Wilderness by Design: Landscape Architecture and the National Park Service / Building the National Parks: Historic Landscape Design and Construction

Environmental History, Oct 1998 by Pritchard, James A

Wilderness by Design: Landscape Architecture and the National Park Service. By Ethan Carr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. viii 378 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $45.oo.

Building the National Parks: Historic Landscape Design and Construction. By Linda Flint McClelland. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. xxv 591 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $65.oo, paper $29.95.

These books are the product of work involved in designating park structures and landscapes for national historic status. Ethan Carr's handsomely produced Wilderness by Design best presents the vision and meaning of landscape architecture in the parks: the designed landscape acts as a intermediary between people and nature, guiding the visitor's experience and enhancing their appreciation of nature. Linda McClelland's well-illustrated Building the National Parks ably discusses naturalistic theory and describes the techniques that harmonized buildings and infrastructure with park landscapes.

McClelland highlights the role of English naturalistic gardening and rustic architecture in forming a design ethic adopted by the National Park Service (NPS) by 1927. Decades earlier, by i841, Andrew Jackson Downing distilled the enduring elements of naturalistic landscape design. His plans for country estates incorporated a place for wild nature, walks and drives calculated to yield a sequence of views, rustic resting places, artfully contrived rockwork, and vegetation propagated for picturesque effect. Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. utilized all these elements in his urban park designs. Henr Hubbard and Frank Waugh advocated the use of indigenous plant species in an American style of naturalistic gardening, which together with rustic architecture created a design philosophy emphasizing landscape protection and the harmonization of construction with nature.

Carr underscores the significance and enduring power of the landscape park model. The central concept in the creation, development, design, and function of national parks, he suggests, came out of the urban experience of designing municipal landscape parks. Carr discusses the origins of the NPS in the context of the national movement for outdoor recreation and parks and considers the influence of touring clubs and economic boosters. Historians will find the landscape architects' perspective thought-provoking. Carr argues that developing a park for tourism invested cultural value in the landscape, thus ensuring preservation rather than exploitation for some other purpose. Park establishment "transmuted land into a landscape," an alchemy he contends was essential to landscape preservation (p. 16).

Both books review events from 1918 through 1932, when NPS landscape architects Charles Punchard, Daniel Hull, and particularly Thomas Vint "forged a cohesive style of naturalistic park design" (McClelland, p. 136). In the national park context, naturalism meant that roads and trails that yielded access to natural features and scenic views could not impair the attraction. Architect Herbert Maier designed buildings to harmonize with nature, utilizing locally available materials, rock foundations, and finally native plantings to yield the impression that nature had scarcely been disturbed. According to Carr's absorbing narrative, Vint challenged Steven Mather to choose whether the parks would be developed from a landscape or an engineering point of view. The design choice for Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park signaled the ascendancy of landscape architects within the NPS.

Carr emphasizes changing professional roles within the NPS Landscape Division as it assumed responsibility for park planning. The master planning process not only produced a unified feeling within a park, but significantly limited the extent of development and created expertise soon utilized nationwide. The New Deal, suggests McClelland, coordinated NPS programs and "allowed the National Park Service to take a leading role in the development of state and local parks" (p. 42o). Specifically, the NPS employed state park inspectors who supervised ECW projects in state parks and supplied technical specialists to the CCC camps. Finally, the NPS devised portfolios of outstanding designs to share with state park authorities. McClelland argues that these portfolios were "not prototypes to be copied but examples to foster imaginative harmonious solutions" (p. 432), while Carr emphasizes NPS supervision in state park development plans.

During the postwar era, according to McClelland, rustic architecture fell from favor due to modernistic architecture and the expense of hand-crafted structures. Carr suggests that landscape architects and the NPS diverged while critics labeled tourism a threat. He cautions that the parks may "cease to be public in any meaningful sense," proposing that the success of the landscape architects during the 192os and 1930s was "the creation of a middle ground between excesses of commercialism and of exclusivity" (p. 310).