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Overview Featured Research Publications
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Revisiting Riverside: A Frederick Law Olmsted Community
A Master's Project completed for the School of Natural Resources & Environment, University of Michigan
Project Summary
Riverside, IL is a suburban village designed between 1868 and 1869 by the landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Riverside is located along the Des Plaines River, nine miles west of Chicago. The design of Riverside is significant because the character of the community created by the designers was unlike that of other suburbs of the time. Olmsted and Vaux prescribed well-built, well-drained roads with gracefully curved lines and generous plantings. The idea was to create attractive and highly functional access interspersed with public grounds for rest and recreation: a community with the best attributes of the country and city.
Today, Riverside remains a vibrant community. The significance of the landscape architecture of Riverside has been recognized at the national, state, and local levels. In 1970, Riverside was designated a National Historic Landmark, in recognition of its historic landscape architecture. The residents' and village leaders' interest in the study and documentation of Riverside has helped to preserve the original design.
We also investigated the residents' perception of the Riverside landscape and how this relates to Olmsted's original design principles. We created and administered a survey in order to learn more about how residents of Riverside perceive their historic landscape. By posing questions that specifically address the resident's preferences for landscape features, it was possible to begin to understand what areas or views of the landscape residents perceived as their favorite or least favorite. From the responses, it was possible to investigate how the spaces and views mentioned by the respondents related to Olmsted's design principles. In general, the spaces and views most preferred by residents strongly exhibited the design principles. Spaces and views that were least preferred by residents were incongruous with the overall design and feeling of Riverside.
A final goal of this project is to understand whether or not the design of Riverside has influenced subsequent suburban community design.
Riverside is a designed landscape that merits preservation, but this can only occur with a thorough understanding of the original design intent, of the design as it was constructed, and of the design that has survived. The intent of this master's project is to increase the understanding of the principles Olmsted used in the design of Riverside, and the understanding of the relevance of these design principles in the modern Riverside landscape. We hope that the organization and presentation of the design principles, together with the visual products produced by this master's project group, will contribute to a unified sense of stewardship among Riverside's residents, its leaders, and the many private groups within the community. The written and visual products of this project will be donated to the Village of Riverside for educational purposes.
Portions of the project are available in PDF Format by individual chapters:
Please note that due to the large size and detailed nature of many of the graphic images developed for this project, it is not possible to offer the entire project online.
Getting Adobe Acrobat Reader for PDF Files
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