Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted PDF

Here is a structured markdown format of the provided document: # UNCOMMON GROUND ## Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted by Anne Whiston Spirn ### Excerpts **Page 90** * **Sustainability**: Means never imagining that we can flee into mythical wildernesses to escape history...

Here is a structured markdown format of the provided document: # UNCOMMON GROUND ## Constructing Nature: The Legacy of Frederick Law Olmsted by Anne Whiston Spirn ### Excerpts **Page 90** * **Sustainability**: Means never imagining that we can flee into mythical wildernesses to escape history and the obligation to take responsibility for our own actions that history inescapably entails. It means practicing remembrance and gratitude. * Thanksgiving is the simplest and most basic of ways for us to recollect the nature, the culture, and the history that have come together to make the world as we know it. **Page 91** * **Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903)** left a legacy of wonderful places from Central Park to Yosemite. * People are startled to learn that New York's Central Park was constructed. * Olmsted was so skillful at concealing the artifice that both the projects he had constructed and the profession he had worked so hard to establish became largely invisible. * Many landmarks of landscape architecture are assumed to be works of nature or felicitous, serendipitous products of culture. **Page 92** * Olmsted is justly recognized and remembered for his built works, but his legacy consists of far more than places. * He was a pivotal figure in the formative years of the conservation movement and struggled with issues that still face American society. * In his report on Yosemite he urged that such extraordinary places be made accessible to all and not remain the property of an elite. * At Niagara he worked with the "processes of nature" to form a frame for the falls. * At Biltmore he constructed a forest "out of whole cloth" and planned its management for pleasure and utility * In Boston's Fens and Riverway he transformed urban landscapes into habitats. * Olmsted's legacy needs reclaiming. * **Yosemite**: Was the first tract of wild land set aside by an Act of Congress, in 1864, "for public use, resort, and recreation." * Olmsted outlined that Yosemite should be preserved because it had value for humans; to be in a place surrounded by "natural scenery" promoted human health and welfare. **Page 93** * Olmsted's proposals for Yosemite were simple: provide free access for all visitors in a manner that preserved the valley's scenic qualities. * He returned to New York soon after meeting, and the report was never submitted to the California legislature. * To Olmsted the significance of Yosemite lay in the quality of its scenery—"the union of the deepest sublimity with the deepest beauty of nature," not in any one scene or series of views, but in the whole. * Olmsted believed the "contemplation of natural scenes of an impressive character" had lasting beneficial effects if it occurred "in connection with relief from ordinary cares, change of air and change of habits". * Olmsted was, in effect, describing the positive effect he believed that natural scenery had upon himself, as he frequently suffered nervous ailments and found relief in "natural scenery". **Page 94** * Yosemite is one of the most popular national parks, with about 2.5 million visitors per year. * It is also an urban park, serving the surrounding metropolitan regions of California and Nevada. * The question Olmsted posed in 1865 remains unresolved: how to admit all the visitors who wish to come without their destroying the very thing they value? * Traffic congestion at Yosemite, 1980. **Page 95** * Ironically, Olmsted's concealment of the artifice of his intervention (a tradition continued today in the national parks) permits the misconception that places like Yosemite are not designed and managed. * Olmsted's work at Central Park and at Yosemite was informed by similar ideas about the value of natural scenery. * He advocated both the preservation of remote wild lands and the restoration of urban landscapes that had been ravaged by human use. * **Niagara Falls**: Is more than a big waterfall. For Americans it is the waterfall. * Niagara has never meant the same thing to everyone, and its meanings have changed over time, reflections of cultural context. **Page 96** * Olmsted concluded that no improvement could "increase the astonishing qualities of Niagara" and therefore focused on enclosing river and falls within a frame of "natural scenery. * Olmsted's plan of 1887 successfully accommodated tourists with diverse values and expectations, but failed to address on the tension between scenic landmark and source of power. **Page 97** * The recommendations of the international boards set up in 1926 and in 1967 provide striking similarities to and telling differences with the report by Olmsted and Vaux in 1887. * The 1967 board was set up to investigate "measures necessary to preserve or enhance the beauty of the American Falls", as the falls were deemed "a symbol of international amity and cooperation". * The commission concluded that "man should not interfere with the natural process," for the falls are a "reminder of man's relationship with his environment. * After all this manipulation of the falls, both actual and virtual, the International Joint Commission concluded that "man should not interfere with the natural process," for the falls are a "reminder of man's relationship with his environment. Indeed, this is the very