The City of Boston, the Boston Society of Landscape Architects and the Franklin Park Coalition invite the public to participate in a Poster Design Competition celebrating the physical and cultural icons of Franklin Park, Boston’s largest open space.
Nestled in the heart of the City, Franklin Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1885, is a beloved destination for residents and visitors alike.
Historically, iconic destinations and landmarks in public parks have often been celebrated through collector-worthy poster series. Artists have captured the magic and beauty of beloved public spaces across the United States, from the stunning posters created through the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project in the 1930s to feature our national parks to the more recent series created in the mid 1990s for the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is time for Franklin Park, a celebrated gem of Boston’s Emerald Necklace, to receive the same attention.
Since 2003, thanks to friends and supporters like you, Party in the Park has facilitated care for more than 9,000 inventoried trees, significant restoration and improvements in the historic, 1,100-acre Emerald Necklace park system designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. This year’s event will take place May 14 in Pinebank in Jamaica Pond Park, Sponsors to date include Bartlett Tree Experts, Sarah Freeman, Georgia Lee, Joan Goldberg, Elizabeth Clark Libert, The Newbury Boston, Elizabeth Brookhiser, and Skanska USA Commercial Development. To join the growing list, visit https://www.emeraldnecklace.org/party-in-the-park/
On Tuesday, October 29 at 6:30 pm in the Piper Auditorium of Gund Hall at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Anne Whiston Spirn will present the Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture Restoring Nature, Rebuilding Community. The lecture is free and open to the public. Complete information is available at www.gsd.harvard.edu.
What would it mean for a city to be ecologically robust and socially just? What would such a place be like? Through what means might such a vision be accomplished? And how might change be created and sustained? These are not questions to be explored in the abstract. They call for action research, for testing ideas in practice, and engaging with real people in actual places to make discoveries from which principles can be drawn.
For the past four decades, Anne Whiston Spirn’s research and teaching have demonstrated how to combine concerns for environment, poverty, race, social equity, and educational reform, and how university resources can be leveraged to address environmental and social challenges that confound society. These initiatives have resulted in projects and programs in partnership with community residents, and contributed to a revolution in water-quality management, represented by Philadelphia’s landmark, billion-dollar “green” infrastructure project.
Anne Whiston Spirn is the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at MIT. The American Planning Association named her first book, The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (1984), as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century and credited it with launching the ecological urbanism movement. Since 1987, Spirn has directed the West Philadelphia Landscape Project (WPLP), an action research project whose mission is to restore nature and rebuild community through strategic design, planning, and education programs. Spirn’s second book, The Language of Landscape (1998), argues that landscape is a form of language. She continued to develop the subject of visual literacy and visual thinking in her award-winning book, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field (2008), and The Eye Is a Door: Landscape, Photography, and the Art of Discovery (2014). Prior to MIT, Spirn taught at Harvard University and at the University of Pennsylvania. Spirn’s work has been recognized by many awards, including Japan’s International Cosmos Prize for “contributions to the harmonious coexistence of nature and mankind,” and the National Design Award for Design Mind, for “a visionary who has had a profound impact on design theory, practice, or public awareness.” Spirn’s homepage is a gateway to her work and activities.
Join The Emerald Necklace Conservancy on Wednesday, November 8 at 6:00 pm EST with Dr. Ethan Carr for a talk on his new book, Boston’s Franklin Park: Olmsted, Recreation, and the Modern City (LALH 2023), which details the history of Franklin Park from the time of peak popularity to the current era of park revival.
This talk will be held in person in Rabb Hall at the Central Library in Copley Square. Following the talk, there will be time for audience Q&A, and the program will conclude at 7:00 pm with a book signing.
Dr. Carr’s forthcoming book, Boston’s Franklin Park: Olmsted, Recreation, and the Modern City (LALH 2023), documents the design and history of Frederick Law Olmsted’s most mature expression of urban park design. In this comprehensive study, Carr affirms Franklin Park as one of great works of nineteenth-century American art. Since the 1980s, historians have described Franklin Park as unfinished, obsolete, or a casualty of changing trends in public recreation. Carr disagrees, offering a persuasive argument that the park’s decline was not a consequence of its design but of a lack of stewardship on the part of the city, an example of institutionalized racism.
