Building the National Parks: Historic Landscape Design and Construction [Hardcover]

Linda Flint McClelland (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1998 | ISBN-10: 0756765048 | ISBN-13: 978-0756765040

Since its founding in 1916, the National Park Service has been charged with two equally important & often conflicting missions: to preserve our country's natural wonders for future generations & to develop national parks for the appreciation & enjoyment of visitors. Recalling the era of the great lodges at Yellowstone & Yosemite, this volume tells the story of how the new bureau's landscape designers, architects, & engineers met each of these challenges, forging a rich legacy of buildings, roads, & trails that both harmonized with the natural scenery & accommodated visitors to the parks. Their achievements -- detailed for the first time here -- have greatly influenced the design of state & local parks & other recreational areas across the U.S. B&W photos.

Editorial Reviews

Review

""In an era in which the National Park Service spends $600,000 to build a comfort station, this book attempts to explain the rationale for the agency's decisions on what structures to put where. As with almost every facet of park-making in the United States, the hand of the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted can be seen in the built environment of the national parks." -- Washington Post

"Building the National Parks is a detailed, descriptive chronicle of the efforts of the nascent National Park Service to develop the parks in a harmonious fashion... The author provides useful and interesting sections on some of the landscape architects and designers who worked in the national parks." -- Robert Pavlik, California History Action

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Book Description

Recalling the era of the great lodges at Yellowstone and Yosemite -- the story of the landscape designers, architects, and engineers who built America's scenic national parks.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 591 pages
• Publisher: Diane Pub Co (February 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0756765048
• ISBN-13: 978-0756765040
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 7.8 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,880,688 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Too many facts, not enough analysis, November 5, 2004

By 

Ranger Reub (Cedar City, UT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Building the National Parks: Historic Landscape Design and Construction (Paperback)

The National Park Service's (NPS) 1918 statement of policy says that "in the construction of roads, trails, buildings and other improvements, particular attention must be devoted always to the harmonizing of these improvements with the landscape" (123). Linda Flint McLelland's Building the National Parks explains how this was done in the early days of the NPS. Over and over again, the book reminds readers that such improvements, especially those in the Civilian Conservation Corps era, were built so that the landscape was not injured and so they would, as much as they could, blend in to the natural environment.

The volume's explanation of the early construction of campgrounds is one of the more interesting examples of how early NPS landscaping attempted to lessen the impact on the environment. Plant pathologist E.P. Meinecke, known as the father of the modern campground, discovered that human activity caused a myriad of ecological problems and therefore applied his understanding of plant ecology to campground planning and design (279). Meinecke chose campground sites by type of soil, density of vegetation and then "divided up into individual campsites of legitimate sizes, each one offering approximately as much privacy, shade, and other advantages as the other (278). Environmentally conscious readers will hopefully think twice before camping somewhere outside an established campground.

The book presents facts and statistics well, but doesn't tell an engaging story. For instance, the volume lists the overall park visitation statistics from 1914 to 1918, which demonstrates a significant rise, but never offers any analysis on why those numbers augmented. Many journalism professors tell their students to "show, don't tell." McLelland's text tells, but doesn't show. Many pages feel like an organized list of particulars in paragraph form, offering little or no analysis. The pictures and their accompanying captions tell the best story. When investigating landscapes and landscape elements, visual presentation shows more and leaves a more lasting impression than any page of text.

Building the National Parks' title is somewhat misleading. The book also discusses landscaping in numerous state parks across the country. "Building Yosemite and Other Selected National Parks" would not be a far-fetched title as McLelland chronicles nearly every landscape decision at Yosemite and doesn't give other deserving national parks equal share. Perhaps 1916-1940 should be placed in the title after "construction," since that period is the book's focus. The last chapter covers the history of landscaping since 1940 and proves itself as a fascinating portion of the volume, explaining that the "naturalistic harmonies" in NPS landscape design once strictly adhered to have been thrown by the wayside with emphasis on functionality and safety rather than aesthetics (462-467). It goes to show that the period of 1916-1940 was truly the golden age of the national parks.