Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.

Cornelius Amory Pugsley Gold Medal Award, 1953

Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. (1890-1957) received the Pugsley Gold Medal in 1953. He was the son of Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. and Mary Cleveland Perkins and was born on Staten Island, New York.  He earned his bachelor’s degree at Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude and studied landscape architecture under his father.  His mother, Mary Cleveland Perkins had married first John Hull Olmsted and their son was John Charles Olmsted.  Upon the death of Dr. Olmsted, she married his brother, Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. and their son was Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. from his earliest years, young Olmsted was aware of his father’s fervent desire, bordering on obsession, to have him carry on both the family name and profession.  In a telling act, the elder Olmsted renamed the child (who had been called Henry Perkins at birth) Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. thus making his only biological son his namesake. 

While still a student at Harvard, Olmsted spent a summer working in Daniel Burnham’s office as the “White City” of the 1893 Columbian Exposition arose in Chicago.  After graduating in 1894, he studied landscape architecture under his father spending thirteen months on site at Biltmore, the 10,000-acre estate being developed for George Vanderbilt in Ashville, North Carolina.  He began his career as an assistant with his father’s firm in 1895 in Brookline, Massachusetts, which was known as Olmsted, Olmsted and Eliot.  At that time the firm’s principals were Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., his stepson John Charles Olmsted and Charles Eliot, son of Charles W. Eliot, President of Harvard University.  After the death of Mr. Olmsted, Sr. and Charles Eliot, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. became a partner in 1895 with his stepbrother John Charles Olmsted and the firm’s name was changed to Olmsted Brothers.  This firm became the leading landscape architecture firm in America, completing thousands of landscape projects nationwide over the next half-century.  

Olmsted returned to Harvard as an instructor in 1900 to help develop and teach courses in professional landscape architecture and served as a member of the Harvard faculty until 1914.  The Harvard School of Landscape Architecture was the first such program to be established in a university in the US.  One of his contemporaries commented, "More than any other man, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. is responsible for the establishment of formal training of landscape architects and, through that training, for the standards and strengths of the profession today.”  He subsequently helped form the American Society of Landscape Architects and served as its president.  

In 1901, he was appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt as a member of the Senate Park Improvement Commission for the District of Columbia, commonly known as the McMillan Commission, joining other notable personalities such as Daniel H. Burnham, Charles F. McKim and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, with a charge to "restore and develop the century-old plans of Major L’Enfant for Washington and to fit them to the conditions of today."  This inaugurated for Olmsted, a long period of devotion to public and quasi-public service in landscaping and planning problems of the District, and particularly in conservation and recreation problems of national import–a devotion undiminished throughout his active life.  For decades Olmsted steadfastly guarded and protected the McMillan Plan, serving on the two federal oversight bodies for planning in the capital city, the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Park Planning Commission.  As advisor or designer, he worked on many prominent Washington landmarks, including the White House grounds, the Federal Triangle, the Jefferson Memorial, Roosevelt Island, Rock Creek Parkway, and the National Cathedral grounds.  

The McMillan report, with its promise that the City Beautiful could be achieved through the art and science of comprehensive planning, had a galvanizing effect on municipal art societies and civic improvement associations in cities and towns around the country.  Olmsted found himself in great demand to advise new quasi-official planning boards and citizen associations on civic improvement; between 1905 and 1915 he produced planning reports for Detroit, Utica, Boulder, Pittsburgh, New Haven, Rochester, and Newport.  During the same period he also applied the emerging principles of comprehensive planning to suburban settings, creating master plans for new sections of Roland Park, a Baltimore suburb; Forest Hills Gardens, a model garden community outside of New York City; and the industrial town of Torrance, California (largely unrealized).  Many of the features of his suburban plans have had enduring influence, including the concept of neighborhood-centered development, the differentiation of streets by function, the importance of common open recreational spaces, and the need for continuing maintenance and aesthetic oversight to preserve the quality of the community.  

Olmsted did not write any books; but his comprehensive reports on the many problems about which he was consulted, and his numerous and arresting articles on professional and sometimes non-professional matters which challenged his active mind, provided a wealth of enduring evidence of the quality of his thinking and of his outstanding contribution.  Throughout his long career the sociological values of public parks had a special appeal.  

In a letter to the president of the Appalachian Mountain Club in 1912, Olmsted wrote:  

“The present situation in regard to the national parks is very bad. They have been created one at a time by acts of Congress which have not defined at all clearly the purposes for which the lands were to be set apart, nor provided any orderly or efficient means of safeguarding the parks... I have made at different times two suggestions, one of which was... a definition of the purposes for which the national parks and monuments are to be administered by the Bureau.”  

