Category: Olmsted & the Olmsted Firm

Moraine Farm (Project No. 12297) in North Beverly, Massachusetts, is a remarkable but not well-known property, retaining much of the ambiance and character that Frederick Law Olmsted intended for this private commission 140 years ago. That it has retained so much of its integrity over the decades is due to the wise and committed stewardship […]

Service must precede art, since all turf, trees, flowers, fences, walks, water, paint, plaster, posts and pillars in or under which there is not a purpose of direct utility or service are inartistic if not barbarous…So long as consideration of utility are neglected or overridden by considerations of ornament, there will be no true art. […]

The Olmsted Brothers’ work on Palos Verdes (Project No. 05950) spanned more than two decades. Planning started in 1913 under John Charles Olmsted and finished under Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.   Designed largely in the 1920s, Palos Verdes Estates was a large and very special new town— located in South Los Angeles County. Conceived as a […]

F.L. Olmsted was greatly influenced by what he saw during his brief visit to Birkenhead. As well as the Park’s design, he was fundamentally challenged by the social and political concepts that it embodied.

In this episode of Cream City Windy City, podcast host Wendy Bright discusses Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of landscape architecture. Olmsted had an outsize impact on Milwaukee and Chicago, designing some of the cities’ most exquisitely conceived parks in the early 1890s. Listen to the podcast now: https://cream-city-windy-city.simplecast.com/episodes/frederick-law-olmsted

Frederick Law Olmsted and his successors are well known for their development of city parks and park systems, but they also made lasting contributions to the National Park Service (NPS).

Despite Connecticut’s importance to the Olmsted, there is little contemporary understanding for the state’s place in the story. In response to this information gap, two Connecticut organizations collaborate to complete the state’s Olmsted research and inventory.

In the final decades of the 19th century, the new art of landscape architecture was born, in large part due to the efforts of Frederick Law Olmsted. This new profession offered “very specific responses” to the social, political, and environmental challenges of the time, argued Charles Waldheim, Hon. ASLA, the John E. Irving professor of landscape […]

Olmsted judged the Genesee River to be Rochester’s fairest asset with natural settings that should be preserved. He recommended the purchase of land and the development of two large parks straddling the Genesee River north and south of the city’s center. The North Park later was named Seneca Park and the South Park Genesee Valley […]

Charmed by the natural beauty of Asheville, North Carolina, George Washington Vanderbilt III amassed 125,000 acres in the late 1880s on which to build his “little mountain escape.” Architect Richard Morris Hunt designed Biltmore House in the Châteauesque style modeled after the Renaissance châteaux of Blois, Chenonceau, and Chambord and England’s Waddesdon Manor. In what […]

After spending nearly two years steeped in the Olmsted story working at the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, I recall what former supervisory park ranger and current Friends of Fairsted member Alan Banks told me soon after I joined the staff. He said something along these lines: “When you start learning about Olmsted and […]