Frederick Law Olmsted

Frederick Law Olmsted

26 April 1822

Hartford, Connecticut

Waverly, MA, 22 Aug 1903

landscape designer, urban planner, and writer

Frederick Law Olmsted was an American landscape designer, urban planner, and writer. Influenced by 18th-century English traditions of landscape design and by his own social beliefs in the importance of community and the civilizing role of aesthetic taste, Olmsted undertook a large number of public and private commissions. His commissions ranged from regional plans and scenic reservations to residential communities, academic campuses, and the grounds of private estates. With his partner Calvert Vaux, and later independently, he designed a series of city parks systems between 1858 and 1895. These landscaped parks were integrated with other public spaces through broad interconnecting thoroughfares, or parkways, which incorporated drives, paths, and areas of turf and trees. His major works include Central Park, New York (1858–77), and the ‘Emerald Necklace’ series of public spaces in Boston (1880s). He believed in the power of landscaped scenery to exercise a restorative and civilizing influence.

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Kolva, Jeanne. Olmsted Parks in New Jersey. Schiffer Publishing, 2011.

Roper, Laura Wood. FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. 

Schuyler, David. The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-century America. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.