Architects of an American Landscape: Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the Reimagining of America’s Public and Private Spaces

Product Description
A dual portrait of America’s first great architect, Henry Hobson Richardson, and her finest landscape designer, Frederick Law Olmsted―and their immense impact on America
As the nation recovered from a cataclysmic war, two titans of design profoundly influenced how Americans came to interact with the built and natural world around them through their pioneering work in architecture and landscape design.
Frederick Law Olmsted is widely revered as America’s first and finest parkmaker and environmentalist, the force behind Manhattan’s Central Park, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Biltmore’s parkland in Asheville, dozens of parks across the country, and the preservation of Yosemite and Niagara Falls. Yet his close friend and sometime collaborator, Henry Hobson Richardson, has been almost entirely forgotten today, despite his outsized influence on American architecture―from Boston’s iconic Trinity Church to Chicago’s Marshall Field Wholesale Store to the Shingle Style and the wildly popular “open plan” he conceived for family homes. Individually they created much-beloved buildings and public spaces. Together they married natural landscapes with built structures in train stations and public libraries that helped drive the shift in American life from congested cities to developing suburbs across the country.
The small, reserved Olmsted and the passionate, Falstaffian Richardson could not have been more different in character, but their sensibilities were closely aligned. In chronicling their intersecting lives and work in the context of the nation’s post-war renewal, Hugh Howard reveals how these two men created original all-American idioms in architecture and landscape that influence how we enjoy our public and private spaces to this day.
Review
Praise for Architects of an American Landscape:
“In a vivid, deeply researched dual biography, Howard, a historian of architecture and design, pays homage to two men who exerted a huge influence on America’s homes, parks, and public spaces . . . As he did in Architecture’s Odd Couple, the author brings the architectural world to life on the page. An absorbing and informative history from a significant historian/biographer.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A solid dual biography of pioneering landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and his influential friend, neighbor, and frequent collaborator, building architect Henry Hobson Richardson . . . Howard succeeds in shining a spotlight on the lesser-known Richardson and documenting Olmsted’s innovations as ‘a democratic designer of places that belonged to everyone.’ Architecture buffs will be engrossed.”—Publishers Weekly“A well-researched dual biography, rich in historical context, presenting two gifted architects who as robust allies utterly transformed the look of American buildings and landscapes.”—Booklist
“Hugh Howard’s tandem biography of two American visionaries—the polymath Olmsted and the Rabelaisian Richardson—ranges across the intertwined fields of nineteenth century American design, innovative architecture, and the infant art of landscape preservation, ranging from the staid precincts of Boston, to the churning commercial metropolis of Chicago, to Washington, D.C. as it stood at the cusp of imperial grandeur, to the near-wilderness of California’s Yosemite. Erudite and propulsively readable, it vividly captures the driving energy of its principal subjects and their circle of remarkable friends as well as the larger creative spirit of the post-Civil War nation as it began to shape the physical fabric of America as we know it today.”—Fergus M. Bordewich, author of Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America
“In this beautifully written book, Hugh Howard reveals how two brilliant American artists melded their creativity to reinvent America’s architecture and landscaping. The parks of Frederick Law Olmsted are rightly treasured, but it