In this essay I will start by outlining the social, cultural, and philosophical context of the urban park, how these resulted in the emergence of public parks, and additionally how the evolution of the designer’s and user’s attitudes to the public realm in these places shaped their development throughout. I will investigate the theory behind the form of the nineteenth-century urban park, looking specifically at Olmsted’s Central Park and its relationship to the city. Understanding how the philosophical context of the time, Transcendentalism and Romanticism, affected the approach towards public parks. Additionally, I will be inspecting Olmsted’s and Vaux's subsequent work on Prospect Park, how the relationship between the park and the city developed along with studying the evolution of both the designer’s and user’s attitudes towards these parks, comparing both projects. I will then briefly outline the social and cultural context for Amsterdamse Bos, a European park of the 20th century. Comparing and contrasting any parallel developments. Finishing by concluding these themes which demonstrate why Olmsted and Vaux are considered to be the fathers of landscape architecture.
The social, cultural, and philosophical context of the development of the urban park is crucial to comprehend the relationship between the urban park and the city, additionally how the evolution of the designer’s and user’s attitude to the public realm in these places shaped their development. The social context of 19th-century cities revolves around the unprecedented problems caused by the birth of mass society. ‘Cholera, caused by contaminated drinking water, and other illnesses were associated with overcrowding’. These problems lead to the use of industrial technology to build important elements of new urban infrastructure, for example, aqueducts and sewers. These new developments were imperative for populations to be able to survive in cities grown to a metropolitan scale. Furthermore, parks and transportation lines, which were now possible, connecting the outlying residential suburbs to the commercial center were needed to maintain contact with nature otherwise lost to large-scale urban growth. These new posed problems in terms of education, housing, and medical problems illuminated religion’s role in an ethical system as industrial capitalism and humane practicality went hand in hand. The doctrine of utilitarianism was enunciated by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill and was ‘the ethical theory that sees utility as a measure of economic and social value, directing all action toward the goal of achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people’.
Colonialism, which peaked in the 19th century was generally callous in its disregard of native cultural values. It attempted to push Western mores as universal while relegating non-European races to an inferior social and cultural status. The United States, even after becoming a sovereign nation, achieved the settlement of its continental territory under similar cultural imperatives. Nevertheless, this period in Western history demonstrated the improvement of living conditions, superior public sanitation, and the foundations of modern medicine as a result of science. With the help of faster means of transportation and communication, this scientific technology fostered a plethora of new inventions which improved the processes of industrial production in terms of quality and speed. This resulted in goods being cheap and readily available. ‘The creation of public parks and rural cemeteries were linked 19th-century phenomena’. What this means is the that the rise in the number of dead in growing municipalities meant faster disinterment was needed to make room for new burials. Non-denominational public cemeteries were advocated by sectarian minorities who didn’t have burial grounds. Sanitary reformers joined these same efforts as they recognized that urban churchyards were a source of groundwater contamination, allowing the spread of Cholera and other infectious diseases as previously mentioned.
The Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, established in 1804, became an international model for municipal cemeteries. The first American public cemeteries, Brooklyn’s Green Wood and Boston’s Mount Auburn served the function of public pleasure grounds quite successfully and prior to the establishment of public parks. This promoted the municipal parks movement, which was growing fast in popularity. Nineteenth-century designers began to incorporate newly discovered plants, resultant of expeditions of botanical discovery and the establishment of commercial nurseries, into the existing repertoire of design idioms which included Picturesque, geometric and gridiron layouts. Horticulture became within reach for other social strata due to commercial nurseries catering to the head gardeners of large estates. As living standards rose so did the growth in home ownership. The ornamental garden assumed a fresh importance, as an aesthetic object rather than just a utilitarian one. This is significant to the movement of public park development as a whole as it was the beginning of a revelation that sought the value of incorporating existing vernacular architecture into design. Cottages and sometimes whole villages, which previously were thought to blight the view of naturalistic arranged scenery were now appreciated for their comfort and warmth for those who dwelt within and scenic charm for those without. At the same time, industrial production in large factories saw the separation of living space from the workplace. These new means of public transportation, mainly due to the invention of the railroad steam engine and macadam paving, made the creation of residential suburbs possible. Landscape planners quickly exploited this opportunity with ample ingenuity.
