Richardson and Olmsted's Picturesque Masterpiece: The Buffalo State Asylum

The Buffalo Psychiatric Center (originally the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, then the Buffalo State Hospital) is the product one of the greatest artistic collaborations in the nation’s history. It is a work of one of the greatest architects America has produced, Henry Hobson Richardson, and the founder of the profession of landscape architecture in the United States, and its greatest practitioner, Frederick Law Olmsted.

The Asylum, planned from 1871 to 1875, was produced with each man in his prime: Olmsted (left) and his partner Calvert Vaux had recently designed New York’s Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and were at work on their seminal Buffalo park and parkway system. Richardson, of gargantuan physiognomy and talent, would be propelled by his Buffalo work to the front rank of American architects.

Richardson died in 1886, too soon to see the project through to completion. The western pavilions, erected in the 1890’s, followed his design. Outbuildings, including the Women’s Kitchen, summerhouse, greenhouse, and a male staff dormitory (destroyed), were designed by Buffalo’s own man of eminence, E.B. Green. A laundry building (destroyed) and a magnificent powerhouse (altered beyond recognition) were also designed by Richardson.

While the importance of Richardson (left) and his contribution to the work is generally appreciated locally, Olmsted’s is not.  This is largely due to the depredations the landscape has suffered over the last 75 years, itself partly a function of the failure to understand the artistic inseparability of the landscape and buildings in this, one of the greatest works of the Picturesque built in America. Indeed, the work is locally known as the Richardson Complex, acknowledging the architecture alone.

The landscape has been mauled at every turn, and that has effected the perceived viability of the now-abandoned buildings and caused them to suffer. The landscape is seen as so much open land, available for roads, parking lots, and college construction and expansion. It is a story familiar to Buffalo: Olmsted’s grandest parkway, Humboldt, was destroyed in the 1950’s for highway construction, and Olmsted’s Front, Riverside, and Delaware, and Humboldt parks were severely compromised by highway construction. None of these incursions could have been built without the enthusiastic support of the community’s leadership.

Today, strenuous, expensive, and frustratingly slow efforts are being made across the city to mitigate the effects of those long-ago decisions and to reclaim our parks and heritage. It is not only highways which are targeted for removal: An unsympathetic building which blocked an important view was recently cleared in Front Park, and an apartment building — built to “save” the Darwin Martin House in the 1950’s — was recently bought and demolished as part of the restoration and reconstruction of that historic site, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, himself a disciple of Richardson.

Buffalo State College is presently seeking to expand the campus in a way that will do irreparable harm to a great cultural resource. It seeks to erect a massive building (larger in footprint than the original Albright Art Gallery, its 1962 addition, or Buffalo State College’s Rockwell Hall) of severely inappropriate style and materials within the bounds of Richardson and Olmsted’s great Picturesque collaboration.

The college is leaping over a physical and psychological barrier at an extraordinarily sensitive site: The intersection of the only remaining corridors in Olmsted’s grand scheme of green space for Buffalo. Building there will inflict severe historic, cultural, artistic, and aestheticdamage that cannot be undone. What this project needs is thorough public review and a vetting of ideas. There is $100,000,000 on the table, appropriated in 2004 by the state legislature, to both restore the Psychiatric Center’s historic resources and fund a Buffalo State College expansion. The implementation of the latter must not compromise the former.

This irreplaceable National Historic Landmark continues to deteriorate while Buffalo State College's plans, occurring in a vacuum with total disregard for the historic and cultural context, would destroy key elements of the Richardson/Olmsted collaboration and jeopardize the restoration of Olmsted’s grand vision of a continuous swath of green space from Grant Street to Main Street

The beginnings of the Buffalo State Hospital lay in Olmsted’s vision of shaping the city through the physical conjoining of three institutions into one thematic Picturesque whole. The first piece was Forest Lawn cemetery, a very large large exemplar of the rural cemetery movement, designed in the Picturesque aesthetic in the 1850’s. The second was a 350-acre tract of land that would be the city’s main park, again in the rural style (this phrase had greater recognition in the United States than its kin, picturesque). The third, if Olmsted and his local patron — district attorney, businessman, and political artist William Dorsheimer — could manage it, would be a scenic rural asylum. Olmsted thought the synergies of pooling the open space of the three institutions were obvious (Olmsted's 1869 plan, left)

As Alex & Tatum state in Calvert Vaux, Architect & Planner (New York, 1994), “The choice of the park site in north Buffalo was a considered one, between two large adjacent green areas, Forest Lawn Cemetery and the grounds of the State Insane Asylum, intending to preserve for Buffalo an extensive, permanent rural area.”

