Échelon, Quincunx, Quadrangle: The Olmsted Firm and Campus Planning in the Early Decades of Vassar College

Abstract

Frederick Law Olmsted and his sons were America’s foremost campus planners, whose multidisciplinary skill set and collaborative practices enabled them to envision and realize comprehensive plans for campuses, much as they did for their better-known parks and suburban communities. This article contributes a new campus case study to Olmsted firm history. There have long been unsubstantiated reports that F. L. Olmsted designed the bucolic Hudson Valley campus of Vassar College, although the source of Vassar’s early designs has remained unclear. Drawing on unpublished archival materials, this article traces three generations of the Olmsted firm at Vassar, revealing that it was John Charles Olmsted—whose important oeuvre remains to be fully distinguished—who fundamentally shaped Vassar’s central campus. This narrative elucidates the planning processes of this small, progressive woman’s college in its formative decades, and addresses the shifting role of the landscape architect in American campus design in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries.