building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

Commission, which resulted in the creation in 1872 of the Yellowstone National
Park, the first Nature Reserve in the world.
On his return to New York, he was to begin a profitable career as a landscape
designer. The Central Park project was followed by major projects, such as Prospect
Park in Brooklyn (1867), Riverside Park and Morningside Park in New York (1873),
Belle Isle Park in Detroit (1880s) designed together with Charles Eliot (1859‐1897),
one of Olmsted’s greatest apprentices, who died prematurely at the age of 38. In
the final decades of the century, he was committed to the project design for
Franklin Park in Boston, a large pastoral scenario, which was eventually extended
into the Emerald Necklace, the system of parks, parkways and waterways designed
for that same city. There was no lack of consultancy work to protect important
natural areas, such as the case of the Niagara Reservation project (1885), a tourist
destination easily reachable from New York. However, we will not be referring to
these projects, as their implications and town planning results go far beyond the
time limit set for this research on the birth of the landscape and its theories in the
United States.
The years following the Civil War were a moment of maturity and reflection on the
hypotheses which people, such as Jefferson, Downing and Olmsted, had put
forward since the first half of the century. Olmsted, who, for obvious reasons of
age, ‐ he was to die in 1903‐, was the only one of them to see the end of the
nineteenth century and to prepare the landscape plan for the World’s Columbian
Exposition in 1893. After the Civil War everything had changed. Olmsted himself
had organised the office according to contemporary, professional requirements,
thus losing the vitality and experimental nature he had poured into creating Central
Park. The project for the Biltmore Estate (1889‐95), an enormous private estate
belonging to George Washington Vanderbilt in North Carolina, looked back to the
models of the formal, eighteenth century, French gardens and was an insincere
support of the classical style out of mere opportunism or tiredness. After his
professional retirement in 1893, the firm continued its activities under the guidance
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