Carry the city’s cross traffic through the park on roads sunk below its surface, out of sight; inside it, give carriages, riders and walkers each their own system of drives, rides and paths, crossing one another by bridges and arches so that none need meet.
Central Park is a strip half a mile wide and two and a half miles long laid across the grid of Manhattan, and the city’s cross streets had to pass it. Olmsted and Vaux sank four transverse roads in cuttings walled with stone and screened by planting, so that the park could be crossed by carts and coaches without the people in the park seeing them. Inside, the drives, the bridle path and the footpaths were separated, and Vaux designed some thirty bridges and arches, each different, to carry one over another.
The idea of separating kinds of traffic by level passed from the park into town planning, to Radburn in New Jersey (1929) and to the new towns of the twentieth century. Inside the park, the separation is what lets the landscape of meadow, wood and water seem continuous.
In place of a wall, bound the garden with a ditch whose side towards the garden is a vertical retaining wall and whose other side slopes up to the field, so that cattle are kept out and the view from the house runs on uninterrupted into the park.
ditch c. 1.5–2 m deep: wall on the garden side, turf slope on the park side
Let the character of the site direct the design: whether the ground should be raised or lowered, a view opened or closed, water led or stilled. Prefer variety, surprise and concealed bounds to symmetry.
Compose the garden as a painter composes a landscape: in groups of trees for light and shade, with water winding through the hollows and a temple or bridge placed where it will be seen across it, so that each turn of the walk opens a new picture.
Bring grass up to the walls of the house and keep the cattle off it with a ha-ha; plant trees in clumps on the rising ground and as single specimens on the lawn; and enclose the park with a belt of woodland, with a drive inside it from which the park is seen.
Make the lake by damming a stream in its valley, give it a winding, irregular outline with promontories, and hide both its ends behind trees, a bend or a bridge, so that it seems a river flowing through the park.
Show the natural beauties of a place and hide its defects; give it an appearance of extent and freedom by disguising the boundary; conceal every interference of art, so that the whole seems natural; and remove or hide whatever serves only convenience and cannot be made ornamental.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Separate ways for carriages, riders and walkers”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/olmsted-separate-ways. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.