Frederick Law Olmsted
American journalist, social critic, public administrator, and landscape designer
1822 CE to 1903 CE
Frederick Law Olmsted (April 26, 1822 – August 28, 1903) is an American journalist, social critic, public administrator, and landscape designer.
He is popularly considered to be the father of American landscape architecture, although many scholars have bestowed that title upon Andrew Jackson Downing.
Olmsted is famous for co-designing many well-known urban parks with his senior partner Calvert Vaux, including Central Park and Prospect Park in New York City.Other projects that Olmsted has been involved in include the country's first and oldest coordinated system of public parks and parkways in Buffalo, New York; the country's oldest state park, the Niagara Reservation in Niagara Falls, New York; one of the first planned communities in the United States, Riverside, Illinois; Mount Royal Park in Montreal, Quebec; the Emerald Necklace in Boston, Massachusetts; the Emerald Necklace of parks in Rochester, New York; Belle Isle Park, in the Detroit River for Detroit, Michigan; Presque Isle Park in Marquette, Michigan; the Grand Necklace of Parks in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Cherokee Park and entire parks and parkway system in Louisville, Kentucky; the 735-acre (297 ha) Forest Park in Springfield, Massachusetts, featuring America's first public "wading pool";[4] the George Washington Vanderbilt II Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina; the master plans for the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University near Palo Alto, California; and Montebello Park in St. Catharines, Ontario.
In Chicago his projects include: Marquette Park; Jackson Park; Washington Park; the Midway Plaisance for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition; the south portion of Chicago's "emerald necklace" boulevard ring; Cadwalader Park in Trenton, New Jersey; and the University of Chicago campus.
In Washington, D.C., he works on the landscape surrounding the United States Capitol building.
World
The Atlantic Lands
View →Related Events
Showing 2 events out of 2 total
The cornerstone of the new Stanford University is laid on May 14, 1887.
The university, founded by railroad magnate, United States Senator, and former California governor Leland Stanford and his wife Jane Stanford, is named in honor of their only child, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died in 1884 just before his sixteenth birthday.
His parents had decided to dedicate a university to their only son, and Leland Stanford had told his wife, "The children of California shall be our children."
The Stanfords had visited Harvard's president, Charles Eliot, and asked how much it would cost to duplicate Harvard in California.
Eliot replied that he supposed fifteen million dollars (in 1884 dollars) would be sufficient.
The university's founding Grant of Endowment from the Stanfords had been issued in November 1885.
The Stanfords had chosen their country estate, Palo Alto Stock Farm, in Santa Clara County as the site of the university, so that Stanford University is sometimes called "the Farm" to this day.
The original "inner quad" buildings (1887–91) are designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Francis A. Walker, Charles Allerton Coolidge, and Leland Stanford himself.
Chicago hosts the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, a spread of one hundred and fifty pompously neoclassical white-plaster façades with a common sixty-foot (eighteen-meter) cornice line relieved by a few outstanding designs, such as the Japanese Ho-o-den pavilion and an entry by Adler & Sullivan.
The second U.S. world’s fair, the Exposition is an influential social and cultural event and has a profound effect on architecture, sanitation, the arts, Chicago's self-image, and American industrial optimism.
The so-called “White City” establishes white, columnar architecture as the only acceptable public style in the United States.
Celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1492, the centerpiece of the Fair, the large water pool, represents the long voyage Columbus took to the New World.
Chicago had won the right to host the fair over several other cities, including New York City, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis.
The layout of the Chicago Columbian Exposition has, in large part, been designed by John Wellborn Root, Daniel Burnham, Frederick Law Olmsted and Charles B. Atwood.
As the prototype of what Burnham and his colleagues think a city should be, it is designed to follow Beaux Arts principles of design, namely French neoclassical architecture principles based on symmetry, balance, and splendor.
The color of the material generally used to cover the buildings façades gives the fairgrounds its nickname, the White City.
Many prominent architects have designed its fourteen "great buildings".
Artists and musicians are featured in exhibits and many also make depictions and works of art inspired by the exposition.
The exposition covers six hundred and ninety acres (two point eight square kilometers), featuring nearly two hundred new (but deliberately temporary) buildings of predominantly neoclassical architecture, canals and lagoons, and people and cultures from forty-six countries.
More than twenty-seven million people attend the exposition during its six-month run.
Its scale and grandeur far exceed the other world's fairs, and it becomes a symbol of the emerging American Exceptionalism, much in the same way that the Great Exhibition became a symbol of the Victorian era United Kingdom.
Dedication ceremonies for the fair had been held on October 21, 1892, but the fairgrounds are not actually opened to the public until May 1, 1893.
The fair continues until October 30, 1893.
In addition to recognizing the four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the New World by Europeans, the fair also serves to show the world that Chicago had risen from the ashes of the Great Chicago Fire, which had destroyed much of the city in 1871.
On October 9, 1893, the day designated as Chicago Day, the fair sets a world record for outdoor event attendance, drawing 751,026 people.
The debt for the fair is soon paid off with a check for one and a half million dollars (equivalent to forty-one million eight hundred thousand in 2018).