building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

lane, to one of these. It consisted of some thirty neatly‐whitewashed
cottages, with a broad avenue, planted with Pride‐of‐China trees
between them. The cottages were framed buildings, boarded on the
outside, with shingle roof and brick chimneys; they stood fifty feet apart,
with gardens and pig‐yards, enclosed by palings, between them. At one,
which was evidently the "sick house," or hospital, there were several
negroes of both sexes, wrapped in blankets, and reclining on the door
steps or on the ground, basking in the sunshine. 38
Olmsted did not fail to refer to situations of town life and made remarks about the
planning of the towns he travelled through in his journeys.
It was during these explorations that his repulsion for slavery reached a climax, and
he decided to document what he had seen and to encourage the anti‐slavery voices
with the publication of his travel diary and the dispatches he had written for The
Times, just as the Civil War broke out.
The homes linked to the cultivation of the fields deserve a more detailed discussion.
The architectural principles which inspired the plantation houses can be essentially
traced back to two models, which were often merged together according to eclectic
criteria that expressed the overall taste of the owners.
The first type was the Creole cottage 39 , used mainly for small buildings [Figures 15‐
16]. The main feature of Creole architecture was its special distribution system,
where a kind of central hall, accessible from the front door, acted as walk‐through
living room. Moreover, a fairly large portico, known as the galerie or gallery, not
only protected the entrance, but also allowed the access to the internal rooms
overlooking the main side. The buildings were usually low and the gallery, which
extended along the four sides of the building, was very frequently on a raised level
and the house suspended above the ground.
These buildings correspond to the stereotyped image, probably of cinematographic
origin, which we have of a house in the American Deep South in the nineteenth
century: a one‐storey house, with whitewashed wood panelling, a veranda
38 OLMSTED, Frederick Law, Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, New York, Dix & Edwards, London,
Sampson Low, Son & Co., 1856, p. 416
39 A study of Creole architecture is: EDWARS, Jay, D., “The Origins of Creole Architecture”, Winterthur
Portfolio, Vol. 29, N. 2/3 (Summer‐Autumn, 1994), The University of Chicago Press, pp. 155‐189, and
to see also LANCASTER, Clay, “The American Bungalow”, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 40, N. 3 (Sep. 1958),
College Art Association, pp.239‐253
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