The Best Planned City in the World: Olmsted, Vaux, and the Buffalo Park System (Designing the American Park)
The Best Planned City in the World is well organized, very well written, and has the advantage of the author's long acquaintance with Frederick Withers, Calvert Vaux, and Frederick Law Olmsted. It is an invaluable study.(David Schuyler, author of Sanctified Landscape: Writers, Artists, and the Hudson River Valley, 1820--1909)In his book, which includes a wealth of historic photographs, postcards, and maps, Kowsky points out Buffalo's park system was never 'divorced from real-life concerns' and took years to reach maturity, given the political and budgetary setbacks that took place along the way.(The Daily Hampshire Gazette)Showcasing original plans, drawings, photographs, reports, and letters, The Best Planned City in the World is a superbly written and presented work of scholarship that is highly recommended.(The Midwest Book Review)In his magnificent new book, with its lucid prose and deft organization, Kowsky follows the evolution of Olmsted and Vaux's astonishing creations in Buffalo--those 'landscapes of recreation, residence, memory, and healing,' as he so gracefully describes them--from their initial design and their growth into maturity through their heartbreaking decline and, in recent times, tentative rebirth. An extraordinary variety and abundance of illustrations fill the book, including photographs new and old, maps, diagrams, paintings, and lithographs. As a physical object, The Best Planned City in the World has a beauty worthy of its subject.(Site/Lines)The author adeptly explains the city politics of the gilded era and Olmsted's privileged outsider role, putting park building into the broader context of city planning. Readers will come away with an appreciation of parks and a personal empathy for park builders. Highly recommended.(Choice)This book is more than a scholarly approach to the planning of Buffalo's parks. Social and political background is woven into [Kowsky's] narrative of landscape design, and the color images create a book that looks as good on a coffee table as in a research library.(Western New York Heritage)Francis Kowsky has painted an excellent portrait of Buffalo in its heyday.(Landscape Architecture Magazine)Kowsky reminds us that parks are not open spaces awaiting development, and that people need trees, meadows, expanses of water, and walking paths, and biking trails. The more dense a city grows, the greater the need. The responsibility of an enlightened public and their leaders is to balance development pressures and the need to expand the tax base with humanity's need for relaxation and enjoyment. Kowsky's masterful book makes the visionary landscape and planning principles Olmsted and Vaux pioneered in Buffalo clear, with the hope that restoration efforts will once again allow it to become the best planned city in the world.(Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide)