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The Last Great Projects, 1890-1895 David Schuyler Volume IX of The The Last Great Projects, 1890-1895 David Schuyler Volume IX of The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: The Last Great Projects, 1890-1895, has just been published by The Johns Hopkins University Press. It is the longest and final volume of documents in the twelve-volume series begun in earnest in 1972, the sesquicentennial of Olmsted’s birth. One additional volume, Supplementary Series III, a larger format collection of plans and historic photographs of Olmsted projects ranging from suburban communities, college campuses and the grounds of public buildings to private residences, will complete the series upon its publication in 2016. The two “last great projects” are George Washington Vanderbilt’s estate, Biltmore, near Asheville, North Carolina, and the World’s Columbian Exposition. Olmsted considered Biltmore much more than a wealthy gentleman’s estate: it was a unique opportunity to merge landscape art and horticultural science, a private commission with enormous public significance. He also hoped that as a result of its many visitors Biltmore would influence the public’s taste in landscape architecture. The World’s Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago between May and the end of October 1893, the greatest of America’s world’s fairs, was developed at the same time as Biltmore and weighed heavily on Olmsted’s mind. Each of the two projects would have been more than enough for any individual, but at the same time Olmsted and his partners were also engaged in completing the Boston park system, working on parks in Louisville, KY, Buffalo, Rochester, and Brooklyn, N.Y., Milwaukee, WI, and other places, and also engaged in the planning of institutions, college campuses, and numerous private estates. Figure 56 from Volume IX: Plan for the Chicago Exposition Figure 50 from Volume IX: Shores of Wooded Island Chicago Exposition At times Olmsted worried that the firm’s many commitments would make it impossible to devote enough time to each to do its best work. Despite that concern, the last six years of Olmsted’s involvement with the firm were among the most challenging and rewarding of his long professional career. During these years the Olmsted firm evolved from a small firm to a large practice with projects across the United States and Canada. When Henry Sargent Codman became a partner in 1889, the firm became F. L. Olmsted and Company. Codman became the firm’s principal for the Columbian Exposition. When Olmsted visited Chicago in March 1892, he reported that Codman had exposition matters “as well as possible in hand” and that he was “showing high ability on the diplomatic and social as well as the executive side.” Following Codman’s sudden death in January 1893 Olmsted described him as “our pupil, attached friend and partner.” Within weeks Olmsted and his stepson John met with Charles Eliot, who had been the first apprentice in their office, and persuaded him to join the firm, renamed Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot. Eliot brought to the firm a growing practice that included the Cambridge, Massachusetts, park system as well as planning for the Trustees of Public Reservations and the Metropolitan Park System in greater Boston. Until Codman’s death, John Charles Olmsted oversaw the firm office in Brookline while his partners traveled to clients in distant places. He managed a growing staff that included Warren H. Manning as chief horticulturist and engineer Edward Bolton as chief of construction as well as approximately twenty assistants and secretaries, and established many of the procedures that enabled the firm to function effectively. When Eliot joined the firm, John traveled much more extensively, as Eliot was tied to work in eastern Massachusetts and had a family with small children. Eight months after Eliot became a partner Olmsted wrote Frederick J. Kingsbury, his longtime friend, describing Eliot: “He is clever; has a fine cultivated taste and some special talents,” he wrote, but added, he “does not yet fill Codman’s place.” In addition to the many letters and reports that reflect on the various projects the firm was undertaking, two other themes are important: Olmsted’s concern over his declining health and his determination that his son and namesake, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., be the best trained landscape architect in the world. These were incredibly busy years for Olmsted, even as he was aging. His health declined over the course of the volume, his memory began failing, and he fretted over the future of his profession. Still, in a remarkable letter to Elizabeth Baldwin Whitney Olmsted reflected on a sermon that he had read during his New Haven years (1845-46), James Martineau’s “Having, Doing, and Being.” In the sermon Martineau castigated not only acquisitiveness (“having”) but also those individuals who were concerned with “doing,” who saw themselves as “the mere instruments of some social work” and who spend themselves “wholly in it.” Martineau urged listeners and readers to “be good” and to live a life of virtue (“being”) that would serve as a model for their community. As Olmsted confessed to Whitney, “I have been selling being for doing”—giving up too much of his life in order to accomplish his goals. Other than his children, he conceded, the center of his life had been “the improvement of scenery and making the enjoyment of it available.” What follows are excerpts from several documents in the volume that suggest the range, and the creativity, Olmsted and his partners brought to several of these projects. These excerpts reveal both the human side of the man—his affection for his sons and daughter, his relationship with his partners, his awareness of his failing health—as well as his thoughts on several of the most important projects he undertook during the final six years of his professional career. In several of them Olmsted assesses the profound influence he has had on the shaping of the American landscape to meet deep human needs, for recreation, to be sure, but also for community and for family life. Olmsted reflecting on his accomplishments: As I travel I see traces of influences spreading from it [my work] that no one else would detect—which, if given any attention by others would be attributed to “fashion.” There are, scattered through the country, seventeen large public parks, many more smaller ones, many more public or semi-public works, upon which, with sympathetic partners or pupils, I have been engaged. After we have left them they have in the majority of cases been more or less barbarously treated, yet as they stand, with perhaps a single exception, they are a hundred years ahead of any spontaneous public demand, or of the demand of any notable cultivated part of the people. And they are having an educative effect perfectly manifest to me—a manifestly civilizing effect. I see much indirect and unconscious following of them. I know that I shall have helped to educate in a good American School a capital body of young men for my profession. All men of liberal education and cultivated minds. I know that in the minds of a large body of men of influence I have raised my calling from the rank of a trade, even of a handicraft, to that of a liberal profession—an Art, an Art of Design. Olmsted to Elizabeth Baldwin Whitney, Dec. 16, 1890 On the training of landscape architects The best way to meet your inquiries will be by stating what other men have done under our advice. There are four such who have all gone through the course that we shall describe and there are two others who have entered upon it. They have all been men of liberal education; the majority graduates of Harvard, and have been so situated as to have acquired a good deal of general cultivation and to be somewhat familiar with works of art in various forms. They have taken post graduate courses in engineering, botany and drawing, freehand, mechanical and topographical. At the same time, they have taken courses of reading in the literature of landscape architecture, some in French and German as well as English. They have also attended lectures and had some field practice at the Bussey Institution, and have become more or less familiar with the large collection of trees and shrubs at the Harvard Arboretum which is connected therewith. They have then come into our office as students and have visited various works upon which we have been engaged in different parts of the country and have engaged in office practice, and more or less in the superintendence of such works. This is generally continued for two years and they have then, in each case, spent a year traveling in Europe under our advice. We have made no charge for such instruction and advice as we have given them, but while with us they have paid their own expenses. After returning from Europe, they have either found employment as assistants, or have entered directly upon the practice of the profession on their own account. Olmsted to Charles Chambers, Dec. 4, 1890 On planning the Columbian Exposition: The general comradship and fervor of the artists was delightful to witness & was delightful to fall into. If people generally get to understand that our contribution to the undertaking is that of the framing of the scheme, rather than the disposition of flower beds and other matters of gardening decoration—as to which those familiar with European exhibitions will be disappointed—it will be a great lift to the profession—will really give it a better standing than it has in Europe. I was exceedingly pleased to find how fully the architects recognized our service in this respect.
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