Frederick Law Olmsted......

[TEPaul]

could he have been perhaps the most naturalistic golf architect ever?

Olmsted's career pretty much preceded golf architecture's transition to America but Olmsted's fundamental "landscape architect" prinicples seem to be the ideal prescription for those golf architects of the late "Golden Age" of golf architecture who dreamed of particular ways that the future might hold to merge golf architecture more completely into the look of a natural site.

Olmsted seemed to have a basic lifelong principle of attempting to subordinate "the parts" into a more complete presentation of "the whole"! This fundamental "landscape architecture" prinicple which he may've uniquely advanced led to his lifelong frustration with an inablilty to make widely enough known the important distinctions between his view of "landscape architecture" (as a "whole") and that of "gardening" which he viewed as a distracting presentation of a decorative or ornamental  "part" which subtracted from and diverted attention from "the whole".

Olmsted's son who joined the firm in 1894 just as his father was retiring did get involved in various golf and residential projects, though, such as Mountain Lake and Fishers Island both with Seth Raynor.

It seems to me if those ultra-naturalist golf architects of the "Golden Age" could've gotten involved with Frederick Law Olmsted himself they may've been able to see their dreams realized more than they did. But the irony is, they were all born too late for him.

If Frederick Law Olmsted had gotten into golf architecture he may've realized naturalism in golf architecture some of the later golf architects apparently dreamed of. And his fundamental of completely subordinating the "parts" to the "whole" just may've been the very thing that could've produced as much "naturalism" in golf architecture as the requirements of the game could ever allow.

[T_MacWood]

The Olmsted Brothers (FLO's step-son and son) were involved in the planning of a number 'golf communities'...in addition to Fishers Island and Mountain Lake, there was Pasateimpo, ANGC and Gibson Island.

IMO the rugged naturalistic look of Sunningdale, St. Georges Hill, Walton Heath, The Addington, Alwoodley, PVGC, Brookline, Essex County, Myopia were inspired more by the sea than LArch priniples. LArch's stylized ideas on 'naturalism' may be more akin to the work T.Fazio than Colt, Fowler or MacKenzie. Hutchinson was a early proponent of the 'ugly'...the 'jungle' along the margins of the course (the fairways, tees and greens being the 'pretty').

[Brad Klein]

TEP, it's Olmsted, not Olmstead.

By the way, he did the land plan for The Country Club and the town of Pinehurst. If you see his design of the famous Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC, adjoining Biltmore Forest GC, you'd swear you can see golf holes in the larger, open areas. He also did about a dozen plans for real estate projects that included golf courses, and his son's work with the firm upon Frederick Law Olmsted's death in 1903 was directly involved with about a dozen courses, including, as you suggest, Mountain Lake. Most courses claiming a link to FLO in fact are referring to his son, not the famous visionary

There is a great affinity in the ethos of naturalism that FLO preached and wrote about and the more naturaliustic designs of the Golden Age designers. The pioneer park and garden theorists like Humphrey Repton and Capability Brown from the late 18th/early 19th Centuries read like they were trying to create an idyllic escape from urbanism and industrialization - for purposes of moral healing. Olmsted is in that tradition and saw parks as a form of social reform and enlightenment.

[TEPaul]

Brad:

Thanks, I'm a terrible speller. I took all the "a" out of my initial post. That's an excellent post of yours to capture what Olmsted was after in "landscape architecture"---as you say, that it (art and landscape architecture) must necessarily serve or perform a social service and in Olmsted's mind that certainly did mean a 'sanitive' purpose to calm the everyday concerns of man in his work-a-day life basically up against the tiring life of business concentration and urban artificiality.

However, I really do like the direction of his principle of minimizing the "parts" to enhance the effect of the "whole" and also his resistance to highlighting "gardening" and such as a concentration on a "part". He apparently didn't completely insist on it as someone like Charles Sargent did but he preferred plants in their natural environment rather than plants and such that were imported from another environment (as had become popular in landscape architecture with a "gardening" concentratin) and used in an environment to which they were not natural. Clearly, Olmsted was not a fan of the "Japanese" landscape architecture principle of highlightening a plant, for instance, as the art subject.

