From: Culture and the Natural Environment
Dr. Patricia Likos Ricci, Elizabethtown College
“Forever Wild: Nineteenth-century Print Culture and the Making of Adirondack State Park”
The founding of Adirondack State Park, “forever kept as wild forest lands” by amendment to the New York State Constitution in 1894, was the fruition of a campaign waged in printed media for seventy years. Reproduced in books, magazines and newspapers, prints of the Adirondacks gradually built a constituency for preservation by disseminating identical, positive images of the wilderness.
From: European Precedents
Catharina Nolin, Assistant Professor, Department of the History Of Art, Stockholm University
“Urban parks in Sweden at the turn of the twentieth century: the search for national identity and for the conservation of nature.”
The decades around 1900 showed new aesthetic approaches to park design in Sweden. Nature parks moulded from wooded hillsides or clearings and primarily restricted to indigenous plants became usual. But why were urban parks made to bring visitors closer to nature? Was it to evoke the untouched landscape and thus function as a surrogate for ‘true’ nature? Or were they intended as a stage in the formation of a national identity? Certainly there are relations to nature conservation, and with the search of national identity within fine arts and literature. But how truly Swedish were these parks, and were there international influences?
From: U.S. Parks in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Emily T. Cooperman, Principal, ARCH Consulting
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"The First Federal Park: the State House Square, its creation and reception in the Early Republic"
Long before the nineteenth-century establishment of the best-known American national parks, or even the beautification of the Capitol grounds and the creation of the Mall in Washington, D. C., one of the nation’s first public gardens was created to the south of the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia in the mid-1780s. With the establishment of the residence of the federal government in that city in 1790, the State House Square became, for all intents and purposes, the first American federal park until 1800, when the government moved to its new purpose-built capital, Washington, D. C. Using contemporary images and documents, this paper will analyze the creation of the park by Samuel Vaughan, and the use and experience of this State House park while Philadelphia was the seat of the federal government. Its initial creation as an arboretum honored the genius loci (that is, to celebrate Penn’s woods) and the Enlightenment scientific pursuits of such organizations as the American Philosophical Society. The paper will also explore the park in its afterlife in the early national era, when it was, as William Birch’s views of 1800 demonstrate, a focus and expression of American civility and culture, and an urban parkland joining nearby public institutions: it was a space in which the values and ethos of the expanding new republic would have room for demonstration.
From: Memorial Competitions, 1827-2007
Sally Webster, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University
"Column or Obelisk: Choosing a Design for the Bunker Hill Monument"
Solomon Willard, an engineer/architect who actually oversaw the construction of the Bunker Hill monument, submitted, even before the announcement of the competition, a plan for a 200+ foot column (1825). The Art Committee, which included leading Boston citizens such as Daniel Webster, and the artists Gilbert Stuart and Washington Allston, called for a competition from which Willard recused himself. Among the fifty submissions were ones from Horatio Greenough and Robert Mills. Greenough, the sculptor of the ill-fated seated George Washington (1832-41), was nineteen at the time, a student at Harvard, studying art privately with Allston. He submitted a model along with an eloquent explanation of the appropriateness of an obelisk. Meantime Mills, a Washington-based architect, who at the time was overseeing the construction of a 200+ foot column, the Washington monument (1813-38) for Baltimore, also proposed a scheme for an obelisk. Greenough won the $100 prize, which was never forthcoming, for the best submission but Willard won the contract to build the monument in the form of an obelisk. This paper will explore the debates surrounding the competition: the choice of form and clarify who, indeed, was responsible for the monument’s design
Kent Cooper, Former Principal, Cooper Lecky
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"Competitions in the Era of War Veterans Memorials: Vietnam and Korea"
With the completion of Constitution Gardens in the late 1970’s a new era of development began. There had not been a successful architectural competition for a Mall structure for decades and a major national competition for a memorial to FDR was organized in the late 1950’s. After the heroic scheme of four tall tablets (one for each of FDR’s terms) was turned down by the Fine Arts Commission, new criteria for memorials in the western Mall were developed. The landscape solution, which had no visibility from a distance, was intended to foster designs that created “an appropriate sense of place, carefully settled into its wooded environment.” No covered structures were to be included. The design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, selected from 1600 submissions, met the program criteria fully. The Korean War Veterans Memorial also began as a competition, but with a significant difference. Where the Vietnam competition had a selection jury composed of accomplished artists and architects, the Korean jury was composed of Retired Generals and Colonels. It is no wonder that they picked a winner that was based on a column of soldiers marching up a hill to the foot of an American Flag. While the development process for the Vietnam Memorial was largely maintaining the concept when challenged by real life conditions, the problem in developing the Korean Memorial was finding a voice that had a meaning which could be communicated, and understood by the viewing public using enough of the competition theme that it might be identified. A basic decision was made to develop the Korean Memorial as a compatible relative to the Vietnam Memorial.
