of refinement" who proposed, through Senator John Conness, that Congress designate Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Big Tree Grove as public reserves.

Olmsted served a one-year appointment on the Board of Commissioner of the state reserve, and his report to Congress on the board's recommendations laid an ethical framework for the government to reserve public lands, to protect their "value to posterity". He described the "sublime" and "stately" landscape, emphasizing that the value of the landscape was not in any one individual waterfall, cliff, or tree, but in the "miles of scenery where cliffs of awful height and rocks of vast magnitude and of varied and exquisite coloring, are banked and fringed and draped and shadowed by the tender foliage of noble and lovely trees and bushes, reflected from the most placid pools, and associated with the most tranquil meadows, the most playful streams, and every variety of soft and peaceful pastoral beauty".

In the s, he was active in efforts to conserve the natural wonders of Niagara Falls , threatened with industrialization by the building of electrical power plants. At the same time, he campaigned to preserve the Adirondack region in upstate New York. He was one of the founders of the American Society of Landscape Architects in Olmsted was also known to oppose park projects on conservationist grounds.

In , Olmsted refused to develop a plan for Presque Isle Park in Marquette, Michigan , saying that it "should not be marred by the intrusion of artificial objects". The firm lasted until Many works by the Olmsted sons are mistakenly credited to Frederick Law Olmsted today. For instance, the Olmsted Brothers firm did a park plan for Portland, Maine , in , creating a series of connecting parkways between existing parks and suggesting improvements to those parks.

The oldest of these parks, Deering Oaks, had been designed by City Engineer William Goodwin in but is today frequently described as a Frederick Law Olmsted-designed park. A residence hall at the University of Hartford was named in his honor. Olmsted is known as the "father of American Landscape Architecture ". Daniel Fawcett Tiemann , the mayor of New York, officiated the wedding.

Frederick and Mary also had two children together who survived infancy: a daughter, Marion born October 28, , and a son Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. Their first child, John Theodore Olmsted, was born on June 13, , and died in infancy. Olmsted's election to MOLLUS is significant in that he was one of the few civilians elected to membership in an organization composed almost exclusively of military officers and their descendants.

In , senility forced Olmsted to retire. By he moved to Belmont, Massachusetts , and took up residence as a patient at the McLean Hospital , for whose grounds he had submitted a design which was never executed. He remained there until he died in Drawing influences from English landscape and gardening, [ 37 ] Olmsted emphasized design that encourages the full use of the naturally occurring features of a given space, [ 38 ] its "genius"; the subordination of individual details to the whole so that decorative elements do not take precedence, but rather the whole space is enhanced; concealment of design, design that does not call attention to itself; design that works on the unconscious to produce relaxation; and utility or purpose over ornamentation.

A bridge, a pathway, a tree, a pasture: any and all elements are brought together to produce a particular effect. Olmsted designed primarily in pastoral and picturesque styles, each to achieve a particular effect. The pastoral style featured vast expanses of green with small lakes, trees, and groves and produced a soothing, restorative effect on the viewer.

The picturesque style covered rocky, broken terrain teeming with shrubs and creepers, to express nature's richness. He spent the next 20 years gathering experiences and skills from a variety of endeavors that he eventually utilized in creating the profession of landscape architecture. He worked in a New York dry-goods store and took a year-long voyage in the China Trade.

He studied surveying and engineering, chemistry, and scientific farming, and ran a farm on Staten Island from to In he and two friends took a six-month walking tour of Europe and the British Isles, during which he saw numerous parks and private estates, as well as scenic countryside. That December he began the first of two journeys through the slaveholding south as a reporter for the New York Times.

Between and he published three volumes of travel accounts and social analysis of the South. During this period, he used his literary activities to oppose the westward expansion of slavery and to argue for the abolition of slavery by the southern states. He spent six months of this time living in London with considerable travel on the Continent, and in the process visited many public parks.

Thus, it was that by the time he began work as a landscape architect, Olmsted had developed a set of social and political values that gave special purpose to his design work. From his New England heritage he drew a belief in community and the importance of public institutions of culture and education. His southern travels and friendship with exiled participants in the failed German revolutions of convinced him of the need for the United States to demonstrate the superiority of republican government and free labor.

A series of influences, beginning with his father and supplemented by reading such British writers on landscape art as Uvedale Price, Humphry Repton, William Gilpin, William Shenstone and John Ruskin convinced him of the importance of aesthetic sensibility as a means of moving American society away from frontier barbarism and toward what he considered a civilized condition.

To learn more about his southern travels and research on the institution of slavery, click here. The following March, he and Calvert Vaux won the design competition for the park. During the next seven years he was primarily an administrator in charge of major undertakings: first as architect-in-chief of Central Park, in charge of construction of the park; then — as director of the U.

Sanitary Commission, charged with overseeing the health and camp sanitation of all the volunteer soldiers of the Union Army and with creating a national system of medical supply for those troops; and finally as manager of the Mariposa Estate, a vast gold-mining complex in California. Over the next 30 years, ending with his retirement in , Olmsted created examples of the many kinds of designs by which the profession of landscape architecture a term he and Vaux first used could improve the quality of life in America.

In each of these categories, Olmsted developed a distinctive design approach that showed the comprehensiveness of his vision, his uniqueness of conception that he brought to each commission, and the imagination with which he dealt with even the smallest details. In fact, he and Vaux were the first Americans to ever use that title. However, the American landscape architect was much more than that; he was also a master organizer, social reformer, city planner, and environmental advocate.

Every time he designed a landscape, he did so in service of bigger ideals. From his childhood, he understood the benefits of spending time in nature. As an adult, he dedicated much of his career to making those benefits accessible to as many people as possible, particularly city-dwellers. Olmsted worked based on the principle that access to green spaces has a powerful effect on human physical and mental health, and also cultivates healthy community relationships.

In many ways, his true significance lies as much in the philosophy behind his work as it does in the work itself. Although Olmsted was born two hundred years ago, his ideas about the environment and its role in human well-being sound surprisingly modern. In a time when American industry, wealth, and culture were largely built through extremely detrimental labor and environmental practices, Olmsted believed in the necessity of supporting the natural environment and making it accessible to everybody in the name of improved physical and mental health for all.

Following the 19th-century American nature preservation movement, and based on his experiences out west, Olmsted became keenly interested in preserving the natural environment. He was an early advocate for the government to preserve Yosemite, which he had visited, as a resource for all. His son, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. Olmsted Sr. He and Vaux worked together on the new park created there to simultaneously protect the falls and make them accessible to all.

Olmsted sparked what was to become a major effort in American forestry at Biltmore, revitalizing the native forest that was already severely denuded when George Washington Vanderbilt bought the property. One of the reasons that the American landscape architect was so keen on parks, besides their benefits to the populace, was the fact that they could protect landscape scenery from destructive commercial interests.

The American landscape architect seems to have possessed a special gift for transforming and revitalizing the most abused and despondent land. He had ideas about how to structure the Stanford University campus to create the best student experience, and how to orient the buildings in asylums to give patients the most sunlight in their rooms.