His contributions to the philosophical underpinning of the role of a National Park Service were substantial.  He crystallized the national park idea by framing the philosophical mission statement that undergirded the 1916 National Park Service Act establishing the agency: "To conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."  These were the most critical sentences in the Act.  This mandate became the NPS’s touchstone—its chief point of reference for managing parks.  Olmsted was primarily concerned with protecting the beauty, dignity and nobility of national park landscapes, and preventing excessive commercialism in the parks.  

With his brother’s death in 1920, Olmsted became the senior partner in the Olmsted firm, then the largest office of landscape architecture in the world.  In 1921 he was asked to advise on the preparation of a regional plan for the New York area.  His plan for Fort Tryon Park, a great urban park on the bluffs on Manhattan’s northern border overlooking the Hudson River, also dates from this period.  Olmsted designed two more notable suburban communities in the 1920’s: Palos Verdes Estates in California and the Mountain Lake Club in Lake Wales, Florida.  

Olmsted had a lifetime commitment to national parks.  He worked on projects in Acadia, Everglades, and Yosemite.  From 1928 to 1957 he served as a member of a Committee of Experts to advise on plans and policies relating to Yosemite National Park.  In 1945 he was employed to study and report on Recreational Resources of the Colorado River Basin in connection with the plans of the Bureau of Reclamation for conservation of the water resources of that vast and scenically interesting area.  Throughout the years he advised the NPS in an unofficial way as a member of citizen organizations that were solicitous for the future of "these priceless irreplaceable inheritances from a primitive past for which the Service is responsible.  

In his later years, he invested considerable effort in California.  Especially noteworthy were his 1928 exhaustive survey and report identifying the opportunities and needs for state parks in California which became a model for other states, and his time-consuming devotion to the work and aims of the Save-the-Redwoods League including developing a market plan for saving the California redwoods.  To him, in 1944, there seemed to be more at stake of great and lasting importance to mankind in this Redwoods enterprise than in anything else to which his efforts were likely to be applied in the remaining years of his active life.  Olmsted’s ultimate reward came in 1953 when the "Olmsted Grove", a noble stand of redwoods in the Redwood National Park was purchased by his many friends and admirers, and was dedicated in his honor on his 83rd birthday.  This was an appropriate honor for the man whose contributions to protect America’s system of national parks will forever stand as tall as those magnificent trees.  

Olmsted summarized his philosophy about landscape architecture in the following terms:  

“In dealing with existing real landscapes, I have been guided by an injunction impressed on me by my distinguished father: namely, that when one becomes responsible for what is to happen to such a landscape his prime duty is to protect and perpetuate whatever of beauty and inspirational value, inherent in that landscape, is due to nature and to circumstances not of one’s own contriving, and to humbly subordinate to that purpose any impulse to exercise upon it one’s own skill as a creative designer.”  

He deserved the title Geotecht which Lewis Mumford bestowed on the elder Olmsted, finding the title Landscape Architect insufficient for a man of such scope in his undertakings.  For "F.L.," too, worked on and with the earth in no limited sense.  His solutions were not merely something pulled from a bag of tricks, but grew out of the genius of the place; they prepared for a man-earth entity where previously there had been only earth.  They were not always obviously showy solutions; they were seen to be, sooner or later, obviously right–or if wrong, then wrong because of the advent of conditions which neither he nor anyone else could have surely foreseen.  

Carrying on the ideals of his father, and with many of his father’s special qualities and characteristics, Olmsted was an outstanding leader in advancing landscape architecture to a status of honor and recognition among the professions.  Indeed, for over a half-century Olmsted was the preeminent practitioner and spokesman for landscape architecture and comprehensive planning, both interested in the interrelationship of people and their environment.  Such leadership continues to be in demand; and men of Olmsted’s stature are rare.  

At the Olmsted Grove dedication ceremony, Horace M. Albright who pioneered the development of the NPS with Stephen Mather, remarked "I think he is the greatest of Parks men in the world, indeed the greatest of all time; for who among contemporaries or in the past has so wisely, soundly and with vast professional skill, so profoundly influenced plans and programs for local, state and national parks as Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr."  

Sources: 

Whiting, E.D. & Phillips W.L. (1958) Frederick Law Olmstead - 1870-1957: Appreciation of the man and his achievements. Landscape Architecture April, 145-157.

Planning and Civic Comment (1958) In Memoriam: Frederick Law Olmsted (1870-1957) 24(1), 55-57.

Klaus, Susan L. (2000) Olmsted, Fredrick Law Jr. In Charles A. Birnbaum & Robin Karson. Pioneers of American landscape design. New York: McGraw Hill.