Basically, tying a setting or scene together in a site natural whole seemed to have been the ultimate goal of the later "Golden Age" architects who were the most extreme naturalists.

[T_MacWood]

Brad/TE
What does Olmsted's romantic idealism (a continuation of the garden design movement that began in 18thC. England) have in common with the early Heathland courses and the early American courses around Boston (and the Sandbelt courses of Melbourne for that matter)?

[TEPaul]

Brad:

The book I'm reading is on Frederick Law Olmsted himself and not his son or the firm later. This book goes into the details of his history and his development of his unique "landscape architecture" principles and preferences. It's ironic that Olmsted retired at almost the exact same time as James Walker Tufts bought Pinehurst and began to develop his plan. So it looks as if Frederick Law Olmstead himself never had anything much to do with golf architecture and its evolving naturalism. It would've been interesting if he had, I think.

[TEPaul]

I don't believe one should necessarily say Olmsted's ideas and preferences or principles on "landscape architecture" were idealized or romantic idealism. Perhaps somewhat the opposite, in fact, given some of the direction of the art form when he was developing his own ideas on it and obviously in reaction to idealized landscape presentations.

If one begins to see the distinctions between the ideas of the so-called trilogy of 'landscape qualities'---eg "the beautiful" (pastoral) and "the picturesque" (rougher and wilder) or even "the sublime" (a basis of describing aesthetics even in the context of human or physical attraction ("generation) and appearing as an almost biblical or exaggerated form of human emotion towards Nature and natural settings), one can see that Olmsted seemed much closer in "landscape architecture" principles to the "picturesque" which was rougher, wilder and more natural than the more idealized "pastoral" landscape presentation.

[T_MacWood]

TE
Whatever you want to call it...pastoral...picturesque...his 'landscape architecture' was a continuation of the ideas that began in 18th C England....aka an idealized vision of nature.  What did his design practices have in common with the Heathland courses and the early American courses?

[TEPaul]

"TE
Whatever you want to call it...pastoral...picturesque...his 'landscape architecture' was a continuation of the ideas that began in 18th C England....aka an idealized vision of nature."

Tom MacWood:

Pastoral and picturesque are not what I want to call it--its what Beveridge and Rocheleau called it in a book they wrote about Frederick Law Olmstead and his landscape architectural ideas and principles. They pointed out that English landscape theorists called the trilogy of landscape qualities ‘beautiful’, ‘picturesque’ and ‘sublime’, and in landscape architecture the first decision was which to choose as a narrative theme.

You may say that the entire history and evolution of English landscape architecture from which the American, Frederick Law Olmsted, took his initial beliefs was an idealized vision of nature, or romantic idealism but that is not what I’m saying on this thread and frankly, that seems to be some conclusion of yours you’ve said on here numerous times I’m not sure I agree with as completely as you seem to. Olmstead appears to have taken his initial beliefs in landscape architecture from the time he was a child and the observations of his parents in nature’s unadorned scenery as a “whole”. He seems to have developed his ideas later of landscape architecture and art itself as primarily serving the purpose of calming and soothing the spirit of man, particularly the urban man. And lastly, he seemed to concentrate on minimizing the “parts” of a composition to better enhance the effect of the “whole” (scene).

That’s what I’m saying is an interesting correlation to the “Golden Age” architects of the 1920s who dreamed of tying all of what they actually created into a whole that was as imperceptible to what the natural site looked like as the game of golf would allow. That is what I mean by minimizing the look of the “parts” (man made features) to the “whole” (the natural look of a particular site) as much as the game would ever allow. This is what Olmsted tried to do by minimizing the concentration of the decorative and ornamental---eg gardening precepts of maximizing the presentation of flowers and trees and such at the expensive of the “whole” scene.

This is what I’m talking about on here as an interesting correlation since Frederick Law Olmstead probably knew very little about golf and perhaps less about golf architecture. You might even attempt to roll all this into your beliefs about the all encompassing influence of the “Arts and Crafts” movement but I’m not doing that. There are other things that influence certain artistic ideas than just the arts and crafts movement as a reaction to classicism or even romantic idealism and Olmsted’s ideas seem to ideas and principles that were influenced by other things. His beliefs about what constitutes the importance of the whole as distinct from the importance of the parts seems to be examples of such ideas and principles---and this is certainly a close correlation to naturalistically inclined golf architects who attempt to make whatever they create look like the Nature of any site itself.

