The Public Historian / Winter 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Design with Culture: Claiming America's Landscape Heritage
By Richard Francaviglia, The University of Texas at Arlington
Many practitioners of landscape preservation assume that the field dates from the 1980s. The reasoning here seems natural enough: After all, didn't the historic preservation movement of the late 1960s usher in landscape preservation as we know it today? The answer is no: Although landscapes preservation does owe a debt to the increasingly sophisticated NPS emphasis on the identification and protection of large, complex properties such as rural districts, the editors of Design with Culture set the record straight. They begin by noting that "pioneering landscape architects, individual activists, and emerging national organizations considered historic values in their planning and design projects during the years 1890-1950 .." (p. 1) This book presents the story, or rather stories, of these pioneering landscape preservationists. In this early period, editors Birnbaum and Hughes see the beginnings of preservation planning, documentation, interpretation, and advocacy — the latter sometimes quite passionate.
This book consists of eight separate essays. The first four deal with early preservation activity in the eastern United States . In the first essay, titled "Grounding memory and Identity," Catherine Howett discusses pioneering garden club projects that documented historic landscape traditions of the American South. Howett sheds considerable light in the mythologized process by which women participated in early efforts in Virginia , Georgia , the Carolinas , and elsewhere. She astutely observes, "[i]f all history is . inevitably a form of mythmaking, it is fair to say that the men -- the experts to whom the women of the garden clubs have always turned for the standards and design decisions . deserve most of the praise or blame for the preservation philosophy that determined what was done, undone, or redone on the ground." (p. 36) In "If Washington Were Here Himself, He Would Be on My Side," Phyllis Anderson addresses Charles Sprague Sargent and the preservation of the Mount Vernon landscape. Anderson confirms the importance of Sargent's "rigorous approach to research and scholarship, his insistence on authenticity in both plant placement and replacement, [and] his admonition to treat the site with a consistent sensibility" (p. 54) —all of which helped guide his successors. In "Morley Jeffers Williams," Thomas Beaman, Jr. discusses the contributions of this pioneer of landscape archaeology who helped so closely associate with Stratford Hall , Mount Vernon , and Tryon Palace. Despite many changes in the field, Beaman concludes that ". the objective of landscape archaeology — to understand cultural impressions made on the natural landscape -- remains essentially unchanged since Morley Jeffers Williams began his work in the 1930s." (p. 78) In "The Fading Landscape," Elizabeth Hope Cushing discusses Boston landscape architect Arthur A. Shurcliff's evolving perceptions of landscape preservation. Shurcliff was interested in "farmscapes" and especially concerned about the relationship between cultural and physical aspects of the environment -- something we take for granted today.
The fifth essay — "'Californio' Culture and Landscapes, 1894-1942" by David Streatfield -- takes the reader to the far West. Its theme is how myth and romance are entwined with preservation in the Golden State. Streatfield begins with Helen Hunt Jackson's 1894 novel Ramona , which had a strong impact on the preservation of the state's Spanish missions. Although "[t]he difference between the reality and myth of California culture confirms that myths are usually grounded in some historic truth ..," Streatfield correctly notes that, in a number of cases, a ". selective pursuit of an idealized past venerates only those achievements that have obvious dignity or elegance, such as the mission church or the ranch house, without wishing to inquire too deeply about their social circumstances or origins." (p. 129)
In the sixth essay, Cynthia Zaitzevsky addresses one of America 's most noted landscape architects, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. After providing a brief biography of Olmsted, Zaitzevsky highlights his reports on the White House and Pt. Lobos in California as a way of demonstrating that Olmsted's work — both directly and indirectly — "provided an invaluable guide for later generations of park planners." (p. 152) In "the Noblest Landscape Problem," Ethan Carr focuses on Thomas C. Vint and landscape preservation. Vint was the National Park Service's early (1920s) influential landscape architect involved with master planning and design. Vint helped integrate historic preservation planning and environmentally sensitive design into the National Parks. His work is evident in parks across the nation, including the rustic-style Grand Canyon Inn and the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway. In the last essay, Ian Firth discusses that parkway as "the road to the Modern Preservation Movement." Here we see the importance of Stanley Abbott, who was given a free hand by his superiors (including Thomas Vint). Abbott designed a remarkable road that traverses not wilderness, but, as he called it, "a managed landscape" that provided an opportunity to pioneer "a new sort of conservation in which the national parkway becomes a museum of managed American countryside." (p. 197)
This book will give landscape architects, historic preservationists, and other public historians a new respect for preservation philosophies and planning that encompass a long period (ca. 1890-1940) that has been overshadowed by more visible, and better-funded, programs since the 1960s. As intellectual history, it reveals the growth of visionary attitudes toward places, and our debt to pioneers in a field that increases in importance with every new development.
