Landscape Pasts

At the Olmsted: Bicentennial Perspectives conference, organized by the GSD and the Arnold Arboretum, many presenters prefaced their comments with the same disclaimer: “I am not an Olmsted scholar.” In other circumstances, this might have been an alarming admission, but it turned out that the presence of nonexperts at the conference was by design. The event challenged entrenched views of landscape architecture’s putative founder, a man who, after 200 years, is still a field of study all his own. Olmsted’s multifaceted output—not just as a designer, but also as a journalist, editor, farmer, and environmentalist—as well as his personal and professional relationships were explored in depth. Among the presentations, Yvonne Elet described the quadrangle of Vassar College as “another element in the so-called hot fight between the formal and natural garden,” which Olmsted’s firm adjudicated through its work as consulting landscape architect. Christin Edstrom O'Hara looked to Olmsted’s built and unbuilt projects in the Bay Area of California as an example of “regionalism as e…