Frederick Law Olmsted in partnership with Calvert Vaux, created the picturesque idiom towards democratic ends by creating America’s first public parks. These parks that Olmsted and Vaux designed, the first of which is in New York starting with Central Park, were ‘mostly naturalistic essays in which they replicated rural and wilderness scenery in order to create a poetic mood that would lift the spirits of careworn city dwellers’. Olmsted and Vaux were the country’s very first urban planners on a metropolitan scale. They had envisioned clearly a citywide system by linking parks with parkways and providing carriage drives to America’s first suburbs. The curvilinear plan form of these suburbs offered a Picturesque alternative to the existing grid layout.
Calvert Vaux, born 1824, finally got to put his talents to the test, while in collaboration with Frederick Law Olmsted, born 1822, to create America’s first large-scale public park. Central Park was the real beginning of the parks movement as well as the profession of landscape architecture in America. New York’s campaign for a public park coincided favorably with the Vaux’ plans and he moved to the city in 1856. At this time New York was spawning a lively artistic culture, with the likes of theatres, musical halls, and department stores opening up on Broadway. Both these social and commercial aspects were becoming accustomed to many New Yorkers all whilst the city’s thriving port and commercial enterprises drew in quite a volume of immigrants, especially after the potato famine in Ireland in the 1840s and the resulting political turbulence after several failed revolutionary movements throughout Europe in 1848. While public health had greatly improved in New York since the addition, in 1842, of the Croton Aqueduct which supplied pure drinking water to the city, this mass immigration caused a lot of crowding and threatened the city with an increase of disease and crime. In the current state, New York had little to offer in terms of publicly accessed spaces of greenery. Apart from the Green Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, which had become and continued to be increasingly popular, residential squares and spaces were fenced off with restricted access. It seemed apparent to Olmsted and Vaux it was necessary to build a great public park to satisfy the city’s recreational needs as well as to ‘establish their city competitively as a pleasant and civilized urban center of international importance’. So after contentious debate, a bill was passed in 1853 which authorized the acquisition of land below the Croton Reservoir in the center of the island. The democratic mayor at the time saw potential in a large public works project to assist immigrant laborers as well as be profitable for himself as he was heavily invested in park-side real estate, and so the construction of Central Park between 5th & 8th avenues and 59th &106th streets proceeded.
The legislature in Albany, which was dominated by the newly formed Republican Party, was apparently eager to wrest power from Mayor Wood and removed authority over Central Park from the city, and placed it under a state-appointed commission. The engineer Egbert Viele was re-appointed by the commission but after Vaux saw the plan Viele proposed, which Wood had approved, he considered it inferior to the potential that was at hand. Vaux successfully lobbied for a design competition to find a plan that, according to him, wouldn’t disgrace the city. The terms of the competition were announced on October 13th, 1857. After previously meeting once before, Vaux made
Olmsted superintendent of clearing operations of Central Park. Vaux recognized that Olmsted’s daily familiarity with the park landscape and his stature as a person of moral influence would make him a great partner in the design competition. They labeled their competition entry the Greensward Plan (image.1) which embodied the vision of gently rolling contours created by judiciously removing or adding to the land. Using drains to convert swamps into ponds, they would release a landscape that was pastoral yet Picturesque. For however much design ability and intelligence Vaux added to the professional duo it was undoubtedly Olmsted’s brand of nineteenth-century spirituality and democratic humanitarianism that added a philosophical purpose to their shared vision. Olmsted found that the Gardenesque style would only be a distraction for the park’s real purpose. A purpose to create rural scenery that ‘evoked a poetic mood lifting one out of everyday care and ennobling the spirit with intimations of the divine’. Olmsted never presented himself as having botanical expertise, he preferred plants arranged for their overall artistic expression rather than those presented as individual scientific specimens. Olmsted shared the same view of the landscape as eighteenth-century writers, seeing landscape not as a collection of features artistically arranged for display but as a shifting panorama, an array of views and vistas that revealed themselves harmoniously as one moved throughout.
