Growing up where I did, I understood landscape architecture as simply as riding a bike. I was raised in Lyons, a working-class Chicago suburb whose defining natural feature is the Des Plaines River. The river played a crucial role in Chicago’s development, but Lyons’ conventional suburban layout all but conceals it. The Des Plaines is segregated into forest preserves; on a map, the river is an interruption, a gash in the grid.
However, if I pedaled to neighboring Riverside, as I often did — it had the cozier, bigger, nicer public library — everything changed. The streets were all curved, following and echoing the path of the Des Plaines. From downtown, the river was unmissable. Lyons homes were mostly single-family boxes; in Riverside, Victorian piles were set back from broad lawns. Riverside’s water tower was a stately Swiss Gothic edifice; Lyons’ was a functional mid-century bulb. On Riverside’s streets, I could sense directly under my wheels the distinctions of class and comfort, the difference between where I was and where I might want to go.
Frederick Law Olmsted, who famously designed New York’s Central Park, designed Riverside in 1868. It was the first planned suburban community in the United States, intended as a retort to the rigid grids that had begun to emerge in America’s first century of existence. Olmsted’s goal with Riverside, he said, was to create a sense of “leisure, contemplativeness and happy tranquility.” Tranquility could be debatable if you were trying to get around Riverside in a car, especially for the first time. But for a kid on a bike, leisure and contemplation indeed seemed within reach.
Compare Riverside with Lyons, and you sense that feelings of oneness with nature and the built environment need to be fought for — legislated, litigated, designed, sold. The earth has to move for it. The scope of that effort becomes clear in Hugh Howard’s Architects of an American Landscape, a fine dual biography of Olmsted, America’s first major landscape architect, and Henry Hobson Richardson, the first important architect to work in an American vein. Together, their work made some of the first arguments toward preserving the country’s natural environment, and how to design and build with it in mind.
Richardson arrived at his calling partly out of a need to escape his roots. Raised in New Orleans, he was unable to attend West Point due to a stutter. As the Civil War approached, he was inclined to avoid the South’s disarray. Instead, he headed to France to study architecture, a discipline that was still nascent in the United States. Meanwhile, Olmsted had stumbled into a leadership role in creating Central Park. He had understood that parks, beyond being green spaces, had a role to play in social engineering. As Howard writes, he had “a growing sense that the American landscape could not be separated from the national dream of democracy, an aspiration that he viewed as imperiled by the South’s adherence to slavery … He saw landscape — and parkscapes in particular — as an antidote to the stresses of city life and, in a larger sense, as a mode of social reform.”
[Left: F. L. Olmsted] Olmsted’s travels only solidified that conviction. In 1863, he headed to northern California to work for a mining concern, and the sight of El Capitan left him thunderstruck. Shortly after, he would play a lead role in preserving the area as what is now Yosemite National Park, which he told his father was “the noblest public park, or pleasure-ground, in the world.” He also grasped that the beauty of the area left it ripe for exploitation. Luckily, Olmsted had public sentiment on his side. Works like Frederic Edwin Church’s epic 1857 painting, Niagara, helped galvanize a country that was looking to build westward but also inclined to preserve pockets of untouched nature.
In threading this needle — to build something majestic, but keep nature in the equation — Olmsted and Richardson made a good team. One of their earliest collaborations, Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane (1869), put the facility in sync with its environment instead of planting a fortress on top of it. “Tutored by Olmsted,” Howard writes, “Richardson demonstrated a new sense of how to think about buildings from the inside out, reversing the classical practice in which the balance and symmetry of the exterior determined much about the configuration of rooms inside.”
Olmsted and Richardson became frequent collaborators on designs of rail stations and other buildings. But they weren’t exactly partners, which makes Howard’s book sometimes feel out of balance, as one architect’s major project often moves the other off-screen. (Richardson’s designs for Boston’s Trinity Church and homes for prominent D.C. families is essential to understanding his work, but Olmsted was occupied elsewhere; similarly, Richardson is absent in pages detailing Central and Prospect Parks.)
But as the book moves closer to the ends of their lives — Richardson died in 1886, Olmsted in 1903 — it becomes clearer that the two reinvented their disciplines under the influence of each other, even from a distance. Riverside was designed in 1869, the same year as the Buffalo asylum, and reveals Olmstead’s eagerness to integrate homes and greenscapes. Richardson prompted his well-heeled clients to think in favor of building with natural surroundings in mind. As one observer quoted by Howard noted, “All [Richardson’s] buildings took possession of the earth they stood on.” [right: H. H. Richardson]
The Olmsted-Richardson relationship sparked questions that persist. What should a building that integrates with the environment look like? What makes buildings sustainable? Communities? Can more suburbs look like Riverside, and can they do it affordably? What democratizing powers does architecture truly possess? Howard, somewhat disappointingly, doesn’t extend his narrative far into these questions — having established that Olmsted-Richardson created a uniquely American approach to the built environment, he is largely content to leave the matter there. But there’s more to be said: Howard notes that the two served as inspirations and precursors for Frank Lloyd Wright, whose pursuit of what he dubbed “organic architecture” inspired planned community concepts like Broadacre City and works like Taliesin West and Fallingwater — edifices that Richardson might have been baffled by structurally but grasped spiritually.
Howard is eminently qualified to explore such matters; he wrote about Wright’s contentious relationship with Philip Johnson (and Modernism in general) in Architecture’s Odd Couple (2016). But he also knows that those questions pull us into a different kind of America than the one Richardson and Olmsted lived in. Today, the awe of nature that led to the creation of Niagara and establishment of Yosemite National Park feels wobbly and endangered; Central Park feels more and more like a miracle not just of landscape architecture but of imagination. Preservation, in itself, is a harder sell today; Olmsted’s teary-eyed witnessing of El Capitan wouldn’t have the same persuasive power today. “Olmsted admired Richardson as a man who found plain joy in simply looking,” Howard writes. “For his part, Richardson had intuited his friend’s belief that scenery must be absorbed in solitude.” Our future hinges on keeping solitude and joy mind, and somehow building around them.
[Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on January 25, 2022, 416 pages, $30.00 hardcover]