Dorsheimer engineered an offer by the City of Buffalo of over 200 acres of land for the State Hospital on the condition the hospital commissioners located the institution where Olmsted and Dorsheimer wanted it. In late 1869, at a meeting held in the offices of the Buffalo Parks Commission, of which Dorsheimer was a member, the hospital commissioners accepted the offer.

This was a very significant act, for the local commissioners of the asylum contravened the locational guidelines of the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane (AMSAII), which the commissioners themselves had adopted as “the proper basis upon which the different sites should be considered and the final determination made.” Asylums, according to the AMSAII, should be located not in a city, but in the countryside.
In his history of the Buffalo State Hospital, The Eclipse of the State Mental Hospital (Albany, 1996) George Dowdall writes: “Why did the commissioners violate the first and simplest of the AMSAII propositions? Their decision was not a simple miscalculation of the direction that Buffalo’s growth would take, but quite the opposite. The asylum commissioners were meeting in the offices of the Buffalo Park Commission, just then embarking on a dramatic intervention in shaping Buffalo’s growth...

“The answer can be found by examining Olmsted’s plan for Buffalo...The plan’s title refers to both a ‘Park System’ and a ‘General Plan of the City.’ The ‘State Insane Asylum’ was intended to be part of both. The Asylum is on the north end of Richmond Avenue...which links several of Olmsted’s major circles. Its grounds are the west border of Buffalo’s largest park...”

Buffalo’s business class, embodied in Dorsheimer, was very consciously creating civic institutions meant to last in perpetuity. As Dowdall says, as “an observer noted at the ceremony laying its cornerstone, the Asylum was viewed as an important part of the social development of the city of Buffalo: ‘The decade of years from 1870 to 1880 will stand in the future annals of the city as an epoch in which a spirit of enterprise...sprang into full life and vigor, and by the inception of grand schemes of public improvement, convinced the public mind that the growth and prosperity of the city depended upon the successful forwarding of works designed to benefit, instruct, and amuse all classes of citizens...’ Olmsted could not have said it better himself.

By early 1871, Dorsheimer further had engineered the selection of the young architect Richardson to design the buildings of the asylum, in collaboration with Olmsted. It was city-shaping on a majestic scale: together with Delaware Park and Forest Lawn, the asylum constituted over 800 acres of artfully designed meadow, wood, lake and stream.

The asylum was a scenic composition, one in which the architecture and landscape are inseparable. It was conceived so, as perhaps the American culmination of the Picturesque, which started in England in the late 1700’s. However spellbinding Richardson’s buildings are, they were but a component of a larger scheme. It is a tragedy that we experience them in isolation, reduced. Unless and until the Olmsted landscape is restored and reconstructed, we shall be denying ourselves a civic treasure of untold value. Buffalo State College, in its willful ignorance, threatens a key component of this composition, one whose importance has only increased with time.

The interplay of buildings with landscape was central to the Picturesque aesthetic. As the movement’s codifier, Sir Uvedale Price, set down in his influential Essays on the Picturesque (London, 1793), in the introduction to his Essay on Architecture an Buildings as Connected with Scenery, “Ornamental Gardening is so connected with Architecture and Buildings of every kind, that I am led to make some remarks on that subject also: at the same time I must acknowledge with respect to architecture, that I have never made it my study as a separate art, but only as connected with scenery...” Price then proceeds for more than 200 pages to define the Picturesque as the melding of architecture and landscape.

