The Burnside Blog
A walk in the park
As I walk through Laurelhurst Park, no matter the season, the experience is always uplifting. The pond, the open spaces, the closed spaces with thick trees; I truly feel that I am in a natural utopia.
But I never really knew why I felt that way in that place. What was it about the design that shaped the feeling and narrative I experienced?
It wasn’t until I moved away from Portland and was living in New York City that I read Witold Rybczynski’s excellent biography of Frederick Law Olmsted: A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century. A fascinating biography on a fascinating man, the book covers his whole career from his time in China and Europe, editing and founding The Nation, commanding a medical unit in the Civil War—a precursor idea to the Red Cross, and his eventual career defining moment of the design of Central Park.
One element of the story of Central Park’s creation that has always stuck with me is how Olmstead designed the five cross town traverses that cut through the park. Obsessed with a re-creation of nature in the city, Olmsted was adamant about not breaking up his clearings and man made viewpoints throughout the park.
So he dug down.
Deep into the Manhattan bedrock, mini canyon roads were created for traffic—horse-drawn originally, automotive later—to pass unhindered and, more importantly, unseen. Foot bridges are built over them and it is possible to be in the park from certain vantage points and see no traffic whatsoever. It is hidden.
As Rybczynski puts it, “Perhaps their [Olmsted and design partner Calvert Vaux] most successful illusion-certainly the most original-was they way that they dealt with the . . . difficult requirment that four or more public streets traverse the park. City traffic would have been a noisy and dangerous intrusion and would have destroyed the effect of country scenery. Vaux and Olmsted placed the streets in large excavated trenches, eight feet below ground. . . [T]he sunken streets dealt with a functional necessity in such a way that the visual continuity of the landscape remained undisturbed; pedestrian ways, carriage roads, and bridle paths simple bridged the streets.”
What does this have to do with Laurelhurst and Portland? Years later, Olmsted’s two sons, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. and John Charles Olmsted carried on their father’s legacy in designing numerous parks throughout the country—including our own Laurelhurst. It too has very specific man made transcendent viewpoints with beautiful undisturbed nooks and crannies aplenty.
Upon my homecoming to Portland and having read Rybczynski’s book, a breakthrough realization about Laurelhurst was noticing that pretty much the entirety of the park is sunk deep into the ground. Like Central Park’s traverses in reverse, the roads are high, the parkgoer is placed low and the whole massive amphitheater of space is surrounded by a wall of trees. One cannot notice actual traffic and feels as if one is miles from any urban center. It is the Father Olmsted Central Park idea adjusted but carried on anew.
A Clearing In The Distance is one of those books that greatly deepened my understanding of design and what its potential for emotion and narrative can be. There are many more books and many that I’d like talk about in future posts. But I pose this question: what books on design have changed you?
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