Happy Birthday to landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (b. April 26, 1822, in Hartford, CT), who designed many of the best-known landscapes in the United States. These include Central Park, the U.S. Capitol complex, and more. By designing and organizing urban spaces prominently lived in by generations of Americans, Olmsted substantially shaped modern American life. He specialized in parks and envisioned them as creating an “enlarged freedom” for city dwellers, a needed respite from urban chaos. As scholar George L. Scheper writes, “Olmsted’s great urban, pastoral style public parks, from Louisville to Buffalo, from Boston to Brooklyn, stand as living monuments to and embodiments of the idealist proposition that there is a pre-established harmony between the forms of nature and the human heart and mind and that proper character formation as well as individual and collective human happiness are dependent upon that synergism.” Scheper also points out the emphasis on community inherent within Olmsted’s thoughtful public spaces. The park was to be a place for people to not just escape and exhale, but to do so together.
Citations: George L. Scheper, “The Reformist Vision of Frederick Law Olmsted and the Poetics of Park Design,” The New England Quarterly 62, no. 3 (September 1989): 371-372, 401, https://www.jstor.org/stable/365780; Andrew Menard, “The Enlarged Freedom of Frederick Law Olmsted, The New England Quarterly 83, no. 3 (September 2010): 508, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20752715; T. Johnson and James Notman, “Frederick Law Olmsted,” wood engraving (location unknown, c. October 1893), https://lccn.loc.gov/95514014.
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