[Navigational Banner]Evolutionary Infrastructures Home Page

Name: Frederick Law "Rick" Olmsted, Jr. (b. 1870, d. 1957)
Occupation: landscape architect
Descriptive Note: Frederick Law "Rick" Olmsted was an influential national voice promoting the park movement and the professions of landscape architecture and city planning in the first half of the 20th century. Born in 1870, Rick grew up within the tradition of his father's Fairsted atelier in Brookline. In the 1890's Rick began his apprenticeship in landscape architecture with his father and older stepbrother, John Charles. When Charles Eliot died in 1897 the younger Olmsted's role in the profession expanded. He assumed Eliot's position as chief landscape architect for the Metropolitan Park Commission in Boston. In 1900 Rick became head of the first American academic program for landscape architecture at Harvard University. The following year he became a member of the Senate Park Commission. He helped establish city planning as a profession through his designs for planned communities, his co-authorship of the McMillan Plan for Washington, DC, his 906 co-authorship with John Nolen of an essay delineating a typology of open spaces as coordinated elements in city plans, and his nomination as first president of the American City Planning Institute in 1917. Rick also made important contributions in the area of "scenic preservation". He drafted parts of the National Park Service's (NPS) enabling legislation that required the NPS to "conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein," while allowing for "the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." source: Carr, p. 2.
Corporate Bodies:    
Olmsted Brothers    
Role in Works: