The danger, of course, lies in taking his work for granted. Visitors to Central Park are often surprised to learn that it is not natural landscape but was completely manmade by workers who moved nearly 5 million cubic yards of stone, earth and topsoil and planted more than 500,000 trees, shrubs and vines. Spellbound by the English Romantics’ notions of the sublime and the picturesque, Olmsted worked more like a painter than a gardener to enhance and exploit ““the genius of the place.’’ To celebrate his accomplishment, the Canadian Centre for Architecture in l987 commissioned photographers Geoffrey James, Robert Burley and Lee Friedlander to explore Olmsted’s landscapes. The results of their seven-year-long expedition make up a dazzling exhibit, ““Viewing Olmsted,’’ which opened last week in New York and travels to Columbus, Ohio, and Wellesley, Mass., accompanied by a handsome but frustratingly brief book, Viewing Olmsted (119 pages. MIT Press. $25).
Eschewing pretty vistas for the most part, these photographs convey what it feels like to stand in these parks, to be swallowed up in a grand vision. They also remind us that these places are used, used, used–some have been kept up, some are scuffed raw but nearly all are intact and all have been, as Prospect Park administrator Tupper Thomas puts it, ““nearly loved to death.’’ (The Central Park Conservancy just spent $18 million to put some lawn back on the Great Lawn.) Olmsted’s landscape-architect sons extended his vision from Baltimore to Seattle, but no one has come along in 100 years to redream the American landscape as epically as he did. The CCA show beautifully inventories that inheritance, but more than that, it goads us to ask, what next?
