History of Landscape Design

The second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century was a time of secular faith-that is, faith in the power of science and technology to harness nature's resources and to engineer improvements that would better the lot of the mass of humanity. Utopia-which means "Nowhere"-is an ideal state, a kind of paradise on earth. We have studied earthly paradigms of the Biblical paradise as an especially fertile, well watered, and temperate place set apart from the rest of nature, a representation of the divine paradise. Now, armed with the philosophy of Karl Marx, secular idealists imagined that humanity could remedy the ills of early industrial capitalism in which labor was exploited. This is the period in which the Russian Revolution gave rise to communism, and many socialist experiments were undertaken that were grounded in community planning. Victorian humanitarian reformers, themselves industrial capitalists, sought to remedy the dire living conditions found in smoky, crowded cities, and Ebenezer Howard, the father of the garden cities movement, sought to realize his vision within the framework of capitalist society. Discuss Port Sunlight, Saltaire, and Bournville as precursors of Ebenezer Howard's garden cities movement.
We have seen how bird's-eye perspective in engravings (which were done by artists whose ability to ascend aerially was limited to the height of church towers and belfries) revealed estates and cities in their entirety. With metropolitanism-the growth of cities to a much larger scale-it became desirable to gain a broader, more regional perspective. Drawing upon Barthes's essay, the principle behind Geddes's Outlook Tower, and MacKaye's techniques for achieving regional perspective, discuss panoramic vision as a means of comprehending metropolitan urban and natural forms. How could this assist in the planning of cities both conceptually and practically?
The notion of planning has a built-in presumption born of the Enlightenment with its emphasis upon rational science as a means of improving human life through technology. Democracy, the entitlement of all members of societies to share in the fruits of material progress, is fundamental the profession of city planning. Discuss the premises of the Progressive Era-Henry George's proposed single tax (on the appreciated value of land), utopian social cooperation, assimilation and acculturation of immigrants as a desirable goal-as an early 20th-century Zeitgeist.
Utopian reform planning inevitably fostered an elite corps of educated professionals, including municipal bureaucrats and the sponsors and staff of special-purpose public corporations, whose values were realized in physical space through their ability to access legislative and technocratic means. Discuss and compare with the more community- and grass-roots-oriented planning of today.
Few figures have asserted a more compelling influence on early-20th-century town planning than Ebenezer Howard, the father of the garden cities movement. Discuss Howard's concept for population dispersal into new towns.
Discuss the garden cities movement in the context of new developments in transportation technology.
Discuss the relationship of new towns and industrialization.
Discuss the relationship of the garden city movement to the writing of John Ruskin and to the Arts and Crafts movement.
How did Continental and British town planning differ? Discuss Otto Wagner's proposal for Vienna's urban core and Tony Garnier's Cité Industrielle in this context.
Like Paris, Barcelona is a city with a deep indigenous architectural tradition that has made significant contributions to urbanism, notably through the plan of Ildefons Cerdà and the visionary Park Güell of Antonio Gaudí as well as, more recently, through the urban revisions and public-space developments associated with the 1992 Olympics. Discuss.
Unlike Cerdà's forward-looking grid, Park Güell owes a debt to the English Picturesque tradition and craft technology as well as to earlier emblematic gardens. Discuss.
Discuss the relationship between radical socialist idealism and machine technology in European modernist planning. Compare the faith in the future implicit in this type of planning and the historicist planning ideals of Camillo Sitte.
Discuss the architectural manifesto as a means of declaring principles and Le Corbusier's role as a stentorian voice proclaiming such modernist ideals as high-speed machine transportation, industrially based architecture, and the superblock as the principal planning unit of a new urban scale.
Discuss the 19th-century metropolitan focus of Andrew Jackson Downing, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Charles Eliot as background for 20th-century garden cities planning in the United States.
Discuss the career of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., as a city planner and his relationship both to the City Beautiful movement and to British and European garden city.
Who was Clarence Perry, and what was his influence with regard to Forest Hills Gardens and other planned communities?
Discuss Patrick Geddes's concepts of synoptic vision, "Valley Survey," and "City Survey" and how his green cities utopianism influenced the thinking of Lewis Mumford and other early-20th-century regional planners in America.
What was the Regional Planning Association of America, what were the planning principles it promoted, and how were these realized in Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, New York, and Radburn, New Jersey?
The idealism of reformers and garden city planners was thwarted by the realities of market economics limiting the availability of capital for town-scale land development and by political circumstances in the United States favoring land development by private developers rather than by government-sponsored public corporations. Discuss.
Frank Lloyd Wright saw what we might today term "Spread City" as a positive American form of settlement with its roots in frontier tradition. Discuss Wright's anti-urban Usonian Vision for Broadacre City.
Unlike the members of RPAA and Frank Lloyd Wright, the Regional Plan Association, organized to guide the development of New York as the city expanded into the several counties within three states-New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut (the Tri-State area)-was pragmatic, politically connected, and focused more upon data collection and analysis to serve as a guide and means of anticipating and rationally accommodating growth around a central core than upon designing greenbelt cities. With a vision similar to that of Charles Eliot for metropolitan Boston, RPA planners, led by Thomas Adams, saw the construction of new parkways and large exurban parks and the forging of political cooperation among rival jurisdictions as their organization's principal goal. Discuss.
How successful has RPA been in fostering the legislation, zoning codes, and other planning tools necessary to unite the city and its surrounding counties into a well planned multigovernmental regional entity?
We have seen how transportation technology-the development of the spring-hung carriage in the 17th century, the railroad in the 19th, and the motorcar in the 20th-has profoundly affected urban form. Vested interests in the rival technologies of rail and rubber have influenced the shaping of metropolitan New York. Discuss the city's failure to achieve an integrated rail-and-rubber transportation system.
Discuss the relationship between driving and recreation and the design of America's first parkways in Westchester Country and on Long Island as regional-scale versions of the park carriage drive.
Discuss the accomplishments of Robert Moses and how these were served by the planning efforts of RPA.
Along with the new mobility, mass leisure (the result of the organization of labor and the regulated industrial work-week) created new recreational demands. Discuss the effect of this social development upon park building and the profession of landscape design.
Discuss the Chicago park system as a crucible for Progressive-Era recreational innovation.
Discuss Jens Jensen's development and practice of a Prairie style in landscape architecture.
How was an Olmsted-derived Prairie version of the pastoral and Picturesque merged with the new emphasis upon recreation in the Chicago parks designed by Jensen?
Landscape design as a form of public entertainment and preview of future technologies has its roots in the various international expositions of the 19th century. Discuss the New York World's Fair of 1939, billed as the World of Tomorrow, as an urban planning vision.