From: Park System Design
Karl Haglund, Project Manager, New Charles River Basin
“FOUND AND LOST: The Regional Vision of the Boston Metropolitan Park System”
The 1893 Boston metropolitan park plan authored by Sylvester Baxter and Charles Eliot reserved the “rock hills, the stream banks, and the bay and sea shores,” the natural equivalents of what Kevin Lynch would later identify in cities as districts, edges, and landmarks. Their scheme was not only a regionally funded landscape plan; it was also intended as the first step toward regional government. The thirty-eight communities that were linked by the twenty-thousand-acre park system, however, never accepted metropolitan government. The primary focus of the parks agency’s 1956 master plan was active recreation. Yet the neglected reservations remain, and the movement toward a sustainable future suggests expansive opportunities for the new millennium.
From: Parks and Transportation
Theodore (Ted) Catton, Associate Research Professor, Univerisity of Montana
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“The Road Not Taken: Transportation Alternatives in National Park Planning in the 1970s”
Early in the environmental decade, the National Park Service put forward several concept plans for alternative transportation systems in national parks. Featuring shuttles, buses, tramways, and underground trains, these plans all expressed a desire to eliminate or at least reduce the number of cars in national parks. This planning initiative rode a wave of public disenchantment with car culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. What happened to these plans? Did they contain a radical vision of challenging the hegemonic car culture? Can they inspire renewed efforts in that direction today?
From: Battlefields and Archeology
Liz Sargent and Jenny Mikulski
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“Vicksburg National Military Park: An Evolving American Icon”
During the 1890s, five Civil War battlefields became the first national military parks. Their purpose was threefold: preserve a record of the battlefields; provide ground for military training; and commemorate battle events. This paper will explore how Vicksburg National Military Park is emblematic of the issues each of these parks faced at their inception. The ideology and intent of park establishment at Vicksburg is best understood through exploration of the role veterans played in its design. Also key to the story is the connection between the park’s history and the natural environment, particularly how terrain and soils influenced the siege as well as park design.
From: Yosemite National Park
Daniel Schaible, Historical Landscape Architect, Yosemite National Park
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Conflicting Mandates: the History of Entrepreneurs, Concessionaires and Private Partnerships at Yosemite National Park”
This presentation covers the history of Yosemite’s concessionaires, entrepreneurs and private park partners and focuses on how these stakeholders influenced the design and planning processes at Yosemite National Park. It will begin with the first settlers to the area (the Lamon and Hutchings families) and move on to the Yosemite Land Grant Commission (1864-1890) and Yosemite National Park (1890-present) and how these entities differed in regards to their administration of private concessionaires. The primary focus of this presentation will highlight how the NPS and concessionaires mutual goal to increase park visitation often compromised the natural and cultural resources at Yosemite.
From: The CCC and State Parks
Heidi Hohmann, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Iowa State University
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“From Pariah to Paragon: The Redesign of Platt National Park, 1933-1940.”
