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Frederick Law Olmsted (April 26, 1822–August 28, 1903) was a United States landscape architect, famous for designing numerous easily-known urban parks, including Central Park in New York City, the country's oldest coordinated rules of public parks & drive inside Buffalo, New York, the country's oldest state park, a Niagara Reservation in Niagara Falls, New York, Mount Royal Park in Montreal, the Metropolitan Parks System in Boston, Massachusetts, Cherokee Park (& a entire parks and drive formulas) within Louisville, Kentucky, as well as Jackson Park, Washington Park and Midway Plaisance in Chicago for the World's Columbian Exposition.

Life and career
Innate within Hartford, Connecticut to the loaded dry-soft goods merchandiser & a girl of a farmer, Olmsted was fascinated using nature and severity from either his youth. He exposed agricultural science and engineering at Yale. Fallowing sailing to China in 1843 for the year, he worked on his domestic within Connecticut, so moved to Just released York City & ran a 13Cypher-acre (0.Fin kilometre²) experimental scientific domestic in Staten Island that his father acquired for him in January 1848. This domestic, known as "The Woods of Arden" by last creator, Erastus Wiman, Olmsted renamed to Tosomock Farm. Olmsted as well got the important career within journalism. Within 1850 he traveled to Europe to visit public gardens, and later published Walks & Talk about an U.s. Farmer inside England in 1852. Concerned in the buckle down economy, he was licenced per Future York Daily Days (at present a New York Times) to embark on an extensive locate journeying through the American South and Texas from 1852 to 1857. Olmsted took a look at that a practice of slavery was non just morally execrable, however expensive & economically ineffective. His dispatches were collected into multiple volumes which remain intense, 1st-individual social documents of the pre-war South. A endure one, "Journeys and Explorations in the Cotton Kingdom" (1861), published during a number one six months of the American Civil War, helped inform and galvanize antislavery sentiment within Up to date England. Olmsted likewise cofounded a magazine The Nation in 1865.

Olmsted's friend & wise man, Andrew Jackson Downing, the magnetic landscaper from either Newburgh, New York first proposed the development of Up to date York's Central Park when publisher of The Plantsman magazine. It was Downing world health organization introduced Olmsted to the English-born designer Calvert Vaux, whom Downing had personally brought back from either England when his architect-collaborator. When Downing died the hero's dying inside a steamboat explosion on the Hudson Flow of any stream inside July 1852, around his honor Olmsted & Vaux entered the Central Park project competition together—& won. In his link to from either a South, Olmsted began executing a project virtually immediately. Olmsted & Vaux continued their informal partnership to project Prospect Park in Brooklyn from 1866 to 1868, and more projects. Vaux remained in the shadow of Olmsted's gr& public personality and social modems.

A project of Central Park is Olmsted's social consciousness & commitment to classless ideals. Influenced by Downing & by his have observations on social class within Engl&, China and a Our contries South, Olmsted believed that a most common green space must universally become equally accessible to tons citizens. This principle is nowadays therefore fundamental to the idethe of a "public park" when to seem self-taken for granted, however it was non therefore so. Olmsted's tenure when park commissioner was 1 hanker struggle to preserve that idea. When completing Central Park, Olmsted served when Executive Secretary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a precursor to the Red Cross in Washington D.C. which tended to the wounded during the Civil War. When a war he managed a Mariposa mining estate in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. Within 1865 Vaux and Olmsted formed Olmsted, Vaux & Company. After Olmsted returned to Up to date York, he & Vaux designed Prospect Park, Chicago's Riverside subdivision, Buffalo, New York's park system, & a Niagara Reservation at Niagara Falls.

Olmsted non just created city parks inside several cities about a united states, he as well imagine entire systems of parks & interconnecting drive which attached certain cities to green spaces. An lessin of a shell on which Olmsted worked is one of a big pieces of his operate, the park patterns designed for Buffalo, New York: Parks: The Park (now Delaware Park) The Front (now Front Park) The Parade (AKA Humboldt Park, now Martin Luther King, Jr. Park)

Park approaches: Parkways: The Avenue (now Richmond Avenue) Bidwell Parkway Chapin Parkway Fillmore Avenue Humboldt Parkway Lincoln Parkway Porter Avenue Circles: Agassiz Place (now Agassiz Circle) Bidwell Place (now Colonial Circle) The Circle (now Symphony Circle) Chapin Place (now Gates Circle) Ferry Circle Soldier's Place (now Soldier's Circle)

Olmsted was the frequent collaborator using Henry Hobson Richardson for whom he devised the landscaping schemes for half the pack projects, including Richardson's commission for the Buffalo State Asylum.

