Plan for Obama library in Chicago must respect Frederick Law Olmsted parks

Maybe it's time to erect temporary, "proceed with caution" signs at the entrances to Chicago's Jackson and Washington parks. The signs would be directed not at drivers, but at President Barack and Michelle Obama, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the Barack Obama Foundation.

I thought of the need for caution as I made my way through a fascinating new doorstop of a book, "The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: The Last Great Projects, 1890-1895." Its 1,067-pages offer revealing glimpses into the mind of America's greatest landscape architect, including his dealings with architect Daniel Burnham as the two titans planned the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Jackson Park.

The letters express the essence of Olmsted's approach: Naturalistic scenery is preferable to formal pomp; the parts of a landscape should be subordinate to the whole; details matter as much as the grand sweep of things oh do they matter!

To enliven Jackson Park's lagoons for the 1893 fair, Olmsted brought in about 50 electric launches, with colorful awnings, and imported from Venice 20 gondolas, complete with their gondoliers. The chief purpose of the boats, he told Burnham, was less to get fair-goers from Point A to Point B than to provide delightful scenery.

"Put in the waters unbecoming boats and the effect would be utterly disgusting," Olmsted wrote Burnham, who was considering the use of more cost-effective but less attractive craft.

Under normal circumstances, such observations might be of interest only to scholars and fans of landscape architecture.

But they take on fresh relevance as the Chicago-based Obama Foundation nears a decision on which of four competing proposals from Columbia University in New York, the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Chicago will win the Obama presidential library and museum bake-off. Obama met with his foundation's leaders last week during his stop in Chicago to make the Pullman district a national monument.

Olmsted's parks are national treasures. They demand to be treated with the utmost care, not trampled in a rush for economic growth. As I read Olmsted's letters, I had to wonder: What would he have thought of the U. of C.'s proposals, in which the Obama library would rise in either Jackson Park or Washington Park, another Olmsted design?

"He was generally averse to adding different types of structures to the parks," said the co-editor of the new Olmsted book, David Schuyler, a professor at Franklin & Marshall College. "He thought it compromised the very purpose of having a large urban park."

Building the Obama library along, rather than in, public parkland would be an ideal compromise. That can't be done at the 21-acre Jackson Park site, all of which lies within the park. But it could happen along Washington Park if the library were to be built solely on the 11-acre portion of the site that's outside the park's borders. Leave Washington Park itself alone and all the talk about land grabs and lawsuits would go away.

Continued here:
Plan for Obama library in Chicago must respect Frederick Law Olmsted parks