building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

together urban and environmental planning.[…] The park was for
Olmsted the first tool for freeing the city and his architecture from the
slavery of rigid, uniform and mortifying patterns. Here are some
features: ; . In other words,
the sequence of the parks had to offer the means to overcome the
schism between town and countryside, and to fight both the
bureaucratic zoning and the social segregation 95 .
We believe a brief analysis of a project of suburban settlement, such as Riverside,
Illinois [Figure 54], a suburb in the periphery of Chicago, planned by Olmsted and
Vaux in 1869, to be of greater interest. In this case, the planners had to make a
specific choice: either to retain the characteristic grid of the surrounding territory,
or to propose something different, even though they knew they had to assure the
feasibility of an intervention using private investment and therefore for speculative
reasons.
The ground plan for Riverside, the prerequisites of which were resumed by Charles
and Frederick Olmsted in the later Plan for Vandergrift, Pennsylvania (1895), is the
antithesis of “Manhattanism”, which fascinated Rem Koolhaas in his Delirious New
York, since it rejects the typical, geometrical plan of the metropolis. And yet
Manhattan, even though it is not America, embodies perfectly the typical elements
of the "American layout", as Le Corbusier defined the dense road grille of New York
in 1937 96 .
Olmsted rejected the grid and drew a series of curvilinear streets, which
determined oval blocks of buildings. The overall plan recalls a carpet of leaves under
95 ZEVI, Bruno, “F.L. Olmsted, F. Ll. Wright e il contributo americano” [F.L. Olmsted, F. Ll. Wright and
the American contribution], published in ZEVI, Bruno, Pretesti di critica architettonica, Turin, Einaudi,
1983, p. 345 [translation by the editor from Italian]; This text by Zevi is based on the paper The
Influence of American Architecture and Urban Planning in the World presented at the conference
“200 Years of American History: What difference has it made?”, Washington D.C., during the
American bicentennial and published in DAVIS, Allen F., For Better or Worse – The American
Influence in the World, Westport (Conn.) and London, Greenwood Press, 1981
96 See LE CORBUSIER, Quand les Chatédral étaient blanches, voyage au pays des timides, 1937 (Italian
translation by Irene Alessi, Quando le cattedrali erano bianche, viaggio nel paese dei timidi,
introduction by Gianni Contessi, Milan, Christian Marinotti Edizioni, 2003)
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