As architecture and landscape were deemed of a piece, it was natural that landscape designers sought partnerships with architects from the beginning. Humphrey Repton, an English landscape designer and theorist whom Olmsted read closely along with Price, for a time partnered with the noted architect John Nash. Repton was among England’s greatest landscape gardeners (the term landscape architect came into use with Olmsted after the Civil War). Nash, for his part, “made it his business to purvey the Picturesque on a wide scale and in a manageable form,” according to David Watkin, in The English Vision, The Picturesque in Architecture and Landscape Design (New York, 1982). Repton himself, says Watkin, “was more keenly aware than [mid-18th century landscape gardener Capability] Brown had been that architecture was, as he put it, ‘an inseparable and indispensible auxiliary’ to landscape gardening.”

Advancing the unity of architecture and landscape in America was Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-1852), a landscape designer whose Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America (1841), and Cottage Residences; Or a Series of Designs for Rural Cottages, and Cottage Villas and their Gardens and Grounds (1844), among others, are still in print.

Downing was friends with the prolific Scottish designer and author J.C. Loudon, who published collections of Repton’s writings in the 1840’s. Downing met the young architect Calvert Vaux on a recruiting mission to England in 1850 and brought him back to Newburgh, NY as a partner. Downing died in a steamboat racing explosion in 1852 and Vaux continued Downing’s practice until moving to New York in 1857. A year later, entering the competition to design Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Vaux sought out Olmsted as a partner. That year the new partners also entered, and won, the completion to design New York’s Central Park. This partnership of architect and landscape architect was to last 20 years, with a 2-year interregnum while Olmsted went to California to supervise a large landholding.

In Central Park, Olmsted and Vaux achieved what some would call the “picturesque dream of architecture growing out of the soil” with Vaux’s designs for the Belvedere and other structures.

Olmsted’s work with Richardson was not a formal partnership. Rather, each man was part of a team of two. They were to collaborate on several “picturesque dreams” until Richardson’s death. None even approached the Buffalo project in size. One of the signature features of the Buffalo work is the manner in which the Medina sandstone and brick buildings spring directly from the earth, with no intervening pavement or contrasting foundation. The great chocolate-colored, rough-faced cliffs of stone found their only counterpoints in nature. Olmsted and Richardson demonstrated that lithic monumentalism could also be indelibly romantic and characteristically American. The asylum was a fusion of the manmade with nature, not a subjugation of nature by man.

The Picturesque principals that Richardson first put into practice at Buffalo ran through his later influential work on railroad stations, Shingle Style houses, and small libraries and civic buildings. This has been recognized only rather recently. “Beginning in 1955 with Vincent Scully’s The Shingle Style, in which the New England domestic design of the 1870s and 1880s was recognized as a unique phenomenon in which form draws upon intimate linkage between architecture and landscape, Richardson’s work has come to be viewed as seminal to this process, ”  writes Margaret Henderson Floyd in Henry Hobson Richardson: A Genius for Architecture (New York, 1998). Henderson continues:.” The architect’s exposure to the culture of the American landscape through his friend and mentor Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) has thus been established as one generative force behind his design psyche...”

So, one had three ambitious men, masters of the arts of politics, architecture, and landscape, setting about founding great institutions meant to endure in perpetuity for the purpose of advancing democratic ideals and the city itself.  While dozens of such institutions were being built across the country in the first wave of professionalized public treatment of the mentally ill, and Olmsted often wrote of the therapeutic value of designed landscapes, Olmsted got the opportunity to only work on five.  Olmsted prepared the planting plan for the asylum in 1874. Another copy was requested by the asylum commissioners in 1877 and sent by Olmsted (left). It is the only plan created and signed by Olmsted that survives.

Indeed, it is the only such plan which was definitely built. A fortuitous discovery of large-format prints of a 1927 aerial survey of Erie County confirmed, in March of 2006, that Olmsted’s plan was, indeed, implemented, and that parts of it survive to the present day.