Ethan Carr, FASLA, is professor of landscape architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. An international authority on America’s public landscapes and the author of many books, he is lead editor of The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: The Early Boston Years and coauthor of Olmsted and Yosemite: Civil War, Abolition, and the National Park Idea (LALH 2022).
Anita Berrizbeitia is a Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She served as Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture between 2015-2022 and as Program Director of the Master in Landscape Architecture Degree Programs between 2012-2015. Her research explores nineteenth and twentieth-century public realm landscapes, with interests in material culture, urban political ecology, and the productive functions of landscapes in processes of urbanization and climate adaptation. Her research on Latin American cities and landscapes focuses, in addition, on the role of large-scale infrastructural projects on territorial organization, climate adaptation, and on the interface between landscape and emerging urbanization.
A licensed landscape architect, she has worked on a broad range of projects and competitions, including urban design, campus planning, public parks, and residential gardens. She is a consultant for national and international landscape architectural firms and has served on juries of multiple design competitions in the US and abroad, including Chair of the Jury of the Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, and design competitions in Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Spain, and the Middle East. At Harvard, she serves on the university’s Design Review Board, the Harvard University Committee on the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute Public Art Competition. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JoLA). Before joining the GSD in 2009 she was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania.
At the GSD she has taught core Landscape Architecture studios and core Urban Design studios. Her option studios have focused on urban and territorial scale infrastructures, on emergent urbanization, and climate adaptation. She has also taught design theory in both the core and elective curricula.
Berrizbeitia is editor of Urban Landscape—Critical Concepts in Built Environment Series; editor of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates: Reconstructing Urban Landscapes(Yale University Press), which received an ASLA Honor Award; author of Roberto Burle Marx in Caracas: Parque del Este, 1956–1961 (Penn Press), awarded the inaugural J.B. Jackson Book Prize in 2007 from the Foundation for Landscape Studies; and co-author with Linda Pollak of Inside/Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape, which won an ASLA Merit Award. Her essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies, including the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JoLA); Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes; Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts(National Gallery of Art); Cultural History of Gardens (Berg Publishers); Sao Paolo: A Graphic Biography(University of Texas Press), Cerros Islas Santiago (Fundación Cerros Islas); Recovering Landscape(Princeton Architectural Press);CASE: Downsview Park Toronto(Prestel); Large Parks(Princeton Architectural Press); and Retorno al Paisaje (Evren) among others. With Diane Davis, she co-edited Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics (2021).
Berrizbeitia received a BA from Wellesley College in Studio Art and an MLA from the GSD. She was awarded the Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 2006.
This lecture explores how developments in the earth sciences—specifically geology, evolutionism, and biogeography—ushered in advances in design methodologies for large public–realm landscapes in late nineteenth-century Boston.
In her earlier work on Charles Eliot’s Metropolitan Park System of 1892, she argued that geology had provided a framework for re-envisioning what had become a fragmented territory as a unified whole. Eliot proposed the region’s formative processes and the thick and unseen strata underlying the visible and varied topography in and around Boston as the foundation for a new political geography for a rapidly expanding city. For the Blue Hills, the largest of the reservations of the park system, Eliot turns his attention to the surface, proposed as a mantle of vegetation that drapes over the hills’ granitic foundation. Eliot introduces methods of biogeography to fieldwork, of forestry and conservation, and of what today we call restoration ecology. However, Eliot also prompts us to reconsider the role of the wild and wilderness, and of aesthetics in relationship to a growing public. Rather than being the product of a singular or unified framework, his proposal shows us the intertwining of multiple design methods and ways of knowing that join notions of the “wild” and of the “urban.”
Harvard Graduate School of Design is proud to host this October 10 Frederick Law Olmsted free lecture at Gund Hall’s Piper Auditorium beginning at 6:30 pm. For complete details visit www.gsd.harvard.edu
Nola Anderson’s book Immersion: Living and Learning in an Olmsted Garden is a magnificent celebration of a great American garden, restored to its Italianate glory and lovingly documented in new photographs.
When Nola Anderson and her husband purchased The Chimneys in 1991, the estate’s Olmsted gardens had been neglected for more than 40 years―and she had never gardened a day in her life. The restoration and renewal of these historic seaside gardens became Anderson’s three-decade, hands-on personal passion. In Immersion she recounts her inspirational journey from a naive amateur and garden owner to a Botanical Latin–slinging garden creator. Her personal story is filled with loving anecdotes, instructional experiences and serendipitous tips, all sumptuously illustrated with images by celebrated photographer Clint Clemens.
