biography
| name: |
Olmsted, Frederick Law
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1822–1903)
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| biography:
| Landscape architect and writer, born in Hartford, Connecticut, USA. The father of landscape architecture in America (he coined the term), he attended lectures at Yale and studied engineering, then took a year-long voyage to China (1843). He returned to start an experimental farm on Staten Island (1847–57), influenced by the views of his friend, Andrew J Downing. In 1850 he travelled to England, where he was impressed by Birkenhead Park, just completed in Liverpool. Commissioned by the New York Times, he travelled through the American South, and his Cotton Kingdom (2 vols, 1861) was a classic work on plantation life. Appointed superintendent of New York City's Central Park (1857), he and Calvert Vaux, a young English architect, won the 1858 competition to design the area, which was then mostly wilderness occupied by squatters. Their plans called for creating a pastoral effect consisting of walkways winding around gentle slopes, along broad lawns and through groves of trees, with separate recreational areas and vehicular roads. When the Civil War broke out he interrupted work on Central Park to become general secretary of the US Sanitary Commission (1861–3), but political problems and ill health led him to go to California with his new family (he had married his brother's widow in 1859 and adopted her children, including John Olmsted). There he managed John C Frémont's Mariposa properties, designed the Berkeley campus of the University of California, and worked to have Yosemite turned into a state reservation, and was soon among those proposing a system of protected wilderness areas for the US. Returning to New York (1865), he completed work on Central Park, and with Vaux he set up a private firm of landscape architecture, which over ensuing decades designed many parks distinguished by his vision of saving natural environments within urban areas, such as Brooklyn's Prospect Park, the Boston park system, Chicago's South Park, and Montreal's Mount Royal Park. The firm also designed hundreds of other projects such as the US Capitol Grounds, the Riverside community outside Chicago, and the grounds of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893). In 1888 he moved his office to Brookline, MA but his firm retained its supremacy in the field. |
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