By 1930, Horace Albright considered Platt National Park “ a travesty,” but less than a decade later it appeared in Landscape Architecture as an example of “conservation design.” Platt’s transformation--from pariah to paragon--was the result of a complete redesign by the CCC. This paper situates Platt’s design with contexts of early 20th-century landscape architecture, including urban park and country estate design; NPS practices such as master planning and “landscape naturalization”; and the Depression-era expansion of public practice. Finally, the park’s physical and social durability since 1940 are considered in light of its prescient design as a distinctly recreational landscape.
Stephen R. Mark, Historian, Crater Lake National Park
“Rustic Park Design on the Oregon Coast”
Defined and described in different ways, rustic architecture is often linked with individualizing park design—mainly as a reflection of an area’s genius loci. Developing public parks on the Oregon coast began during the Great Depression in concert with completing what was easily the state’s most expensive highway. By 1940 this road represented a parkway of some 400 miles in length, one which allowed for unprecedented public access to virtually all beaches and headlands. The standardized rustic architecture evident along the highway and in the coastal state parks of Oregon also provides something of a link between work relief projects there and trends evident in post World War II design.
From: Evolving Park Ideals
Catherin Bull and Nicole Porter, University of Melbourne
“From Barren Assemblage to World Heritage: The Conceptual and Physical Construction of the Blue Mountains, Australia, 1788 – 2000”
This paper explores connections between the ideas, images, management strategies and designs that have conceptually and physically shaped the Blue Mountains National Park, Australia. Throughout Australia’s history, settlers have worked with the landscape at an imaginative and material level: describing and representing the environment through literary and visual media; enacting legislation to conserve areas of ecological and aesthetic value; and physically modifying the environment through the construction of built elements. By considering the intertwined histories of promotion, production and legal protection, this historical review suggests it is the complex combination of these cultural practices that construct our relationships with ‘nature’.
From: Modernism and Parks
Elizabeth Flint, M.A Candidate, Architectural History at the University of Virginia School of Architecture
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“Beneath the Rugged Tetons: Jackson Lake Lodge and a New Architecture for National Parks”
The product of two men, philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood, Jackson Lake Lodge marked a distinct shift in National Park architecture from the Rustic style lodges of the 1920s and 1930s. Criticized extensively for the modern style and non-native materials, the lodge, despite the disapproval, set a new path for National Park architecture in the 1950s and 60s, and succeeded in providing for a post World War II American public. This paper explores both the architecture of Jackson Lake Lodge, as well as the people, politics and social factors that influenced its construction.
From: Unbuilding Parks
Ray Todd, Branch Chief, Design and Construction Division, Denver Service Center, National Park Service.
"Unbuilding National Parks"
The paper will discuss how understanding the impact of development in national parks has led in some cases to removal of development and restoration of natural processes. It will also look at how conflicts between natural and cultural resource management goals are addressed. The paper will focus on two case studies:
Removal of the historic Giant Forest Village and campgrounds; and restoration of the Giant Forest sequoia grove at Sequoia National Park, including development of appropriate day-use and overnight facilities.
The Elwha River is the largest watershed on the Olympic Peninsula and was once one of the most productive salmon streams in the Pacific Northwest, home to all five species of Pacific salmon, as well as other fish species. Two dams, constructed in the early 1900s, now block fish from all but the lower five miles of the river. Removal of the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams will restore the Elwha to its natural, free-flowing condition and will once again allow fish access to over 70 river miles of habitat now protected within Olympic National Park.
Diane Krahe, Assistant Research Professor in the History Department of the University of Montana
“Re-evaluating Human Habitat and Visitor Frolic in the National Parks: Lassen Volcanic National Park as a Case Study”
In recent decades, the National Park Service has reassessed some
long-standing, high-impact uses of national parks in the name of heightened
resource protection, with limited success on the ground. At Lassen Volcanic
National Park, the removal of overnight accommodations and a downhill ski
area has radically transformed the typical visitor experience. But these
closures resulted from unusual, compelling circumstances. Alarming geologic
data, economic realities, regional drought, and new recreational trends at
Lassen Volcanic provided the National Park Service with convenient windows
of opportunity to institute big management changes in this "little gem" of a
park, changes reflective of the agency's paradigm shift toward preservation.
