building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

Vaux complemented Olmsted, he had a good knowledge of the theories of the
picturesque garden, and in addition, he was a skilled designer with varied
experiences and projects behind him. After the death of Downing, Vaux had been
able to personally revise the ideas of his old partner and friend. Without betraying
the spirit underlying the first American experience, he had also dedicated himself to
the publication of a book entitled Villas and Cottages (1857), which appeared to be
an amalgamation of the ideas of Emerson and Ruskin.
In the Central Park project, together with Olmsted for whom this was his very first
project, Vaux attempted to reintegrate nature into the city on the basis of
principles, which the work of men, such as Henry David Thoreau or George Perkins
Marsh, had disseminated. Olmsted and Vaux conceived an urban park, which was
not just an unbuilt area intended as a green space to meet the recreational needs of
the citizens of a large city like New York, but which was a project capable of
endorsing the recognition of some of nature’s rights and the public aims of
landscape design [Figures 121‐122]. The “regressive utopias”, designed at the
beginning of the century in both town planning and literature could be seen to have
clearly evolved in the daily debate to become a political and city management
problem. There was no longer space for the picturesque dreams of Downing’s Mall
project [Figure 117]. Although there were analogies between the two projects,
what became clear immediately was the different conception of the relationship
between city and park. Downing’s separatist project aimed to build a parallel world
as an alternative to that of the city, in an attempt to soften the contradictions. The
Central Park project followed the logic of an innovative style, which featured
winding paths. The programmatic separation between pedestrians and carriages or
for horse riding [Figure 127] implied an awareness that the city could flow into
fragments of a specially created, natural and pastoral world. Having won the
competition, Olmsted was nominated “Architect in Chief of the Central Park”, the
preceding offices of head engineer and superintendant were abolished, and
between 1859 and 1861 the main landscape work began.
As his first job in his new office, Olmsted gave permission for Vaux and other
assistants to be called in. The two project designers won with a project they called
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