The Olmsteds and American urbanity, present and future

I never realized how much of America the Olmsteds shaped. I knew about the parks, of course. but then there were the parkways, campuses, and enormous subdivisions they planned, setting the tone for practically a century of urban and landscape planning.

The Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site and Arnold Arboretum hosted a panel discussion this past Sunday. Historian Charles Beveridge, UVA's Ethan Carr and Yale's Alexander Garvin and Dolores Hayden (who has authored some very interesting books) spoke specifically on the future of the Olmsted legacy, past and future. The family (Olmsted's sons have careers as prodigious as his own) defined the American city and suburb, with a little help from the City Beautiful movement, etc. - injecting a thirst for "natural" (though heavily engineered) green spaces into the public mind, a noble cause in the filthy cities of their time. In retrospect, they had a hand in our contemporary problem of sprawl.

I can't help but suspect there are solutions to sprawl in Olmsted ideas. His insistance that nature should be part of daily experience and that parks should be inclusive of all activity made me think of my daily commute. It also conflicts with the strict definition of American public space as leasure space, where the business of life is excluded. All public spaces in America, save a very few, are either strict leasure olmstead parks, or elaborate ornament for shopping or civic use. Rarely is there the richness of piazza life, were citizens interact in real-time.

The day left me dreaming of my urban streets filled not with sooty smog but the Olmstedian picturesque, my front door contuguous with all-purpose, useful parks. The convergence of these ideas - Olmsted, Shared Space, super-scale "machines as garens", is a hopeful sign, let's hope I get to be a part of it. ;)

'Machine as the Garden' & the future of development

The Spring/Summer Harvard Design Magazine's main theme is non-formal cities, a hot topic and certainly a rich one - but the there is an an exciting counterpoint to this issue. Nathalie Beauvais, examines an exceptionally 'formal' planned city (well, campus extension): Harvard's Allston Campus. And her article is, mercifully, free. 

She asserts elegantly that the environmental "performance targets... can be read like source code... [and] will direct the forms of the built environment", facades will perform as permeable, reactive skins, and an entire ecosystem of solar panels, geothermal wells, bioswales and their compatriots will increase efficiency and protect the Charles river. The article explains much better than I can (links will remain valid until the issue is archived, I'm guessing).

Frequently the sheer scale of contemporary development seems overwhelming, homogeneous, a dehumanizing beast to attach stone veneer to or rally against at town meeting. What is so exciting about this article and the idea of the working landscape is that entire neighborhoods are being thought of as systems and structures; that scale is being used to enable harmonious diversity and increase sustainability rather than threaten these things.