Shaping the American Landscape, Related Landscapes
Designed by the firm I.M. Pei and Partners in collaboration with Hanna/Olin (now called OLIN), the mall was developed to facilitate public transportation for both downtown and outlying areas, while consolidating and revitalizing the diverse urban core of the city. Opening in 1982, the 80-foot wide, mile-long mall incorporated custom paving, planting, and street furniture. It has become a major economic and cultural catalyst for the transformation of downtown Denver.
Just three blocks from Fountain Place, built two years later, the Dallas Museum of Art garden is a Modernist plaza designed by Dan Kiley. This pair of commissions in the city of Dallas may represent the only instance in an American city (aside from myriad projects in Columbus, Indiana) where two Kiley designs were realized and survive today.
Located on Roanoke Island, the gardens are situated on Sir Walter Raleigh’s 1584 colonial landing site. This early colony was funded mostly by Raleigh under the banner of Elizabeth l. By 1590, no residents of this “Lost Colony” remained.
Completed in 1896 and, at 693 acres, Keney Park is one of the largest municipal open spaces in New England. The pastoral landscape was designed as a series of typical regional landscapes, including meadows and forests, made to appear completely natural. To create this bucolic park, more than a half million yards of earth were moved, and a million trees and shrubs were planted.
In 1850, Atlanta representatives established the Atlanta Graveyard, or City Burial Ground, on six acres of rolling farmland on the city’s southeastern edge. The cemetery was expanded to 48 acres during the Civil War. Designed as a rural cemetery, its wide curvilinear drives and mature tree plantings are overlaid on a regular grid that subdivides the site. The gridded paths and roads are sunken below the level of the graves, separated from burial plots by brick or stone curbs and higher retaining walls in some areas.
Designed by Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church, in collaboration with Calvert Vaux, this 250-acre Persian-inspired estate was conceived as a three-dimensional work of art. The grand views west over the Hudson River to the Catskill Mountains beyond are emblematic of the era’s idealized mix of agrarian and wilderness landscapes.
Reduced to 93 acres from its original 203, the mental health complex designed by H.H. Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. and Calvert Vaux applied asylum design criteria first published by Dr. Thomas Kirkbride in 1851. Begun in 1870, the project was the first major collaboration between the three men.
Opened in 1876, in a tranquil and secluded location on the South Platte River, Riverside was a popular choice for wealthy families until the 1890s when the Burlington Railroad built a main line adjacent to the site. Prior to the development of art museums and other cultural institutions, the funerary art gathered at cemeteries cataloged cultural developments in a region. Riverside’s extensive collection of carved ornamental stone and irreplaceable white bronze (zinc) monuments makes it a significant source of early settler art in the Rocky Mountain West.