OLMSTED’S TIMELESS APPEAL

LAWRENCEVILLE WAS HONORED IN the 13th annual Historic American Landscape Survey (HALS) Challenge: Olmsted Landscapes, announced in December at the American Society of Landscape Architects Conference on Landscape Architecture.

The School, with its National Historic

Landmark status campus, received the National Association for Olmsted Parks Certificate for Non-Park work of the Olmsted Firm. Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. (1822-1903) served as the master planner and landscape architect for the Circle area of campus.

The awards are sponsored by the National Park Service, and the School’s entry was prepared by Elaine Mills P’05, a registered landscape architect and arborist and author of The Trees of Lawrenceville

In the entry, Mills explained: “Olmsted’s … forward-looking campus master plan and landscape designs, which began in 1883 and thrives to this day, supported the School’s progressive educational and social system with aesthetic and functional manipulations of the architecture and landscape. Olmsted arranged the campus in a picturesque and uncommon circular fashion and established each building as a public building in a park with a north front and a south front.

“Olmsted set the 50-acre residential educational community within a ‘museum of botany and dendrology,’ and insisted on advanced facilities for public health including, exercise, water supply, drainage, sanitation, and building orientation. Additionally, in anticipation of future land acquisitions, he established a new axis leading from the Circle to guide the next expansion of the school. The Circle remains a rare surviving example of an educational institution where architects and landscape planners collaborated successfully to change the quality of life of its inhabitants.” n