Between 1902 and 1914 Boston financier Gardiner Martin Lane and his wife, Emma, collaborated with Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to create an Italianate garden. From the ocean bluff a series of garden terraces flow sequentially in an architectural response to the sloping topography. The topmost Water Terrace includes a rose-covered pergola, a beach-view shelter and a stunning water feature inspired by Italy’s famed 16th-century Villa Lante. From this elevation, a succession of granite steps descends through the shady Overlook Terrace, the Lavender Terrace, the all-white Tea Terrace, the Vegetable Garden, the Crabapple Allee and, finally, the luxuriant Rose Garden.
In the early 20th century, The Chimneys gardens were acclaimed in numerous books and magazines. Today, they are once again the centerpiece of the estate and a vibrant example of horticultural elegance.
Ms. Anderson will speak at the Boston Athenaeum on September 20 at 6 pm. Free for Athenaeum members, $5 for nonmembers. Register for the live program HERE. Register for the virtual program HERE.
Join other enthusiasts in great conversation while immersed in the beauty of the Garden at Elm Bank. The Massachusetts Horticultural Society Book Club meets monthly at 1:30 in the Putnam Building, 900 Washington Street. On April 18, the book to be discussed is A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century, by Witold Rybcznskji. To join the list, visit www.masshort.org.
The Arnold Arboretum exists by design. As a freely accessible, public landscape in the heart of Boston, this 280-acre natural preserve, was set aside from development for a thousand years through the careful negotiations between Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles Sprague Sargent, and the Parks department in 1872. This Garden Conservancy tour on September 24 from 4 – 6 will describe the newest landscape projects at the Arnold, from elevated boardwalks to refined entrances, as each project is predicted on a history of great design in the public realm. We will discuss historic and present plans that ensure future access to one of the most renowned living collections in the world. $30 for Garden Conservancy members, $40 for nonmembers. Register at https://www.gardenconservancy.org/open-days/open-days-schedule/digging-deeper-the-arnold-arboretum-by-design
For more information, please contact the Garden Conservancy by telephone 845.424.6500, M-F, 9-5 Eastern, or email events@gardenconservancy.org.
Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, in partnership with the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training (NCPTT), will host a three-day symposium as part of Olmsted 200, the national bicentennial commemoration of the birth of Frederick Law Olmsted, social reformer and founder of American landscape architecture. The symposium will be held in Boston, home to the Emerald Necklace, Olmsted’s last great public project. Adjacent to Boston is Brookline where the Olmsted firm’s home and office resided through 1980. For Olmsted, “nothing else compares in importance to us with the Boston work…I would have you decline any business that would stand in the way of doing the Best for Boston all the time.”
Through events, education, and advocacy at the local and national levels, Olmsted 200 ensures that the legacies of the Olmsteds live on across the country by renewing public and policy commitments to the preservation and maintenance of our historic parks and places. Olmsted Now is the Greater Boston effort, an inclusive coalition that connects communities and organizations commemorating Greater Boston’s bicentennial of Brookline-based Olmsted with the “fierce urgency of now.”
Registration for Olmsteds: Landscapes and Legacies is live HERE. Learn more about the symposium at this link. $49 – $99.
Out of the 1860s, as the United States engaged in a civil war, abolished slavery, and remade the government, the public park emerged as a product of these dramatic changes. New York’s Central Park and Yosemite in California both embodied the “new birth of freedom” that emphasized the duty of republican government to enhance the lives and well-being of all its new citizens. A central figure directly connected with abolition, the Civil War, and the dawn of urban and national parks is Frederick Law Olmsted, whose pre-war journalism about the South, design work on Central Park, and ground-breaking Yosemite Report created an intellectual framework for the “park idea.” Marking the bicentennial of Olmsted’s birth, a new book by Rolf Diamant, former superintendent of Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site and Ethan Carr, Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, offers a new interpretation of how the American park—urban and national—came to figure so prominently in our cultural identity, and why this more complex and inclusive story deserves to be told.
The Arnold Arboretum will present Rolf Diamant and Ethan Carr on March 12 from 2:30 – 4, and will also be presented in-person at the Arboretum’s Weld Hill Research Building at 1300 Centre Street, Boston, MA 02131. To sign up for the in-person event, click here. Presented in collaboration with Friends of Fairsted, the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, and the Library of American Landscape History. Register HERE.
