Frederick Law Olmsted

Frederick Law Olmsted was an American landscape architect, journalist and social reformer. With Calvert Vaux, he designed New York’s Central Park and helped establish landscape architecture as a recognised profession in the United States.

Olmsted also planned park systems, campuses and the grounds of major public institutions. His designs treated accessible green space as civic infrastructure capable of improving health, movement and social life in industrial cities.

In Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, Chicago wins the right to stage the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and appoints architect Daniel Burnham to turn an ambitious national promise into a functioning city of exhibition halls, lagoons and public spectacle. Burnham coordinates designers including Frederick Law Olmsted while confronting financial panic, labour conflict, construction delays, illness and the pressure to surpass the Paris Exposition.