ABSTRACT
The chapter analyzes the controlling metaphors used by Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American landscape architecture, to situate his parks as sanative zones, semi-domestic social spaces, and aesthetic objects designed to inculcate middle-class ideals of comportment in a diverse urban population. As demonstrated in a series of close readings of Olmsted’s later public speeches, the rhetorical analyses of these metaphors for both parks and landscape architects situate natural materials as green media while also playing with and against gendered assumptions about the seeming femininity of these spaces and the assumed masculinity of the landscape architect.
