building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

country, enabled Hotchkiss to become quite famous in their design and in landscape
gardening. Around 1850, he was commissioned to design the Chippianock Cemetery
at Rock Island, Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi, in a place of Indian origin,
which recalled its original use as a burial ground. In 1856, he committed himself to
preparing the project for Lake Forest, a new outlying settlement for the city of
Chicago (27 miles from the town centre). This project was the link between the
experience of the rural cemeteries and the new demands of town planning and
landscape gardening. Lake Forest anticipated on a grand scale some of the concepts
later used by Olmsted and Vaux to design Riverside (1869) [Figure 54]. The project
envisaged a well‐defined, residential and commercial area, a university campus
placed in the centre and a rural cemetery. This all stretched over approximately
1,200 acres on the shores of Lake Michigan, along an area, through which a railroad
line passed. The majority of the project was completed, despite the economic crisis
of 1857, and subsequently other project designers, such as Adler, Olmsted, Wright
designed projects for Lake Forest, while William Le Baron Jenney (1832‐1907) and
Ossian Cole Simonds (1855‐1931) tried their hand at developing the cemetery
landscape, which was enlarged and redesigned by the same people in two stages in
1882 and 1901, respectively.
The town of Lowell, Massachusetts[Figure 67], the “American Manchester” founded
a few years earlier, was also given a rural cemetery. Thomas Bender made a
perceptive observation that, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the
relationship between nature and industry of the new‐born, American nation eluded
people into thinking Lowell was a sort of perfect middle landscape. The clean aspect
of the town and its contact with the natural element of water had known how to
mediate between nature’s resources and the new industrial needs:
When Lowell was founded in 1821, the dominant concept of the
American landscape was that of "an immense wilderness [turned] into a
fruitful field. Art and Nature were blended to define the landscape.
Americans assumed that something artificial could be "introduced into
the natural order [showing] that man has interposed in some way to
improve the pro‐ cesses of nature." However, an extreme departure
from nature could not be accommodated within this ideology without
up‐ setting the balance by shifting from the "cultivated" and the good, to
the "dissipated and corrupt." Lowell and other early factory towns were
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