National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior

Analysis of Historical Significance and Integrity by Resource Type
fulfilled by the house, and is in effect often an outdoor living room. The garden most
commonly is located so that it is visible from the house. It is possible, where a house relates
directly to an informal design, to have a garden, though visible from the house, consist of an
informal arrangement of turf, flowers, shrubbery, and trees. More usually the closeness and
dominance of the house is likely to require a formal treatment of the garden and its formal
relation to the house, and this consideration is strengthened by the practical fact that fences,
shelters, and flower beds are more readily made and managed in formal shapes. On the
smaller estates, where the architectural mass of the house is inevitably dominant and visible
from all parts of the grounds, this is especially true, but this relation will often be desirable in
the case of larger estates as well, not only from the point of view of design in grouping the
various formal units together, making the house and its immediate surroundings a dominant
unity, but from the point of view of use in grouping together those units which have similar
functions, and in arranging the most finely wrought and interesting units of the outdoor
design so that they shall be visible and easily accessible from the place where the owners
spend most of their time, - the house and especially the living room.
. . . Exceptionally, a formally designed garden may bear no relation to the house, but in that
case neither should be seen from the other and the garden should form a satisfactory unit of
and by itself. 1436
Alternatives to these typical approaches to design as outlined by Hubbard and Kimball,
such as the Prairie style as advocated by Wilhelm Miller and practiced by Jens Jensen, became
important regionally during this time in the American Midwest, yet never gained dominance
nationally, and especially not in the Northeast.
While Newton places the lengthy Country Place Era in Landscape Architecture between
the years 1880 and 1929, other scholars of American culture have examined the period and offer
their own nuanced understanding of the times through a subdivision of the period. 1437 For
instance, the period from 1876 to 1917 has been termed the American Renaissance. 1438
However, the end date offered for this renaissance does not take into account the design work
that resumed after the war and continued until the onset of the Great Depression. In order to
place the Vanderbilts' landscape modifications to the Hyde Park property in context of
landscape architecture's Country Place Era, the following divisions of the period are offered.
Early Country Place (1876-1893)
This period begins with the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia and extends
to the World's Colombian Exposition of 1893 held in Chicago. Work during this period tended
to affect an eclectic Victorian sensibility as garden design was randomly influenced by various
period and exotic revivals in the field of architecture. The Biltmore estate, Frederick Law
Olmsted's last commission before retirement was conceived in the late 1880s and serves as an
important transitional work between the early and middle periods of landscape architecture's
Country Place era. This single project heralded the "growth of architectonic direction in the
residential designs of the Olmsted firm." 1439 At the close of this early period of the Country
1436
Henry V. Hubbard and Theodora Kimball, eds., An Introduction to the Study of Landscape Design
(1929; reprint, Boston: Hubbard Educational Trust, 1959), 259-261.
1437
Norman Newton, Design on the Land: The Development of Landscape Architecture (Cambridge, MA:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971).
1438
Wilson, et al, American Renaissance.
1439 Newton, 428.
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