History of Landscape Design

What essential traits constitute modernity, and how does the modern city differ from cities of the past?
Discuss the mechanization of time and space in the industrial age.
The modern city gave rise to new occupations, pleasures, and pastimes through its physical structure and systems of circulation. Describe, compare, and contrast social relations and public life in modern cities and earlier ones.
Urban planning implies an ability to conceptualize a city in its entirety. It also implies a municipal governance that is capable of effecting large-scale improvements by its command of technology, capital, labor, and administrative apparatus. Paris has been called the first modern city. Describe the circumstances and actors that promoted it to a leadership role in pioneering urban modernity.
The 19th-century poet Charles Baudelaire epitomizes in his life and writing a new urban species, the flâneur, a product of modernity. The 20th-century critic Walter Benjamin, an appreciator of Baudelaire, developed his Arcades Project as an investigation of the essential nature of 19th-century bourgeois capitalist culture, as represented most fully by Paris, using the glass-enclosed arcades, emporia composed of gallery-like boutiques or departments, as an architectural metaphor around which to organize his revelatory aperçus regarding modernity. Describe the innovative planning, architectural, and landscape features that turned Haussmann's Paris into a perpetual spectacle for the flâneur.
The term "monumental city planning" applied to the 19th-century transformation of Paris. Describe the character and function of its monuments within the context of its new urban form. What was the Artists' Plan of 1793? What role did Napoleon I play in establishing Paris as a monumental city?
Describe the street furniture and other amenities that contributed to Paris's reputation as an urban cynosure.
How did the squares (places ) of Paris differ from the squares of London?
Charles-Adolphe Alphand, the chief designer of the parks of Paris was an almost exact contemporary of Central Park's designer, Frederick Law Olmsted. While both employed the Picturesque idiom inherited from 18th-century English landscape designers, the Paris parks and Olmsted's parks are fundamentally different in spirit. Analyze the ways in which their respective designs express this difference.
The 1811 grid plan for New York City influenced the configuration of its streets and organized the commodification of land as real estate development. Central Park, the result of progressive engineering in the service of a Picturesque aesthetic ideal infused with mid-19th-century American republican values, was claimed for its promoters and designers to be a thereupeudic antidote to the rapidly industrializing city. As a democratic public institution, its benefits were extended to all classes of people. Some recent historians paint a somewhat different picture. According to Matthew Gandy (see reading assignment), whose argument follows the line of reasoning put forth by Rosenzweig and Blackmar:
Three dominant themes emerge from the debates surrounding the creation of [the park]. First, there is the emergence of a Yankee predilection for the English picturesque landscape transposed to an industrial urban setting, in the context of a pervasive cultural anxiety on the part of North American elites who consistently compared American cities with those of Europe. Second, at a political level the theme of the "public interest" was skillfully manipulated in order to impose a particular conception of urban order amid rapid and seemingly chaotic patterns of urban change. And third, the growing sophistication of real estate speculation becomes linked with newly emerging conceptions of the aesthetics of nature and urban design. This last theme is of particular interest in that it facilitated an uncanny degree of congruence between a distinctively American nature aesthetic derived from the legacy of romantic idealism and the emergence of a sophisticated metropolitan ideology of nature within which the commodification of nature as a social product became an integral dimension to the dynamics of capitalist urbanization.
According to Gandy (and also Rosenzweig and Blackmar), the park succeeded in spite of "Olmsted's rarefied vision" and "those sectional interests that masquerade under the cloak of an imaginary public weal" because its scenic spaces were subsequently altered and appropriated for other uses by "a whole city and its people." Is this revisionist view of the Olmstedian legacy tenable? Discuss.
While the designers of Central Park necessarily had to conform to the pre-existing Manhattan grid, in the creation of Brooklyn's Prospect Park they had a greater chance to influence the setting of the park's boundaries as well as the opportunity to forge a new vision for the design and development of the surrounding city. Discuss the emergence of Olmsted and Vaux as city planners and their subsequent commissions in this regard.
How did Charles Eliot extend Olmsted's Emerald Necklace in Boston to create a metropolitan regional plan?
During the post-Civil War period, the United States came of age as an industrial nation, giving rise to the so-called Gilded Age in which the values of republican patriots, transcendentalists, and the followers of John Ruskin were superseded by an avid neo-classicism that sought express individual and civic wealth by borrowing the design vocabulary of the châteaux, villas, and palaces of Europe. Discuss Olmsted's legacy within this context.
Beginning in the mid-19th-century, World's Fairs became a hallmark and showcase of industrial modernity. Compare and contrast the World's Fairs held in Paris in 1855, 1867, 1878, 1889 with the Chicago World's Fair of 1893.
How and where was monumental urbanism realized in America?
Discuss the career of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. and his role on the MacMillan Commission overseeing the redesign of Washington, D.C.
America's national parks are much a product of 19th-century industrial-age modernity as were its fast-growing cities. Discuss.