[TEPaul]

"What did his design practices have in common with the Heathland courses and the early American courses?"

If you're interested in that question why don't you give the answer a shot yourself?

[T_MacWood]

TE
I don't see it. Perhaps you can find a connection between LArch and GArch starting with RTJ (and those who followed him)...after all he studied LArch.

[TEPaul]

"TE
I don't see it."

Tom:

I'm not surprised.

"Perhaps you can find a connection between LArch and GArch starting with RTJ (and those who followed him)...after all he studied LArch".

Perhaps, but a more modern form of landscape architecture which seemed to focus on "art principle" aspects such as "balance" and particularly "emphasis" (to lead or focus the eye on that which is most important in the presentation). I don't see much connection between RTJ's style of golf course architecture and Olmsted's principle of landscape architecture of minimzing the parts to enhance the "whole" (natural scene). RTJ's man-made features, in my opinion, very much exentuated his decorative and ornamental stylized type of bunkers, and greens, manicured conditions etc. That doesn't  correlate much to Olmsted's ideas of the pastoral much less the  wilder and rougher style of the "picturesque" in the "whole" sense, in my opinion.

[T_MacWood]

TE
Merry Xmas.

Just because I don’t see it, doesn’t mean its not there. Keep pursuing it…you might be on to something. Vistas and views were a major consideration in Olmsted and Vaux’s Greensward Plan for Central Park, and vistas were also an important consideration for a number of golf architects (very important in Japanese garden design as well).

It is my impression the theories of William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll had more of an influence on the average guy…including golf architects.

Robinson was an Irishman who moved to London to become a foreman at the Regent’s Park Botanical Gardens. He eventually became the gardening correspondent of THE TIMES. He founded two gardening magazines, The Garden and Gardening Illustrated, in 1871 and 1879. He wrote many books, including one particularly influential book: The Wild Garden (1870), to which Gertrude Jekyll contributed some sections. Some of Robinson’s wild garden designs are crazy…the word wild is an understatement

Jekyll was Robinson’s protégé and became more or less an iconic figure in Brtiain, where gardening has always been quite popular. She wrote a gardening column for Country Life as well as a number of books ('Essays on the Life of an Amateur' being one of the most popular). She lived in Surrey.

Jekyll and Robinson used more natural combinations for plants in their gardens, including wild flowers and perennials. They extended the flower season from a few months in the warm seasons to all year long with the use of bulbs, ornamental grasses, and old-fashioned plants and herbs collected from the simple English cottage gardens. Earth and plant forms inspired their new concept of garden design...the plants’ season, ecology, and arrangement in nature created the basis for the design revolution. And they were both widely read. Robinson and Jekyll died in 1935.

Their rustic designs seem to be more in tune with the Heathland folks...where broken ground was considered beautiful and where bunkers torn from the ground were an appealing sight along with heather, bracken and wild grass...in contrast to the picturesque, pastorial scenes created by Capability Brown, Repton and Olmsted.

If you are looking for a direct connection between landscape design and golf architecture, Jekyll designed gardens for Horace Hutchinson and Herbert Fowler. Fowler himself was an avid gardener and plant man, I doubt he was the only one (I recall reading something about MacKenzie’s garden in Leeds). Its ironic that Fowler would later collaborate with another avid gardener and plant man—George Thomas.

[Tony Ristola]

"What did his design practices have in common with the Heathland courses and the early American courses?"

If you want to add many of the better courses...perhaps the following would be one...

“Drawings were no more than memorandums the firm supplied to be referred to in getting on the ground a work of art requiring professional creativity and supervision.”   Laura Roper, Fredrick Law Olmsted's biographer summarizing his response to the relationship of plans and field work.

[T_MacWood]

Tony
That is very similar to thoughts expressed by Simpson. My impression is Colt would also agree with that as well.

[TEPaul]

Tom MacWood:

Although that's all very interesting (truly) about Gertrude Jekyll and Robinson and such regarding gardening and their gardening design styles and the fact that Fowler liked gardening and designed gardens and that Colt won a sweet pea contest or Thomas had world class roses I really don't think there's much correlation there between some of the principles of the golf architectural styles of those natural golf architects who attempted to minimize the things they made in such a way so as to make it look like part of the natural "whole" (the entire scene) compared to some of Jekyll's English garden designs, for instance.