Olmsted’s outlooks on the landscape were heavily influenced by his religious experiences growing up, like his father, he responded to transcendentalism and also had a keen emotional response to romanticism being fascinated by the beautiful and sublime in nature. He’d also been influenced by his immersion, as a young man, in the beautifully green rural landscape of England. His mind was imprinted with imagery of pastoral beauty, it served as lasting inspiration for him. The sight that most impressed him from his time in England as he describes it, from a democratic standpoint, was Paxton’s Birkenhead Park, which was the first publicly funded park. ‘’Five minutes of admiration, and a few more spent in studying the manner in which art had to be employed to obtain from nature so much beauty’’. He also admits that in democratic America, there was nothing he thought of as comparable with this ‘People’s Garden’. Thanks to Vaux, he now had the chance to create a ‘People’s Garden’ in New York and in a far grander scale.
As Olmsted’s daytime duties as superintendent continued the pair did most of the collaborations on moonlit as they paced the grounds recognizing the scenic potential of its Manhattan context. They studied extensively the minutiae of the park, deciding the placement of drainage lines, the configuration of carriage lines, and the superior vantage points for vistas. Olmsted and Vaux submitted their Greensward Plan on March 31st, 1858. They were awarded first prize on April 28th. A central element of the Olmsted-Vaux landscape was to use scattered clumps of trees arranged peripherally to lead the eye beyond the indeterminate boundaries and create the illusion of seemingly unending rural scenery. This was a challenge for Central Park because of its narrow rectangular shape and broken topography. One of the most aptly intelligent aspects of the Greensward Plan was the four engineered crossings from east to west. They carried workaday traffic of the city through the park. Olmsted and Vaux implemented the principle of grade separation of traffic a step further by segregating pedestrians from carriage traffic and riders on horseback. This allowed Vaux to design a number of stone arches for paths to accommodate separate carriages and pedestrians.
Olmsted and Vaux are sometimes criticized for being carriers of patrician values or for being agents of elitist objectives because they created a park centralized around scenic viewing. Scenic viewing by carriage, horseback, and on foot yet didn’t cater to the same degree as more populist pastimes, such as games and sports. This outlook imposes a later value system on their objectives and ignores the fact that at the time, which was prior to the physical recreational movement, scenic strolling was a healthy pastime widely enjoyed by all classes. It is difficult to argue they weren’t completely sincere in their aims to provide pleasure and education or enlightenment to the romantically inclined generation at the time or to soften the lives of the less fortunate members of society. Olmsted and Vaux were convinced that the park’s Picturesque and pastoral scenery would serve as an informal public school, teaching immigrants through the unconscious process of scenic indulgence in common values. It is indisputable that there were certain users who felt little transcendental effects in the presence of scenery, to some the park was merely a social arena, a place to parade their wealth. This of course is not to say that the idealism expressed by Olmsted and Vaux wasn’t genuine.
Contrary to many of the landscapes presented to the public by the twentieth-century park builder Robert Moses, which often held single-purpose recreation facilities, the spaces Olmsted and Vaux created were designed to accommodate a variety of purposes. In his writings, Olmsted separates the park into two types of space, ‘’neighborly’’ and ‘’gregarious’’ the former being for small groups of family and friends who came to the park to picnic and enjoy the scenery. The latter serves the congregating strangers who simply enjoy the spectacle of each other. ‘Throughout the park, the rural motif ruled in the predominant interest of ‘’neighborly’’ recreation’. However, an important area was reserved for the ‘’gregarious’’ function. This was the elm-arcaded Mall, a linear concourse from the 65th to the 72nd street which was on the diagonal axis. This was intended to distract from the park’s rectangular perimeter. In the south end of the park, the designer's consideration of women and children is evident.