Community by Design: The Olmsted Firm and the Development of Brookline, Massachusetts

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Description

In 1883, Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. moved from New York City to Brookline, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb that anointed itself the “richest town on the earth.” For the next half century, until his son Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. relocated to California in 1936, the Olmsted firm received over 150 local commissions, serving as the dominant force in the planned development of this community.

From Fairsted, the Olmsteds’ Brookline home and place of job, the firm collaborated with an impressive galaxy of suburban neighbors who were a number of the regional and national leaders in the fields of architecture and horticulture, among them Henry Hobson Richardson and Charles Sprague Sargent. Through plans for boulevards and parkways, residential subdivisions, institutional commissions, and private gardens, the Olmsted firm carefully guided the development of the town, as they designed cities and suburbs across The us. At the same time as Olmsted Sr. used landscape architecture as his vehicle for development, his son and namesake saw Brookline as grounds for experiment in the new profession of city and regional planning, a field that he was once helping to define and lead.

Little has been published at the importance of Brookline as a laboratory and model for the Olmsted firm’s work. This beautifully illustrated book provides essential new viewpoint at the history of planning in america and illuminates an aspect of the Olmsted place of job that has not been well understood.

Published in association with Library of American Landscape History: http://lalh.org/

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