Presenting Nature

Cover

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Overview

Stewardship

Design Ethic Origins
(1916-1927)

Design Policy & Process
(1916-1927)

Western Field Office
(1927-1932)

Park Planning

Decade of Expansion
(1933-1942)

State Parks
(1933-1942)

Appendix A

Appendix B

Bibliography

Presenting Nature: The Historic Landscape Design of the National Park Service, 1916-1942

II. ORIGINS OF A DESIGN ETHIC FOR NATURAL PARKS (continued)

SOURCES OF RUSTIC ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

The late nineteenth century saw the evolution of a design ethic for sturdy rustic structures. In the United States, this ethic made use of Downing's naturalistic principles and prototypes for rural architecture. A variety of practitioners seeking harmony between structure and setting and solutions to building homes in rugged and scenic places developed the style in the Adirondacks, along the Atlantic coast, in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in the Sierras. As the idea of developing wilderness for personal pleasure extended to an increasing number of public parks—local, metropolitan, state, and national—the rustic style was adopted for a multitude of park structures. By the turn of the century, the various expressions were embraced by the American Arts and Crafts movement, where they fused with regional styles, indigenous forms, and Japanese influences in both architectural design and gardening styles based on native materials.

The Ames Gate Lodge, located in North Easton, Massachusetts, was designed in 1880-81 by architect H.H. Richardson during his period of collaboration with landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. constructed of massive, weathered boulders, the lodge contains a gently sloped and curving roof and is bisected by a rusticated arched entrance to the Ames Family estate. Richardson's use of natural materials, the bold arch, and forms to harmonize with the surrounding landscape made the Ames Gate Lodge a model of rustic, Shingle-style architecture that would be adopted by park designers for several generations. (William Pierson)

THE SHINGLE STYLE AND HENRY HOBSON RICHARDSON

Emerging in the northeastern United States in the 1870s, the Shingle style of architecture would have enduring expression in the architecture of parks and resort areas well into the twentieth century. Certain characteristics of the style were well suited to buildings and smaller structures that were required to fit the often rugged topography of natural parks and to blend harmoniously with a natural setting. The style offered a flexible system for massing a building according to interior function and space and the physical and scenic aspects of the site. The addition of porches, porte-cochères, viewing bays, towers, and terraces further allowed the framing of views and vistas from several vantage points and integrated the interior space and exterior setting. Construction materials of weathered local stone and timber further joined the building with its site and setting. The style featured massive interior fireplaces and capped chimneys that often pierced flat, low-pitched, and overhanging roofs. Rich wood paneling and crafted details adorned interiors. These characteristics would suit the functional, recreational, and aesthetic purposes of resort architecture. The style was especially suited to homes by the sea, on lakes, and in wooded enclaves such as Llewelyn Park in New Jersey and Tuxedo Park in New York. Most influential was the work of Henry Hobson Richardson, particularly his work for the Ames family in North Easton, Massachusetts. The style reached its zenith in Kragsyde in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, by Robert S. Peabody and John C. Stearns. Other practitioners included William Ralph Emerson, John Calvin Stevens, Hugo Lamb and Charles A. Rich, Arthur Little, and Charles F. McKim, William R. Mead, and Stanford White.

Many features of the Shingle style were incorporated in park buildings beginning in the 1880s and formed the vocabulary for structures in national and state parks in the 1920s and 1930s. These include an irregular massing of interlocking units on various levels, towers, gable-ended projections, octagons, overhanging roofs, projecting gables, flowing interior space, use of shingles for siding and roofing, entrance porches, porte-cochères, high chimneys, horizontal window bands in the gables, open interior spaces, battered foundations of stone that often merged with great stone chimneys and battered porch piers, and broad, open verandas to serve as out-of-door rooms. In addition to the integration of varied levels to suit the existing topography, the most commonly borrowed feature was a rusticated and often battered stone wall that extended from the ground into the lower story, uniting the building and its natural site. [130]

The Shingle style, according to scholar Vincent Scully. was essentially an American development, that "did not destroy but enhanced and grew upon vernacular building." With their native materials, rustic craftsmanship, and environmental adaptations, Shingle style dwellings could also incorporate features drawn from local vernacular forms such as the homes of pioneers, early settlers, and indigenous peoples and probably reached its epitome in the Adirondack style. The use of native materials allowed designers to match the textures and coloration of the surrounding natural site and to unify groups of buildings and structures built for different functions and at varying scales. This recognition and connection with vernacular traditions was adopted later by the American Arts and Crafts movement and appears in the use of indigenous and pioneering prototypes, materials, and craftsmanship in park buildings of the 1920s and 1930s. [131]

The Ames Gate Lodge (1880-1881), designed by Richardson during his period of collaboration with Olmsted, represents an important stage in Richardson's work that would have influence on the design of park structures. Scully has written that the lodge was "a demonstration and an object lesson" in rockwork and that the "cyclopean rubble . . . culminated this development and brought violently to the attention of American architects the expressive possibilities inherent in construction with rough stone, up to boulder size." Although the bold rusticated arch and rubble construction of the lodge would become hallmarks of the Richardsonian Romanesque style of architecture, their use in park structures would continue to be more characteristic of the Shingle style. [132]

Rusticated arched entrances of large weathered boulders similar to those of Richardson's Ames Gate Lodge and McKim, Mead, and White's Casino at Narragansett, Rhode Island, appeared again and again in park bridges, culverts, fireplaces, and buildings. For naturalistic park design this stylistic development was particularly important, for it extended Downing's ideas about naturalistic rockwork to the construction of structures having a more permanent and sturdy character than those constructed of unpeeled poles and twisted branches. Richardson and Olmsted collaborated and influenced each other's work from the late 1870s until Richardson's death in 1886. Richardson's work extended to bridges, memorials, and other park structures. In addition to several stonemasonry bridges for the Boston parks, he also designed a gatehouse and a fountain for the Muddy River improvements that Olmsted's office was working on in Boston at the time. In 1879, Richardson designed a memorial commemorating the roles of Oakes Ames and Oliver Ames, II, in building the first transcontinental railroad. The result was a stepped pyramid over fifty feet high constructed of rough local granite that emerged from an isolated peak in Wyoming. Olmsted praised this monument for its successful union of structure and setting. Richardson apparently designed several of the earliest shelters for Franklin Park in 1884. Olmsted seized upon Richardson's ideas for designing structures with rough masonry walls and bold arches and adopted a similar approach for the shelters, springs, water fountains, and benches made of large boulders and slabs of Roxbury pudding stone at Franklin Park in the 1880s. [133]

The Shingle style influenced the designers of the national and state parks through several channels. The first was in the rustic stone and shingle structures of nineteenth-century parks. In his Introduction to the Study of Landscape Design (1917), Henry Hubbard recognized the suitability of the Shingle style for structures in natural parks and popularized the Olmsted firm's work at Franklin Park, influenced by Richardson, as a model for park design decades after the style had fallen out of fashion elsewhere. The Shingle style also fulfilled the basic principles of naturalistic gardening—the use of native materials, a design that fit the topography and blended with natural aspects of the setting, and the use of vegetation to blend and harmonize manmade construction.

By the turn of the century. architects in the Adirondacks, the Midwest, and the West had already incorporated many characteristics of the style in their work. By 1910, these ideas were acclaimed by practitioners and promoters of the Arts and Crafts movement in America and had been absorbed into mainstream residential design as part of the "bungalow" craze.

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