Olmsted Landscape Essay

These texts examine the effects that we as humans have on altering and changing the landscape for ourselves. Spirn looks into the legacy of Olmsted who was convinced that the betterment of ‘natural’ spaces was key in having a lasting physical, mental and moral effects on humanlife, that it would release happiness and that the lack of current opportunity could ‘lead to depression and mental illness’. Olmsted’s works valued the natural scenery, the importance of landscapes for the public, the need to manage these space and the idea that you could have a space that was able to be accessed but in a concealed manner as to not intrude on the ‘experience’. ‘How to admit all the visitors who wish to come without their destroying the very thing they value? The moment people come to a place, even as reverent observers, they alter what they came to experience’ pg 94.
Its the paradoxical nature again similar to that of wilderness, we can’t have it both ways. Today Olmsted’s works are admired, but are widely and wrongly assumed to be bits of “nature” in the city, rather than places that were designed to …show more content…
Our society continually wants to connect to the outdoors, ‘an intrepid figure perched high up in one of his own creations’ shows the control of humans over nature. There is an essence of creative destruction by which we create landscapes that we believe fit the ‘identity’ of the land, that we are truly restoring and transforming the space for the better but it begs the question, ‘Restoring to what’ Pg 23 Trigger. Landscapes of the city and wilderness are polar opposites, they display the nature of human intervention and the destructive ways of life, an ever symbolic reminder that our environment around us is in Olmsted’s words, ‘Not infinitely