Building
the National Parks: Historic Landscape Design and Construction
by
Linda Flint McClelland
More
than fifty years ago the Civilian Conservation Corps ended, and
with it concluded a grand era of park-building marked by naturalistic
principles, craftsmanship, and native materials. Rooted in the writings
of Andrew Jackson Downing and the nineteenth-century urban parks
of Frederick Law Olmsted and others, naturalistic park design flourished
in the twentieth century in the United States under the stewardship
of the National Park Service. With the founding of Yellowstone National
Park in 1872, national parks were charged with the paradoxical dual
mission to make the nation's finest natural wonders accessible to
the general public while preserving them unimpaired for the enjoyment
and appreciation of future generations.
At
the urging of conservation-minded individuals and organizations including
the American Civic Association and American Society of Landscape Architects,
Congress established a National Park Service to administer the national
parks in 1916. Shortly thereafter in 1918, an official policy called
upon national park designers to locate and construct roads, trails,
and other facilities in ways that harmonized with the natural setting
and ensured that the natural wonders and scenery remained unimpaired.
In subsequent decades, park designers--landscape architects, architects,
and engineers--forged a rich legacy of scenic roads and trails, picturesque
park villages, campgrounds and picnic areas, scenic overlooks, and majestic
views.
Building
the National Parks is a comprehensive history of the policy, principles,
and practices of landscape design through which the natural parks of
the National Park System became accessible to ever-increasing numbers
of visitors. Written primarily from the perspective of landscape architecture,
the book traces the evolution of the naturalistic ethic for park design
in the United States from Downing and Olmsted to early twentieth-century
practitioners Henry Hubbard and Frank Waugh and finally to the designers
of national and state parks.
Early chapters chronicle the contributions that the park service's first
landscape engineers--Charles P. Punchard, Daniel R. Hull, and Thomas
C. Vint--made to a distinctive style and standards of design for roads,
trails, and park villages based on naturalistic principles and native
materials. The book highlights events such as the 1926 cooperative agreement
with the Bureau of Public Roads that enabled national park designers
to build state-of-the-art roads while preserving park scenery and harmonizing
built features with the natural setting of each park. It closely examines
the major design trends that were in place by the 1930s, including a
process of master planning that guided park development, principles
of rustic architecture that ensured harmonious construction and design,
and practices of landscape naturalization whereby native trees, shrubs,
and wildflowers were preserved or planted to erase the scars of construction
and create the illusion that nature was undisturbed.
Several chapters examine the New Deal era, 1933 to 1942, when the park
system greatly expanded, and planning and construction in national parks
proceeded on an unprecedented scale through programs such as the Civilian
Conservation Corps (CCC) and Public Works Administration. During this
decade of progress, the National Park Service also directed the work
of the CCC in state and local parks and helped forge a state and federal
partnership for outdoor recreation. Examining national park design and
construction since 1940, a final chapter covers the World War II era,
the modernism of Mission 66, and the shift in emphasis from scenery
preservation to environmental protection during the Environmental Era.
Building the National Parks, a publication of the National
Register of Historic Places, is an updated edition of Presenting
Nature: The Historic Landscape Design of the National Park Service,
1916 to 1942, which was published by the Government Printing Office
in 1994. It provides a national context for identifying, evaluating,
and registering the vast number of historic park landscapes influenced
by the design ethic developed and practiced by the National Park Service
in the early twentieth century. This group of significant properties
includes not only the developed areas of national parks but also the
many state and local parks developed by the CCC from 1933 to 1942 under
the direction of landscape architects, architects, and engineers of
the National Park Service. Properties relating to this context may be
nominated to the National Register of Historic Places, under the multiple
property listing, Historic Park Landscapes in National and State Parks
(October 1995).
Commentary
by scholars on Building the National Parks published by John
Hopkins University Press.
"McClelland
traces the history of America's era of naturalistic park design and
discovers an important legacy of National Park Service landscape architecture.
Building the National Parks provides an outstanding guide to
these historically significance designed landscapes and a foundation
for their preservation."--Nora J.Mitchell, Director, Olmsted Center
for Landscape Preservation, National Park Service
"Buildings
in National Parks before 1916 tended toward the monumental, and park
landscapes suffered abuse under foot and tire of those flocking to these
natural and architectural monuments. Upon creation of the National Park
Service in that World War-year, Stephen Mather and a cadre of landscape
engineers, architects and naturalists rather quickly defined a better
acommodation of visitors in the National Parks. In the 1930s, NPS spread
this 'park-minded' gospel to state and local parks as well. Building
the National Parks brings the personalities behind these innovations
to light and traces their words, experiments and triumphs in environmental
sensitivity."--James Wright Steely, National Register Programs,
Texas Historical Commission.
Building
the National Parks is available in hardbound (ISBN 0- 8018-5582-9)
and paperback (ISBN 0-8018-5583-7) from the Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2715 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363; 1-800-537-5487;
http://www.press.jhu.edu.
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