The aesthetics of domesticity. Olmsted and the relationship between house and landscape in nineteenth-century America
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_zarch/zarch.2021176071Keywords:
American Landscape Architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted, Suburban communities, Central Park, 19th century DomesticityAbstract
During the first decades of the nineteenth century in the United States, the house served as an element of both physical and intellectual mediation with a yet-to-be-defined environment in a yet-to-be-defined country. On individual initiative, hundreds of families moved to the urban peripheries giving rise to a particular way of life for the middle class. It did not take long for single-family housing developments to appear on the outskirts of major cities. According to several authors, this form of settlement was modernized when Frederick Law Olmsted planned and built the Riverside neighborhood, on the outskirts of Chicago. Highly praised for combining systematic lot development with landscape aesthetics, this suburb also incorporated common infrastructures only seen before in urban centers.
In this article, I argue that Olmsted's contribution to the relationship between house and landscape was not only practical. It also had a rhetorical facet aimed, above all, at the domestication of the United States. To this end, I propose a re-reading of two of his early projects: the Central Park in New York and the never-built College of Berkeley. Their reports show to what extent the idea of home motivated his landscape discourse. Furthermore, this sustains that one of Olmsted most advanced positions was the development of an aesthetic category derived from the home: the aesthetics of the domestic, an understanding of the landscape as an entity that emerged from the house.
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