Viewing Olmsted

Winner of the AIA 8th Annual International Architecture Book Award (Related Arts Category) and Winner of the 1998 Quill & Trowel Award, sponsored by the Garden Writers Association of America (GWAA)

interviews with the photographers conducted by David Harris


Winner of the 1998 Quill & Trowel Award, sponsored by the Garden Writers Association of America (GWAA)

Winner of the AIA 8th Annual International Architecture Book Award (Related Arts Category)


In 1988, the Canadian Centre for Architecture began an extraordinary photographic commission: to photograph the present state of the parks, private estates, subdivisions, and cemeteries designed by Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), North America's most important landscape architect. Photographers Robert Burley, Lee Friedlander, and Geoffrey James spent seven years visiting and revisiting Olmsted's landscapes—from the best known, such as Central Park in New York and the Emerald Necklace in Boston, to the lesser-known Lake Park in Milwaukee and Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland. This book accompanies an exhibition of 160 photographs from the archive of over 900 images now in the CCA collection.

The photographers witnessed how the sites change from season to season and through the years. Burley was drawn to the interplay of public and private space within parks. He was also interested in how a fixed, relatively timeless element such as a bridge, juxtaposed with plantings that change by the day, provides a field in which human activity changes by the minute. Friedlander tended to explore the character of a space, how a slight change in viewing position or camera format can radically alter one's experience of it. James, who has devoted much of his career to photographing Italian gardens, was most caught up in rendering the physical sensation of moving through the sites, which are so different in character from formal European gardens.

The book features a prologue by Phyllis Lambert, essays by Paolo Costantini and John Szarkowski, 65 photographs from the exhibition (reproduced in color and duotone), interviews with the photographers conducted by David Harris, and a list of the sites photographed.

Distributed for the Candian Centre for Architecture/Centre Canadien d'Architecture

Phyllis Lambert is the Director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Paolo Costantini is the Curator of the Photographs Collection at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. John Szarkowski is the Director Emeritus of the Photography Department of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.