Slate's Bizbox
architecture: What we build.

Olmsted vs. ChristoWhy the architects of Central Park would have vetoed "The Gates."

By Witold Rybczynski
Posted Monday, Feb. 14, 2005, at 7:11 PM ET
Olmsted and Vaux

I'll leave judgment of the aesthetic merits of art installation in Central Park to the art critics, but a comment by Christo and Jeanne-Claude caught my attention. They have written that the name of their project comes from Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who called the various entrances to the park "gates." In fact, the idea of naming the 20 pedestrian entrances to the park after popular professions, such as The Farmer, The Engineer, and The Miner, came from a committee that included neither Olmsted nor Vaux. What struck me was not the factual error, however, but the attempt to enlist the 19th-century makers of Central Park in this modern project.

From the beginning, Olmsted and Vaux strenuously opposed all attempts to introduce art into the park. In their Greensward Plan of 1858—the competition entry that won them the commission—they wrote that while it would be possible to build elegant buildings in the park, "we conceive that all such architectural structures should be confessedly subservient to the main idea, and that nothing artificial should be obtruded on the view." They considered art a similar distraction from the restorative purpose of the landscape and kept statues out of the park. The sole exceptions were Emma Stebbins's Angel of the Waters, atop the Bethesda Fountain, and a series of figures representing prominent Americans that were to adorn the Terrace, but were never erected due to a shortage of funds.

Aerial view of Central Park

However, then as now, the urge to decorate the park with commemorative artifacts was irresistible. Already by 1873 a monument to Shakespeare had appeared, and no fewer than 20 other works of sculpture had been offered to the city. The memorials were gifts from public associations and wealthy individuals, and the pressure to allow statuary in the park grew simply too great to resist. A committee that included Vaux, as well as the painter Frederick E. Church, drew up a list of rules. Statues would be permitted only along the Mall, and they could not be too large. The aim was to limit the visual impact of the artworks on their natural surroundings. A year later, there was a proposal to build a colossal statue at the south end of the Mall. Olmsted and Vaux vetoed the idea. "The idea of the park itself should always be uppermost in the mind of the beholder," they reminded the park board.

It was not that Olmsted was a purist. He considered skating and boating integral parts of the park experience, and as Central Park grew in popularity he accommodated cricket and baseball. Against the objections of the park commission, he organized public concerts, and he opposed—not always successfully—the Sabbatarians who wanted to restrict such activities on Sundays. He described the intended parade ground as a "country green" (today, the Sheep Meadow) and generally discouraged military drills. The park was not to be a place for ostentation or display.

There are now more than 50 fountains, memorials, and sculptures, though there is no monument to Olmsted and Vaux, who deserve one. There are monuments of famous and forgotten figures, artists, politicians, entertainers, fairytale characters, and even a heroic dog. And now, for a short time, 7,500 orange vinyl gates. Jeanne-Claude has been quoted as saying that she thinks that Olmsted would be "very happy" with the installation. I doubt it.

Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
Witold Rybczynski is Slate's architecture critic.
Photographs of: Frederick Law Olmsted © Corbis; Calvert Vaux © Bettmann/Corbis; Central Park © Bettmann/Corbis.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Remarks from the Fray:

Christo is a ridiculous celebrity who has managed to make a famous and amusedly profitable living repeating the same trite idea, in this case a matter of convincing townships, city governments, government bureaucrats to grant him permits and permissions, and donors to give him sufficient funding so that he may wrap another building in massive amounts of swaddling cloth, or hang a Leviathan laundry line across an expanse of inaccessible space/ Okay, we get it, you introduce one aesthetic element into an area where we wouldn't have expected to run into it, thereby creating something of a framing device which decontexutalizes the familiar and forces us to reconsider our relationship with the spaces we inhabit, the spaces we pass through, the spaces we create where there was no space before.

…The fact that there is a line of them, going along a path doesn't diminish the out-scaled tackiness of Christo's singular idea; we have in our midst the equivalent of the bad joke teller who repeats a punch line not once but three times in the course of a stop-and-go round of small talk, with the wan and waning hope that someone might chime in with feverish paragraphs to explain the punchline, to create context and criteria, to invent terms from whole cloth (appropriate analogy) , couched in vague and mysterious use, that have the sound of authority in defending the failed attempt at humor, but lacks something in the area of a tangible , comprehensible idea that gives us a spark and makes us say aha!.

It seems unlikely that Christo and co will have as many defenders and contexualizers and explainers of invisible success at their side with this effort; he is simply too old to get away with this stuff anymore. What he ought to consider is a marketing himself as a celebrity spokesperson for Tide, or Cheer, or some such miracle whitener; it would be a chance for him to admit that he's a hack in a way that's more artful than the work he's managed over the last dozen years.

Metaphorically, it would a chance for him to come clean on his deal.

--Ted_Burke

(To reply, click here)


…the article … talks about olmsted's belief in "restorative purposes of the landscape" and here too i think the gates are in keeping with the original intentions of the park. if olmsted were to stroll under the gates (and i truly hope he is, in spirit) he would have been sensitive enough to pick up on the energy that they create in the viewers. in spite of their size and their color and their numbers, the mind-boggling thing about them is how restful they are…

the other thing olmsted was into was sculpting the land. he wanted different vistas to come into and out of sight as you wandered. if he thought an area needed a hill that had no hill, he'd make one. he had no bones about artificially changing the landscape to create the feeling that he was after. the thing the gates do so immediately is point out all the curves and bends and valleys and dips of the terrain of the park. the paths that the gates take carry your eye in a way that gives you sea-legs. the presence of the gates gives you an appreciation of the variations of the terrain of the park. areas that i'd simply walked thru in the past are currently highlighted in a way that shows off all the rolling sexy ways that the earth of the park actually bucks and twists. the "intrusion" of the gates in the park, for their short life-span, enhances the landscapes in a manner that i wouldn't have believed, had i not spent time walking under them myself. olmsted would have patted himself on the back to see his park massaged by all the gates. he would have been tickled to see the punctuation marks, the jewelry, that christo has placed, just for a short time, on his landscape.

while i am certain that the gates constitute art and not a publicity stunt, the effect is not one of sculpture, but one of performance. in the same way that the philharmonic or the opera comes, temporarily, into the great lawn, attracts people, makes a statement and leaves, so too the gates are in the park creating an enchanting energy that, if you don't experience in person, you won't understand…

--JBVM

(To reply, click here)

(2/15)

Washington Post