I spent a pretty good amount of time in Jekyll's gardens attached to Greywalls (Lutyens)---it is very beautiful and interesting but has little correlation to a natural vista planned by Olmsted that sought to minimize the parts into a natural whole, similar to the goal of some of the natural golf architects.

[T_MacWood]

TE
It is interesting that you would mention Greywalls…it was one of many collaboration between the architect Lutyens and Jekyll. Alfred Lyttelton, who built that house, was a close friend of Arthur Balfour and Horace Hutchinson…those three had a semi-regular game at North Berwick.

It was Jekyll’s ability to meld her informal naturalized designs with the architecture of Lutyens that inspired many. Their collaboration illustrated the appealing relationship between formalized architecture and natural environment…obviously something golf architects deal with as well...blending the man-made with the natural site.  Jekyll’s naturalistic, rustic designs—in and around Surrey—are cousins to the rustic heathland designs that featured native heather, bracken, wild grasses and broken ground.

Jekyll and Robinson’s response to the formality of Victorian garden design were very similar to the response of Park, Fowler, Colt and Abercromby’s to Victorian golf architecture.

Those early designers (Park, Colt, Fowler and Abercromby), and their designs over rough sandy ground bear little resemblance to the idealized natural, pastoral scenes (with lovely water features) you find at Central Park, Biltmore Estate, Riverside and Boston’s Emerald Necklace.

Realism vs Idealism, Rough vs Romantic, Harsh evironment vs Pleasant environment

But I will admit, like Olmsted, and most landscape designer before and since, many of these golf architects (and golfers) did appreciate lovely vistas, and fortunately the hilly open heathlands around Surrey provided an abundance of them.

[TEPaul]

Tom MacW::

Actually Jekyll's garden design at Greywalls is not informal naturalism at all--it's very much a formalized English style high multi-walled garden with numerous little segrated walled nooks that are clearly for individualized and private contemplative purposes. Inside those segregated high walled areas are all kinds of interesting plants and sometimes a central tree within a segregated walled space that are definitely "designed" gardening (I don't know enough about plants and trees to know if they're all indigenous to Scotland or not, though). The entire walled adjunct of that formal English garden design by Gertrude Jekyll is a wonderful garden architecture/building adjunct to the incredibly interesting architecture of Luytens in apparently the only commission he ever did in Scotland. The sweep of Greywalls outbuildings that connect by a massive wall form the large circular interior coutyard drive and lawn in front of greywalls. Some of the outbuildings along the wall are connected on the other side to Jekyll's walled gardens.

Like many English and Irish garden designs of that era part of the design is for contemplation but a far larger part is the practical working garden area that supplied food for the house.

There is one particular thing, though, about that Jekyll formal English garden design at Greywalls that totally fascinated me. As you sit on the main patio of Greywalls you look straight down the center path of Jekyll's walled garden area to an exterior wall at the end of the garden which has in the center of the garden wall and lined up perfectly on the center of the path from Greywalls patio to exterior garden wall an opening in the shape of a large human eye. As you get closer to it you can get an increasingly larger peek from the highly formalized interior of the English walled garden at the vast and expansive sweep of the open countryside beyond the walled garden. And obviously if you go right to the eye you can see the entire broad sweeping lines of the countryside for miles around. It's one of the most interesting techniques and designs I've ever seen not just to distinguish between the division of the formal arrangement within and the informality of raw nature without but who's actually doing it---since the opening in the wall is in the shape of a large human eye!

But the correlation of the minimizing of the parts to enhance the "whole" of natualist golf architects is very much outside Jekylls Greywall garden in the natural vistas beyond and definitely not to the formalization of garden design within.

[T_MacWood]

TE
If you are interested in finding a relationship between landscape design and golf architecture, I would recommend Wethered and Simpson's 'Architectural Side of Golf'. They devote a chapter to garden architecture.

