Landscape Architecture

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE is both the art and profession of landscape design, in which topographical, horticultural, and other elements are arranged to suit human use. While humans have shaped landscapes since antiquity, landscape architecture developed as a profession only in the mid-1800s, and the term was first used in 1858 by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who were then designing and constructing New York's Central Park.

Olmsted and Vaux may have coined the term, but they did not originate the art. Americans had long intentionally shaped landscapes to suit various needs, particularly in streetscapes, garden designs, and park construction. Colonial Americans borrowed heavily from European landscape design, particularly in creating classical, rectilinear gardens, with straight paths and square beds of formal plantings. Although regional differences developed early, as the southern climate and plantation culture encouraged the development of larger gardens, formal design remained a constant. George Washington's Mount Vernon gardens represent the grand gardens of the late 1700s—the long bowling green provided a striking vista, and the symmetrical garden plots provided both beauty and produce. The University of Virginia and the grounds of Monticello remind us of the importance of landscape design to Thomas Jefferson, who built them with an eye to both attractiveness and efficiency.

Andrew Jackson Downing's A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America (1841) was the first major work on gardening by an American. Downing attempted to describe a growing uniqueness of American landscape design. While the work marked the movement away from the classical style and toward a picturesque aesthetic, Downing's book also revealed the continuing debt American landscape design owed to Europeans. Deeply influenced by Romanticism, itself of European origins, the picturesque style emphasized more natural landscapes, with variety, irregularity, and informality. The picturesque style played to America's growing appreciation of its distinctive wilderness. In essence, picturesque gardens could capture a bit of the wildness and preserve it in accessible spaces. Since gaining popularity in the 1850s, the picturesque style has continued to dominate landscape design, with formal gardens playing a smaller role in American landscape architecture.

The profession of landscape architecture developed with the growing urban demand for parks after 1850. After Olmsted and Vaux set the standard with their designs for Central Park and Brooklyn's Prospect Park, most American cities sought their own landscaped parks. Olmsted became the premiere landscape architect and, as that new term implied, he intended to design the landscape as fully as architects design buildings. Natural elements, such as trees, shrubs, and water, would be among his tools, but his creations would be primarily cultural. Mixing open spaces, formal walks, rustic architecture, and naturalistic woodlands, these picturesque landscapes offered variety to increasingly regularized lives.

Even as landscaped parks provided relief from monotonous city life, some visionaries sought to provide more pervasive relief by designing picturesque neighborhoods and communities. In the mid-1850s Alexander Jackson Davis, a protégé of Downing, designed the first picturesque suburb, Llewellyn Park in New Jersey. With its curvilinear streets and planned open "ramble," Llewellyn Park became a model for future suburban developments, including Olmsted's Chicago suburban design, Riverside, built in the following decade. In addition to the movement to create new, planned, landscaped communities, late in the 1800s, the City Beautiful Movement encouraged a greater level of planning throughout cities. While not strictly concerned with landscape design, the City Beautiful Movement did emphasize urban beauty as created by streetscapes, vistas, and architectural design. Inspired in part by the great success of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago, reformers demanded more beauty in their cities, particularly in the form of Beaux Arts architecture, open civic plazas, and striking street vistas. These ideals made their way into the 1902 plan for Washington, D.C., with its long, formal mall, neoclassical architecture, and formally placed monuments. Many other cities initiated redevelopment on a smaller scale, including Denver's civic center, created by 1921. By that date most large American cities had transformed some significant public space to fit the City Beautiful vision.

The World's Columbian Exposition and the City Beautiful Movement marked the return of formal landscape design, as suited the renewed interest in neoclassical architecture. Private development also witnessed a turn toward classical design, particularly in the gardens of America's new castles, built for the growing number of superrich robber barons. These massive estates often included a range of landscape designs, but by the early 1900s the mansions of Newport, Rhode Island, and other refuges for the extremely wealthy, were surrounded by well-trimmed hedges, straight paths, and formal fountains.

Despite the return of classical design, the picturesque continued to dominate city planning, particularly as cities spread out along railroad lines and increasingly important roadways. The curvilinear roads, ample tree plantings, and open spaces of the early planned suburbs continued into the twentieth century. John Nolen's 1923 Mariemont, Ohio, design, for example, relied on European ideas of the garden city, as is evident in the Tudor architecture of the town center, the large central commons, and abundant open and wooded spaces. Mariemont residents, just fifteen minutes from downtown Cincinnati, could think themselves living in the English countryside. The picturesque suburban ideal persisted, influencing the United States Resettlement Administration's design of several "greenbelt" cities in the 1930s, including Greenbelt, Maryland, in 1936. The lush landscapes of these communities, and other less planned suburbs around the nation, contrasted markedly with dense urban cores. They also hid the numerous and necessary connections between suburban and urban landscapes.

After World War II, American landscape architecture revealed a greater diversity of influences, including Asian gardens and massive modern art. Particularly on corporate campuses, where the picturesque could be inappropriate or impossible, modern landscape designs turned again to straight lines, but often at a tilt or on multiple levels, and natural components often found themselves extremely confined, as waterfalls clung to rectangular walls and trees sat upon pavement in large pots. Modern landscape designs created deceptively complex visual spaces, more accepting of artificiality than the picturesque designs of previous decades.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Major, Judith. To Live in the New World: A. J. Downing and American Landscape Gardening. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997.

Newton, Norman T. Design on the Land: The Development of Landscape Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Rybczynski, Witold. A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Scribners, 1999.

David Stradling

See also Central Park ; City Planning ; Suburbanization .