American Landscape and Architectural Design, 1850-1920: a Study Collection from the Harvard Graduate School of Design

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American Landscape and Architectural Design, 1850-1920, provides materials that will aid in the development of various critical thinking skills. For example, the wealth of images documenting the period of estate-building in America can be used to form and test comprehension of this movement. Comparing images, you can practice identifying evidence of change and time. Numerous plans and photographs of design projects provide an opportunity to use analytical and interpretive skills in determining the decisions and values that shaped these materials. Other images tell the story of the design of Washington, D.C. and provide the opportunity to analyze and form opinions about the issues and decisions that influenced the city's development.

The collection offers a number of ways to practice identifying, organizing, and examining information in regard to its place in time and to change over time. Examining the collection's photographs from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, try to identify and articulate the way architecture changed over time. You may want to focus on one particular aspect of design, architectural feature, or location, using the Subject Index and the State Index. Create a photographic timeline that reflects the changes you see. For a more complex project, use the collection's images to create a timeline that locates different architectural styles in history. Or, use the Names Index to create a timeline that illustrates the career of one architect and the development of his or her signature style.

Gannett House, Portico, Harvard University, 135 Western Avenue, Cambridge, MA, 1838.	Craigie House, Facade, 105 Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA, 1759.	Dixon Estate, Exterior of House, Elkin's Park, PA, 1920; Completed 1931.	Compare and contrast these images of houses built in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
	What are the building materials and design style of each house? What social and economic classes do you think the owners of these homes belonged to? Why? What are the relationships of these houses to the natural environment?

Retrieve images from the collection that are not dated and try to determine when the structures may have been built, using information gleaned from other, dated images. What factors do you need to take into account to determine the date of a building? For example, how might Revivalist styles complicate your efforts at determining a date? The lantern slides may have been created long after the sites were originally built with motorized cars and electric lines appearing in images of houses built before these innovations existed. What other changes might throw you off track?

Biltmore Estate, Asheville, NC.		In the late nineteenth century, wealthy American industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller and Edsel Ford commissioned private country estates, creating what has come to be known as the Country Place Era in landscape and architectural design. The era lasted until about 1920 when the Great Depression chilled estate building, and designers' attentions were turned toward the public projects that were sponsored by the federal government.
This collection contains images of hundreds of private estates, including the country estates commissioned by entrepreneurs such as George Washington Vanderbilt, Henry F. du Pont, and William Gwinn Mather, as well as John D. Rockefeller and J. B. Ford. Search on these names to locate images of their estates. Or, use the Name Index to find examples of the work of the Era's leading designers, such as Charles Sargent Sprague, Beatrix Ferrand, Fletcher Steele, Frederick L. Olmsted, Charles Platt, Warren H. Manning, Jens Jensen, Ellen Shipman, and Marian Crugger Coffin. Finally, you may also browse images of estates using the links to houses and gardens on the collection homepage. These images convey a sense of the immense wealth of the period, as well as of the characteristics and tastes behind the Country Place Era.

Wells Estate, Alleé, Newport, RI. Estate of J. P. Bartram, Garden Pond, Stamford, CT.

Estate gardens were typically divided into "garden rooms," separated by walls and gates and joined by corridors. What effect would this create? How would it feel to be in such a garden or one of its rooms? If you owned this estate, why would you go to the garden? How would you use it? Who else would use it? How much attention is given to formality and to naturalism in these gardens? What does this suggest about the tastes of the owners and designers? The landscape architecture of the Country Place Era is characterized by a mixture of Italian, French, and English influences. Why would entrepreneurs of the age want to reference European tastes and traditions? What do these estates suggest about their owners and their roles in society? Gardens on these estates mimicked the axial arrangements, reflecting pools, and fountains of European palaces, such as Versailles. What does this suggest about the owners and what they wanted to convey through their estates? The Country Place Era was also an era of rapid urbanization. Explain the creation of these country estates within the context of social change caused by the growing American metropolis. Why might there have been so many women in the field of landscape design as compared to other professions at the time?

Historical Analysis and Interpretation: Architectural Plans

When choosing how to design a neighborhood, landscape designers, architects, and urban planners make value judgments about how they believe a community will thrive in terms of attracting home buyers and creating a safe and aesthetically pleasing environment. The natural landscape provides challenges and opportunities to the designers in the form of vistas, waterfronts, forest, and farmland. Designers must decide whether to highlight and preserve these features or sacrifice the ecology for human habitation.

Searching the collection on the term plan will retrieve drawings and images of planned communities. Analyze these environments to determine what decisions developers made and what values their decisions represent. For example, the following three drawings represent architectural plans for a competition in Chicago. Review the plans to compare and contrast architectural designs. What values do these plans represent? Analyze the first place design to determine what the judges' goals were for the project.

City Club Competition, Bernhard Drawing, 1st Prize, Northwest Chicago, Chicago, IL, 1913.

