ENVIRONMENT

Frederick Steiner

Frederick (Fritz) Steiner is dean and Paley Professor and coexecutive director of the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. He is author or editor of 21 books, including Design with Nature Now (2019, with Richard Weller, Karen M’Closkey, and Billy Fleming) and Megaregions and America’s Future (2021, with Robert Yaro and Ming Zhang). Steiner is a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and the American Academy in Rome.

Through a series of ordinances in the 1780s,1 Thomas Jefferson put in place a system for settling the United States west of the Appalachian Mountains. Inspired by the European Enlightenment and classical proportions, Jefferson’s geometric land-planning system consisted of a giant grid system of square miles laid out from Ohio to Minnesota. The Jeffersonian grid was later employed farther west in the United States and, after 1870, across much of the Canadian West too. Today, one can fly over North America and, looking down, see Jefferson’s sweeping design. We can also see that the Jeffersonian grid had scant respect for natural features, except for the boundaries defined by the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and the Great Lakes. The landscapes of the old Northwest Territories had been formed physically by glaciation, which resulted in rich soils and abundant water ideal for farming: agriculture was made easier by Jefferson’s grid and the canals and railroads that eventually wove their ways through it.

The 19th-century explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell provided a vivid, environmentally grounded contrast to Jefferson’s large-scale design for settlement. Powell was instrumental in establishing the US Geological Survey and the Ethnographic Division of the Smithsonian Institution and led the first expedition of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. He noted that both Native Americans and Mormons organized their communities around hydrologic systems, since water was precious in the vast arid landscapes they inhabited. As a result, he suggested that the Jeffersonian grid be abandoned and the American West be settled according to drainage basins and watersheds, raising the possibility of designing and planning regions based on their landscape conditions rather than the superimposition of abstract geometry. This essay charts the course of this line of thinking in American landscape architecture and planning.

Living in Harmony with Nature

The Transcendentalists, a group of 19th-century New England intellectuals including figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller were of a similar persuasion to Powell. They believed that people should live in harmony with nature and this idyll inspired their works and infused American culture. Through nature, they posited, we can make meaningful connections with one another and with the world around us. The Connecticut-born Frederick Law Olmsted incorporated Transcendentalist ideas into his vision for the emergent role of the landscape architecture profession. After exploring several occupations, including farming and writing with the support of an indulgent father, the 35-yearold Olmsted began his career as a landscape architect with his design (with Calvert Vaux) for Central Park in 1857. Central Park was remarkable in many respects but often missing from discussions about its planning is the story of Seneca Village, whose mostly African American, Irish, and German immigrant residents were displaced to build the park. Homes, churches, and a school had been built in this exceptionally diverse neighborhood, taken by the city in 1853 through eminent domain. Among the many lessons we can learn from Seneca Village is that, in the United States, private property can be expropriated for the public good in exchange for just compensation. What is the public good? What is just compensation? Who suffers? Who benefits? These are questions we should ask of every landscape architectural project.

In addition to revealing racial discrimination at work, the eradication of Seneca Village illustrates that Central Park is not a remnant of protected nature but a product of design. Historically, the park area had been used for small farms, industry, and scattered settlements, and by the Lenni-Lenape before that. But the creation of an open-air refuge in a giant, crowded city proved to be an immediate success and inspired many other cities to follow suit. Olmsted, often working with his partner Calvert Vaux, an architect who had emigrated from England, designed many of these other parks, including Prospect Park in Brooklyn, as well as other visionary projects, such as Riverside, Illinois, outside of Chicago. At Riverside, Olmsted and Vaux’s design worked with the site’s topography and the flow of the Des Plaines River, protecting areas in the floodplain as park land and letting the natural terrain inform the road system. The resulting plan reflected their understanding of hydrology and topography. As Powell’s plan for the arid regions of the American West contrasts with Jefferson’s grid, the winding streets of Riverside differ from the Chicago street grid.