essence of their attractiveness. * They said to alter the falls would be to create an artificial waterfall in a formal park. **Page 98** * By the 1970s it was not just Niagara Falls but Olmsted's plan that seemed worthy of preservation. * In his report Olmsted carefully explained his ideas about the value of natural scenery and its benefits to health, but the later reports take this value as self evident. * Even the most awesome landscapes are products of both nature and culture, and they change in predictable and unpredictable ways in response to both. * Olmsted employed the shaping capacity of water flow and of plant growth and reproduction to design over time. **Page 99** * Driving up the entrance road through a lush, mature forest at Biltmore, one finds it difficult to imagine that this landscape was constructed. * Biltmore Forest prior to improvement. * Vanderbilt assembled his huge estate through the purchase of many small farms and woodlots. * He retained Olmsted to advise him on the improvement of his newly acquired property. * Olmsted reported, the soil was "extremely poor and intractable," and the woods were "miserable, all the good trees having again and again been culled out and only runts left." **Page 100** Olmsted saw in Biltmore an opportunity to demonstrate the promise of forestry techniques for the management of land used for recreation. * working with a private client, he hoped to avoid the frustrations and misunderstandings he had met in public projects, such as Central Park. At Biltmore, Olmsted nurtured the future development of American forestry in more ways than one. * Gifford Pinchot later recalled his excitement: "Here was my chance. Biltmore could be made to prove what America did not yet understand, that trees could be cut and the forest preserved at one and the same time". Biltmore Forest, 1893. **Page 101** * If one of the richest men in America couldn't afford an experiment in forest management, then who could? * Pinchot's notion that "trees could be cut and the forest preserved at one and the same time" lies at the core of some of the most bitter disputes of the environmental movement during the last century * Trees cannot be cut and "the forest" preserved unless there is agreement on what a forest is and whom it is it for. **Page 102** * Key to his belief in himself was the ability to envision the future shape of the landscape, to guide it over time, and to imagine human intervention as potentially beneficial, not inevitably detrimental. * Olmsted took a long-term view of landscape construction and development. **Page 103** * Biltmore entrance drive under construction, ca. 1890s. Biltmore entrance drive **Page 104** * Boston's Fens and Riverway were built as an urban "wilderness," the first attempt anywhere, so far as I know, to construct a wetland. Olmsted persuaded the city engineer to approve the construction of a tidal marsh instead of a concrete flood basin. * The Fens and Boston, ca. 1925 **Page 105** * The Fens and Boston, 1983. (Courtesy Alex S. MacLean/Landslides) **Page 106** * Constructing the Riverway, 1892 The Riverway, 1920. **Page 107** * Olmsted also engaged Charles Sprague Sargent, director of the Arnold Arboretum, to advise him on plant selection securing the plants and finding a contractor capable of this novel construction proved difficult. * Almost all the plants died before the end of the first year and had to be replaced. * Not only the function but also the appearance of the Fens and Riverway were revolutionary; up to this time, urban parks had been designed mainly in the formal or pastoral styles. * "Cities are now grown so great that hours are consumed in gaining the "country," and, when the fields are reached, entrance is forbidden. **Page 108** There was no underlying function of reclamation, flood control, and health. * Vacant land on floodplain in inner-city neighborhood, Boston, **Page 109** * And the fate of the Fens itself? Massachusetts Department of Environmental Management engaged consultants to prepare a plan for the "preservation" of the Fens because of its importance as a historic landscape. * Its intended function could have been restored: a place where floodwaters, flowing off roofs and streets, course and pool, filling the basin, dropping their silty load **Page 110** * Perhaps this is the value of history-as an attempt to extend the time frame of our memory beyond the human lifetime. The only problem is that history represents selective memory. **Page 111** * Olmsted's projects embody this principle. The marshes, meadows, and forests he conceived in Boston, Biltmore, and Niagara were built of materials that were both given and worked. Olmsted shaped sites like Yosemite more indirectly through the influence of his writings on policy and through the application, after his death, of lessons learned from his work at Niagara. * Olmsted invented methods of practice, advanced the discipline of landscape architecture, and set a standard for professional conduct. But he also believed that professionals were a privileged elite whose expert opinions should not be questioned, and he failed to appreciate the power of popular culture to affect people's attitudes toward his projects. **Page 112** * Calling some landscapes "natural" and others "artificial" or "cultural" ignores the fact that landscapes are never wholly one or the other. Such thinking promotes the persistent, common conception of the city as a degraded environment and wilderness as a pristine place untainted by human presence. * All landscapes are constructed. Landscape may be constructed, but it is not only a construction.