One of Simpson's specialities was designing and building garden golf courses. They were minature pitch and putt golf courses, identical in every way to large courses except for their scale, in photogrphs they look identical to full sized courses, untile you see a man in the frame. Anyone familar with Simpson's bold bunkering and green designs can appreciate how striking these little golf courses were (and evidently a hell of a lot of fun).

These little golf courses meld quite well in these naturalistic environments--I think proving the golf architects and garden designers at that time shared similar principles, although admittedly they worked with  very different scales...with the exception of these garden golf courses.

[T_MacWood]

TE
Don't get me wrong FLO was a brilliant designer (his Boston park design is my favorite), but I don't find a relationship between his designs and the early golf architects around London, or Leeds, Wendeler and Ross at Myopia Hunt, Brookline and Essex County around Boston.

Incidently Wendeler was another American who made a tour of British golf courses in preperation of his redesign of The Country Club.

[TEPaul]

"TE
If you are interested in finding a relationship between landscape design and golf architecture, I would recommend Wethered and Simpson's 'Architectural Side of Golf'. They devote a chapter to garden architecture."

I've read it very carefully and a number of times. Actually the book is Gil Hanse's and it's an original and very valuable, but Gil only lives a few miles away.

But yes, I am interested in finding any relationship between naturalist "landscape architecture" and naturalist golf course architecture and there's no question to me whatsoever that there is a relationship or correlation between the ideas and principles of Frederick Law Olmstead of minimizing the "parts" to enhance the natural effect of the "whole" and a few golf architects of particularly the latter part of the "Golden Age" of golf architecture to do the very same thing. In a very real sense the ideas of MacKenzie to use the concept and techniques of military camouflage that he picked up from the Boers is one mechanism to accomplish that purpose of minimizing or almost extinguishing the "parts" to enhance the effect of the whole (vista). Do you think the British military picked up on the Boer's naturalized trenches? History tells us otherwise. What the British did pick up on, though, were the Boer's formalized and straight-lined engineered looking trenches and those are the one that drew their fire. They were dumbies though! The Boers were in the naturalized trenches that the British military could not distinguish from the broad sweep of the vista of the general area! The Boer's "parts" (their naturalized trenches) were completely minimized from view as they became indistinguishable from the broad sweep of the whole. Mackenzie's application of military camouflage was never to hide his bunker features and such from the golfers eye it was simply to tie them into the natural formation of the site so the golfer could not tell where one stopped and the other started. The same is basically true of Olmsted's "landscape architecture" principles of minimizing "parts" (naturalized plants and trees) that enhance to the eye the "whole"---eg the entire observable scene.

[TEPaul]

'.... but I don't find a relationship between his designs and the early golf architects around London, or Leeds, Wendeler and Ross at Myopia Hunt, Brookline and Essex County around Boston."

Tom MacW:

I don't either but those are not the architects I'm talking about who were so fascinated by naturalizing what they made into what a site was. And those don't appear to be the architects who ever dreamed of taking the art of architecture to another level that could make the "parts" (man-made architecture) become as close to indistinguishable from Nature (natural lines and natural vegetation and material of a site) as the necessities of golf and golf architecture could ever allow!

We've been discussing this for perhaps 2-3 years now, whether it involved NGLA, Raynor's engineered style or whatever and to date I really do doubt you have any real idea what I'm trying to talk about! But maybe because of this particular thread we are at least getting very close to understanding what the subject is I'm trying to discuss.

[TEPaul]

Tom:

Scale has nothing to do with this. Scale is just an architectural technique whether it be building, garden or golf course design. But if a golf architect is to minimize the impact and observability of his "parts" (his man-made features) to meld them better into the whole (natural scene as far as the eye can see) he pretty much has to do it by matching Nature's own scale of her commensurate "parts" with his own.

[T_MacWood]

"I don't either but those are not the architects I'm talking about who were so fascinated by naturalizing what they made into what a site was. And those don't appear to be the architects who ever dreamed of taking the art of architecture to another level that could make the "parts" (man-made architecture) become as close to indistinguishable from Nature (natural lines and natural vegetation and material of a site) as the necessities of golf and golf architecture could ever allow!"

Who would those architects be?

[T_MacWood]

TE
Here is an interesting experiment of scale and also an illustration of garden golf architecture, and the sympathetic relationship between the two art forms.Two pictures, choose the one which is a minature garden design and which one is not: