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The concluding volume of the monumental Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted captures some of Olmsted's greatest achievements. Choice 2015 Outstanding Academic Title In 1890, Frederick Law Olmsted, then nearly sixty-eight years old, had risen to the pinnacle of his career. Together with his partners, stepson John Charles Olmsted and protégé Henry Sargent Codman, he was involved in a number of major ongoing projects, including the Boston, Buffalo, and Rochester park systems, the campus plan for Stanford University, and numerous private estates. In July, he reported that the firm had "twenty works of considerable importance" underway, including nine large parks and six estates that he believed we...
Asphalt Nation is a major work of urban studies that examines how the automobile has ravaged America’s cities and landscape, and how we can fight back. The automobile was once seen as a boon to American life, eradicating the pollution caused by horses and granting citizens new levels of personal freedom and mobility. But it was not long before the servant became the master—public spaces were designed to accommodate the automobile at the expense of the pedestrian, mass transportation was neglected, and the poor, unable to afford cars, saw their access to jobs and amenities worsen. Now even drivers themselves suffer, as cars choke the highways and pollution and congestion have replaced the...
Franklin Park was meant to be the crown jewel of the Emerald Necklace, Bostons famed park system. It was also meant to be the epitome of Frederick Law Olmsteds distinguished career as the father of American landscape architecture. Its 527 acres of open space have been a salvation from urban plight and also the center of urban controversy. Today the community around the park remains strong and depends upon the work of volunteers, advocacy groups, and the City of Boston. The photographs in Franklin Park have been collected from a variety of personal collections and public archives in an effort to illustrate the parks history from its inception in the 1880s through its rebirth in the 1990s.
An illustrated account of the creation of the Charles River Basin, focusing on the precarious balance between transportation planning and the stewardship of the public realm. The Charles River Basin, extending nine miles upstream from the harbor, has been called Boston's "Central Park." Yet few realize that this apparently natural landscape is a totally fabricated public space. Two hundred years ago the Charles was a tidal river, edged by hundreds of acres of salt marshes and mudflats. Inventing the Charles River describes how, before the creation of the basin could begin, the river first had to be imagined as a single public space. The new esplanades along the river changed the way Bostonia...
Seven essays on various aspects of the Park Commission Plan (popularly known as the McMillan Plan), by authors well-known in their fields. Many illustrations, some taken from the Park Commission’s Report (1902) and color illustrations of the remaining water color renderings owned by the Commission. With this current volume, the Commission has chosen to explore its origins with a look into the events and people leading up to the creation of the Senate Park (McMillan) Commission in 1901 and the resulting plan for the redevelopment of the city. It commemorates the recent centennial of the Park Commission Plan as well as bringing to light aspects of and insights into the plan not generally or ...