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Frederick Law Olmsted: His essential theory (2000)

updated: February 23, 2024 Article Frederick Law Olmsted: His Essential Theory Frederick Law Olmsted came to the profession of landscape architecture late in his career. For thirty years after 1837 he served as an administrator-first of New York's Central Park, then of the U.S.

These short rides expanded to become annual "tours in search of the picturesque" that took Olmsted, by the age of sixteen, through the Connecticut Valley and White Mountains, up the Hudson River, and westward to the Adirondacks, Lake George, and Niagara Falls. In his book Ueber Die Einsamkeit, or Solitude Considered, with Respect to Its Influence on the Mind and the Heart, Zimmermann told how he had reluctantly left his mountain canton of Berne to minister to the ailing Frederick the Great. The desire to use landscape art to met deep human needs, coupled with his conviction that the process involved must be an unconscious one, led Olmsted to insist on a whole series of design principles that differed significantly from those of the gardeners of his day.

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