Frederick Law Olmsted (26 April 1822 – 28 August 1903) was an American landscape architect, journalist, and social reformer, widely regarded as the father of landscape architecture in the United States. With his partner Calvert Vaux, he co-designed Central Park and Prospect Park in New York, launching a career that shaped public landscapes across North America. His work extended to park systems, institutional campuses, and planned communities, including the Emerald Necklace in Boston, Riverside, Illinois, and the grounds of the U.S. Capitol. Olmsted’s vision combined ecological sensitivity, democratic ideals, and large-scale planning, establishing parks as vital social and civic infrastructure.
In the U.S., lawns cover nearly 2 percent of the land surface and, as researcher Cristina Milesi revealed using satellite data, “could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America”—their total area is three times larger than that of irrigated cornfields. The infatuation with lawns runs so deep that, in some cases, failing to […]
It was 2 AM, and I was still scrolling through thousands of digitized drawings in the Olmsted archive on Flickr. Six hours in, my avocado toast sat half-eaten, but I couldn’t pull myself away. These hand-drawn plans were so much more alive than the sterile digital renderings that I have gotten so used to seeing […]
Today, the possibility arises to define a new design approach to address issues of environmental and social justice in the urban context. Based on an integrated understanding of the interdependencies involving human and environmental relations, the applied-philosophy approach for landscape architectural practices induces a paradigm shift in spatial design. Rather than applying downstream solutions to […]
Gary Hilderbrand has been teaching at Harvard Graduate School of Design since 1990 and is currently the Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture. He is also the founding principal of Reed Hilderbrand, a leading landscape architecture firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The firm was established in the […]
Tim Waterman is Professor of Landscape Theory and Inter-Programme Collaboration Director at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is Chair of the Landscape Research Group (LRG), a Non-Executive Director of the digital arts collective Furtherfield, and an advisor to the Centre for Landscape Democracy at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He is also […]
As part of the annual IFLA Europe conference, the Finnish Landscape Architects Association MARK organised the Landscape Architects Day 2022 under the motto “Boldness and Beauty”. This alone can be called bold. MARK today has about 300 members and was formed in 1997 from the hard-won merger of the two associations SMAFLA and MAL, which […]
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