#8 The Olmsted Campus Plan

If he had done nothing else during his first ten years in office, Oregon Agricultural College President William Jasper Kerr (1907-1932) still would be known for having managed to do what his predecessors could not: Change the college's perception of itself from that of a small land grant college to an emerging national university. For starters, he raised entrance requirements and worked diligently to nationally certify academic programs. Four major schools were established...Agriculture, Engineering, Home Economics and Commerce...and he soon followed these with Forestry, Mines, Education, Pharmacy, and Health and Physical Education. Kerr initiated a summer session, started the Agricultural Extension Service, gave birth to radio station KOAC, and provided graduate students with more opportunities than ever before.

To support this growth, Kerr supervised the construction of 23 new major buildings for the school, from the Memorial Union to the Women's Building and Weatherford Hall. Rather than approach projects piecemeal, he commissioned John C. Olmsted to complete a master plan for the campus in 1909. OSU has never been the same.

In Olmsted, he could not have made a better choice.

The firm Olmsted represented had been founded in 1857 by his father (John was adopted), Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), arguably the most famous landscape architect in American history. By the turn of the century, Olmsted and associates had amassed a portfolio of projects that included New York City's Central Park, the United States Capitol grounds, Yosemite National Park, Clove Lake Parks on Staten Island, and Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

In 1865, the Olmsteds were asked to create a campus plan for the College of California, later to become the University of California at Berkeley, and the first of over 355 college and university campus designs they would complete over the next 90 years. Many of these are among the most picturesque in the country, including Yale University, the University of Washington, Duke, Stanford, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins, Notre Dame, Brown, Louisiana State University, Stanford, and Washington University in St. Louis.

OSU's Olmsted Plan, housed today in University Archives in The Valley Library, is a 60-page written report (essentially a letter) outlining suggestions for the "look" and "feel" of the campus. Although OAC Professor Arthur L. Peck would use the document in 1910 to create a map to help illustrate the Olmsted vision, it is the report itself, and it's built-in flexibility, that is still mainly responsible for the distinctive atmosphere OSU enjoys today, highlighted by numerous pedestrian paths passing between historic red-bricked buildings outlined in white, terra cotta trim, and buildings arranged around neatly ordered rectangles. However, it is OSU's Lower Campus, site of the university's first real "farm" and football and baseball fields, that may best reflect the signature feature of an "Olmsted campus," the setting aside of an expanse of natural green and landscaping for solitude and quiet reflection.

Other Olmsted recommendations:

- the grouping of buildings in zones by function (nucleus, middle and outer zones)
- harmony of design -- buildings of a simple, Classic design, two or three stories in height, with double fronts
- designing buildings that can be easily enlarged
- developing two primary quadrangles
- diagonal crosswalks in open spaces
- maintaining Front Park (Lower Campus) as a beautiful landscape -- “a broad, imposing park meadow between the principal entrances and the buildings,” allowing one to “take in the group [of college buildings] as a whole”
- development of trees, but with restraint, so that buildings are not “smothered”

In 1926, Kerr used both A. D. Taylor and later John V. Bennes to update Olmsted by expanding the campus to include residence halls. Others would follow...notably those of Louis DeMonte and Albert Wagner...but Olmsted's master plan remains supreme in guiding university planners in matters of campus expansion or revision.

Other Olmsted projects around Oregon and the Pacific Northwest include: the campus of the University of Oregon, the Lewis and Clark Exposition of 1905, Portland park system, Portland Heights, Reed College, the grounds surrounding the Washington State Capitol in Olympia, the Seattle park system, Pioneer Park in Walla Walla, Seattle's Mount Baker neighborhood and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.