Within 1883 Olmsted established what is considered to be a 1st good-whale landscape architecture house inside Brookline, Massachusetts. He known as a personal & professional compound Fairsted, which in todays world is the recently-restored Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site. From either there Olmsted designed Boston's Emerald Necklace, the campus of Stanford University and the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago among many other projects. Inside 1895, senility forced him to retire. He moved to Belmont, Massachusetts and took up home at McLean Hospital, which he had landscaped many years prior to, inside which he remained until his demise in 1903, and burial in the Old Northward Cemetery, Hartford, Connecticut. When Olmsted's dying, his sons John Charles Olmsted and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. continued the work of their firm, doing business as the Olmsted Brothers. A house lasted until 1950.

The quotation from either Olmsted's friend & colleague designer Daniel Burnham could well help when his epitaph. On to Olmsted inside March, 1893, Burnham said, "An artist, he paints with lakes and wooded slopes; with lawns and banks and forest covered hills; with mountain sides and ocean views." (quoted from either Larson's A Devil in the White City)

Academic campuses designed by Olmsted and sons
Between 1857 and 1950, Olmsted & his successors designed 355 school and college campuses. A bit of of the best known come used on this button. American University Main Campus, Washington, DC Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island (1900-06) Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania (1895-1927) Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (1867-73) Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (1925-65) Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C. (1866) Harvard Business School, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1925-31) Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania (1925-32) Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland (1903-19) Lawrenceville School, Lawrenceville, New Jersey (1883-1901) Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts (1896-1922) Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts (1891-1909) Stanford University, Palo Alto, California (1886-1914) Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut (1872-94) College of California, Berkeley, California (1865) University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois (1901-1910) University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana (1929-32) University of Washington, Seattle, Washington (1902-20) Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York (1896-1932) Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri (1865-99) Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts (1902-12) Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (1874-81)

Other notable Olmsted commissions
Athens Lunatic Asylum, Athens, Ohio Audubon Park, New Orleans, Louisiana The Back Bay Fens, Riverway, Arnold Arboretum, Franklin Park, Boston, Massachusetts Beardsley Park, Bridgeport, Connecticut, 1884 Belle Isle, Detroit, Michigan, landscaped in the 1880s Biltmore Estate grounds, Asheville, North Carolina Branch Brook Park, Newark, New Jersey, 1900 redesign Buffalo State Asylum, Buffalo, New York Central Park, New York City, 1853 (opened in 1856) Cherokee Park, Louisville, Kentucky Chicago South Park, Chicago, Illinois Civic Center Park, Denver Cushing Island, Maine Highland Park, Rochester, New York Institute of Living, Hartford, Connecticut, 1860's Manor Park, Larchmont, New York Montebello Park, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada [http://www.st.catharines.com/recreation/pt/montebello_park.asp] Mount Royal Park, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, inaugurated in 1876 Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, California, dedicated in 1865 Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York, finished 1868 Public Pleasure Grounds for San Francisco, California Seaside Park, Bridgeport, Connecticut, 1860s The Rockery, Easton, Massachusetts United States Capitol Grounds, Washington D.C. World's End, formerly the John Brewer Estate, Hingham, Massachusetts, 1889 World Columbian Exposition, Chicago, Illinois, 1893 Seattle Olmsted Parks, Seattle, Washington, begun 1903.

Interview with Witold Rybczynski
Article from Atlantic Unbound on the biography by Rybczynski of Frederick Law Olmsted - 'A Clearing in the Distance', which aims to tell the story of 19th-century America through landscape architecture.

Olmsted in Buffalo
S. M. Broderick gives an illustrated history of America's oldest coordinated system of public parks and parkways, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux.

Scape Artist
New York Times review of Witold Rybczynski's book on Frederick Law Olmsted, who co-designed New York City's Central Park and was among the first to call himself a landscape architect.

Grave of Frederick Law Olmstead
Photographs of the landscape architect and his grave in Old North Cemetery in Hartford, Connecticut, from Find A Grave.

John Singer Sargent's Frederick Law Olmsted
Portrait by Sargent, biography, and list of projects from the John Singer Sargent Virtual Gallery by Natasha Wallace.

Yosemite and the Mariposa Grove: A Preliminary Report
Written in 1865 by Frederick Law Olmsted when he served briefly as one of the first Commissioners appointed to manage the grant of the Yosemite Valley.

Olmsted, Frederick Law (1822-1903): American Landscape Architect
Rod Davis provides a photograph and brief biography, with related web links, most with short descriptions.


Regional: North America: United States: Massachusetts: Travel and Tourism: Parks: National Parks and Monuments: Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site






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