![]() Should be called the Back Bay Fens, or The Fens…and that so much of the That instead of being called the Back Bay Basin, or the Back Bay Park, the place With exclusive regard to their use as pleasure-resorts. Its primary utility, or by one provoking comparisons with grounds prepared Significant to its landscape character, than either by one bringing to mind “…it will now be better taste to call the bottom of the basin by a name In both documents, and throughout Olmsted’s correspondence and directives on the Backīay Fens project, the primary design objectives were embodied in its name: 10 Yet, within the comprehensive and integrated parkway Necklace, the purposes of the Back Bay Fens project favored the pragmatic. As plans for each of the subsequent segments-including Marine andįranklin parks, the Arboretum, Charlesgate, and the like-were specified, Boston ParkĬommissioners extolled the virtues of “the complete system much greater value than the sum of…its different parts”. Reflective of the spirit of civic imagination, that verbal descriptions of the parkway system wouldīe rendered inadequate. In fact, the city report enthuses, the aesthetic improvements would be so profound, so Quality, and overall, creating a “greater attractiveness so obvious that it is necessary only to refer Improvement” to be gained by constructing a linked park system around a stable flood basin,īuilding dependable, “modern” retaining walls, ridding Charles River water of its “brackish” The documents emphasize the “considerable Olmsted firm followed suit with formal reports of progress to the Joint Metropolitan ParkĬommission and State Board of Health. 9 Articulating their vision and reporting on its progress, the Boston Board ofĬommissioners and Department of Parks filed a landmark Annual Report in 1887 and the “elaborate and elegant garden-like work” helped make the firm’s designs acceptable to city The adaptive nature of the “natural” design and its absence of what Olmsted described as ![]() Than in any engineering innovation as such”. Writes, “The brilliance of his solution lay in his synthesis of the practical and the aesthetic, rather Pragmatically constructed as a portion of a larger, garden city vision. In Boston, redemptive green space would not be discovered and restored per se. Improving the health, both physical and emotional, of city dwellers. Redemptive solitude within the domesticated green oasis of the city, Olmsted would championĪmerican cities as ideal environments for composing wilderness within the urban core-and for The nature in cities,” writes essayist Frank Meola. Like other the leading intellectuals of the era, Olmsted sought renewal in “the nature of cities and Twain, and other leading critics of 19th century industrialism would have surely appreciated. Reverence and “redemptive greenness” that Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark 5 TheĬhallenging construction (made difficult by the constricted size of the work site) would beĪchieved by adapting existing engineering techniques in the service of principles of pastoral Pre-Industrial tidal basin that had been destroyed by urban growth, writes Banks. They were also not designed as pedestrianīuilt into the project was a sense of “progressive nostalgia,” an attempt to bring back the They were not intended to be ornaments of the landscape or entry points for the Muddy River. Bridges in the Fens, both major and minor, were required elements in several locations where city streets had to traverse the parkland.
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