Last updated: June 5, 2024
Place
Columbia University
Olmsted Archives
Quick Facts
Charles McKim of McKim, Mead & White, was chosen to design Columbia’s master plan. Because landscape architecture was such a new profession, many of these brilliant minds ended up working together quite often. McKim had apprenticed with Olmsted Sr.’s close friend H.H. Richardson for two years before leaving in 1879 to work with Mead and White.
Olmsted Sr. had already worked with McKim at the World’s Columbian Exposition, where the two had introduced the City Beautiful movement to America with well-designed and maintained grounds. Olmsted Jr. would also end up working with McKim again, when in 1901 they were both chosen to serve on the Senate Park Commission, which would redesign the core of Washington, D.C. The two Harvard alums would also go back to do improvement on their alma mater, with McKim carrying out Olmsted’s plan.
Olmsted Sr. noted of McKim’s design that “these courts and quadrangles are entirely cut off one from another, they are entirely independent of each other”
-Frederick Law Olmsted Papers: School Buildings and Grounds, Columbia University (1893).
McKim’s entire campus was a rectangular, symmetrical design that conforms to the natural topography of the site while taking advantage of the campus’s high position in New York. Olmsted trusted McKim in his arrangement of the campus, praising McKim’s ability to remove trees and replant them in more favorable locations.
Source: "Columbia University in the City of New York," The Cultural Landscape Foundation
For more information and primary resources, please visit:
Olmsted Research Guide Online
Olmsted Archives on Flickr Olmsted Online
Olmsted Sr. had already worked with McKim at the World’s Columbian Exposition, where the two had introduced the City Beautiful movement to America with well-designed and maintained grounds. Olmsted Jr. would also end up working with McKim again, when in 1901 they were both chosen to serve on the Senate Park Commission, which would redesign the core of Washington, D.C. The two Harvard alums would also go back to do improvement on their alma mater, with McKim carrying out Olmsted’s plan.
Olmsted Sr. noted of McKim’s design that “these courts and quadrangles are entirely cut off one from another, they are entirely independent of each other”
-Frederick Law Olmsted Papers: School Buildings and Grounds, Columbia University (1893).
McKim’s entire campus was a rectangular, symmetrical design that conforms to the natural topography of the site while taking advantage of the campus’s high position in New York. Olmsted trusted McKim in his arrangement of the campus, praising McKim’s ability to remove trees and replant them in more favorable locations.
Source: "Columbia University in the City of New York," The Cultural Landscape Foundation
For more information and primary resources, please visit:
Olmsted Research Guide Online
Olmsted Archives on Flickr Olmsted Online