City Club Competition, Comey Drawing, Second Prize, Northwest Chicago, Chicago, IL, 1913.

City Club Competition, Frank Lloyd Wright Drawing, Special Plan, Northwest Chicago, Chicago, IL, 1913.

Designers' goals and techniques can also be better understood by analyzing the collection's images of parks in light of information in the Special Presentation on Charles Downing Lay, landscape architect for New York City. Search the collection on the terms park and playground and consider how the examples reflect the goals articulated by Lay. What techniques were used to meet these goals? What other goals and values are evident? If you were planning a park for your own town, what goals would you have for the park? How might you redesign existing parks or create new parks in your town to meet these goals?

Columbus Park, Playground, New York, NY.

Historical Issue-Analysis and Decision-Making: Redesigning the Nation's Capital

Washington Monument, Aerial View, Plan of 1901, the Mall, Washington, DC.

At the turn of the century, Senator Joseph McMillan called for a commission to redesign the nation's capital. Headed by the former Director of Construction of the World's Columbian Exposition, Daniel H. Burnahm, the commission also included architect Charles McKim, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, landscape architect and urban planner Frederick L. Olmsted, and Congressional liaison Charles Moore. Search on Washington DC to locate sketches, plans, and models from the commission's 1901 plan. In addition to expressing the commission's intentions, these materials, along with others, provide a view of the city's past and tell the story of how it came to be as it is today.

The materials include the first plan of the capital, drawn by Pierre L'Enfant in 1791. The Frenchman based his design upon models of European city capitals and royal estates. In the style of these models' "grand avenues," L'Enfant gave the city what has come to be known as the Mall, marked by the letter "H", in his plan. Other aspects of his plan included designated monument sites throughout the city, as well as the axial grid that still characterizes the city's streets today.

L'Enfant's Plan of Washington, DC.

Aerial View of Washington, DC.

Unwilling to finance such a large project, the government implemented only a fraction of L'Enfant's plan. The Mall was largely undeveloped throughout the nineteenth century.
Model of Mall Looking West, Showing Present Condition, Washington, DC.	Model of Mall Looking West, Showing Proposed Treatment, Washington, DC.	What we take for granted today as a public park and cultural center was then the site of private gardens, public markets, fairs, farms, and livestock grazing. Three-dimensional models from the 1901 plan contrast a tree-filled Mall as it existed at the turn of the century with the controlled landscape planned by the commission, akin to L'Enfant's original plan and synonymous with the Mall today.

Alley Slums, Washington, DC.

More than bringing order to the Mall, the 1901 plan was meant to bring moral and social order to the city, which, like the Mall, had felt the neglect of the federal government throughout the nineteenth century. In the philosophy of the City Beautiful Movement, the 1901 plan sought to correct the social ills of the city through the inspiration of monuments and the restorative power of beauty. As the models show, the plan focused on the development of the Mall, with the addition of the Lincoln Memorial and of building groups designed in the Beaux Arts style of the Capitol, surrounding the Mall.

Capitol Building, 1946, Washington, DC.

• What do the columns, color, size, and shape of Beaux Arts buildings suggest about the government that occupies them? What is the significance of the style's European influence and Greek origin?
• How did the 1901 plan change the uses of the Mall and the relationship between the Mall and the residents of the city? What kind of symbolic message does this send? Who is the Mall for?
• How effective is beautification as a solution to moral and social ills? What does the photograph of slums with the dome of the Capitol in the background suggest?
• Should the government have spent its resources on developing the Mall instead of improving the economic and social conditions of the city more directly?
• What is the value of monuments, museums, fountains, statues, and landscaped boulevards?
• What is the role of a nation's capital? How is this role expressed in its design, architecture, and in the lives of its residents?
• Is it more important that a nation's capital be a center of civic and national pride, or an exemplary urban center of social order, community, and well-being?
• What are the roles and challenges of the city of Washington today? If you were going to create a plan for the improvement of the nation's capital today, what would you do? What would you prioritize?

This collection can be used to research the historical use of various architectural design elements by browsing the Subject Index. It may contain several unfamiliar terms, such as allee, frieze, puddingston, and caryatid. Research these design terms first by viewing the collection's images found when searching on the terms. Then, research the exact definition in a dictionary and compare your guesses to the true definitions.

For example, the term colonnade may be unfamiliar. However, once you search on the term and review the images, you may soon guess the definition to be "a series of columns usually supporting one side of a roof," (The Random House Dictionary, Ballantine Books:New York).

Parthenon, First Copy, Nashville, TN, 1897; Second Copy, Concrete, 1930.

Capitol Building in 1849, Washington, DC., 1793; Completed 1827.

Madison Square Presbyterian Church, NE Cor. E. 73rd St. and Madison Ave., New York, NY., 1899; Altered 1966.

In addition, this collection can be used to research individual architects, urban planners, and landscape architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Louis Sullivan, as well as other lesser-known individuals listed in the Name Index. The collection can also be used to research specific locations and constructions.