Richardson and Olmsted’s preliminary plan of 1871 was completed in great fidelity by 1895. It consisted of roughly two halves. The southern half contained the main buildings with their attendant parklands, while the northern half contained farmland. The whole was contained by a landscaped circumferential carriage drive that ran along Elmwood Avenue to Scajacquada Creek and then southward to the parkland south of main buildings once again. Olmsted described his intent in his 1871 report to the asylum commissioners, “A road is also proposed to cross the property from East to West, back of the buildings, from which branches would communicate with the various outbuildings, and with the administration court. All the grounds north of this is proposed to be enclosed by a ring fence for tillage and hay fields. The park and all the border ground on each side of the circuit road between the tillage ground and the boundary or the creek might thus be kept permanently in turf and pastured. The whole would also form a pleasure ground...”

Examination of the 1927 aerial photograph (left) shows some changes to accommodate growth in the institution. The reception function was removed to a large freestanding building oriented to Elmwood Avenue in the late 19th- or early 20th century. The intersecting hipped roofs of its southern pavilion provided an appropriate transition with the Richardson buildings. The new Reception Building was set back between two branches of Olmsted roadway, sufficiently far from Elmwood to retain the park-like aspect Olmsted intended. The larger circuit drive, however, was interrupted by this time, having become the public Scajacquada Parkway along the creek. The section along much of the western edge of the asylum was also removed, possibly to accommodate the mechanization of the farm operations. A smaller circuit remained, however, combining Olmsted’s East-West road with the intact portions of the original carriage circuit sketched out in 1871.

Large changes, however, were in the offing. In 1919 Buffalo’s Commissioner of Public Works proposed an “Educational Center” for the asylum’s farmland (left). The Education center was to house an expanded State Normal School (which was outgrowing its, again, its building on Jersey Street), an elementary school, high school, vocational school, and a State Normal Vocational School.

By 1928, construction had begun on the State Normal School, which was to become Buffalo State College. The first four college buildings were opened in 1931, including Rockwell Hall, which was built closer to Elmwood Avenue than the rambling Reception Building it replaced. Rockwell Road was rather crudely laid out rigidly east-west, which was to become the psychic border between what was now called the Buffalo State Hospital and the college. 

This had serious consequences for Olmsted’s landscape, as examination of a 1957 aerial photo mosaic (left) reveals. A new Reception Building had to be built for the State Hospital. Architecturally it referenced Richardson’s nearby pavilions and displayed fine brickwork, but it broke with Olmsted’s building orientation by adopting an orthogonal stance and matching Rockwell Hall’s reduced, though still generous, Elmwood Avenue setback.

Shortly thereafter, a massive Medical-Surgical Building was erected south of the new Reception Building. This building was of cookie-cutter design, matching buildings erected at other state hospitals at the time. It was placed in what must have seemed a logical spot: the open space of Olmsted’s great meadow. It was demolished recently, although no attempt has been made to landscape the resulting open space, let alone restore its Olmstedian features.

The Medical-Surgical Building also resulted in two very large parking lots being built atop Olmsted’s grand carriage circuit, destroying its coherence. These lots remain, and in fact have been expanded.  The carriage road north and south of the lots, which evidence suggests was of crushed stone, was either allowed to become grown over or was covered with soil and seeded, leaving a grassy meander between the groves of mature trees that survived. A new roadway, placed tightly around Richardson’s male (eastern) pavilions, was built to maintain the ability to drive around the grounds.

The late 1950’s saw the Scajacquada Parkway destroyed for an eponymous expressway, removing the last piece of the Olmsted landscape north of Rockwell Road. On the Psychiatric Center grounds, the intrusive and unsympathetic Strozzi Building was erected west of the Medical-Surgical Building in the early 1960’s. In 1969, in a tragic loss for American architecture, the three easternmost pavilions (Men’s buildings C, D, and E) of Richardson’s main building were destroyed. Buildings C and D were replaced by mostly single-story structures that in their orientation, form, and and materials were wholly unsympathetic with not only the remaining Richardson buildings, but every other building around them, to say nothing of the landscape. The site of Building E was simply covered with dirt and seeded with grass. Medina sandstone foundation remnants were visible at the surface in the summer of 2006.

Also in the late 1960’s, Richardson’s muscular powerhouse was cruelly altered, and other buildings were abandoned and allowed to fall into disrepair, including Andrews Hall and E.B. Green’s Men’s dormitory and Women’s Kitchen. Since 1974, the Richardson buildings were abandoned, save for the Administration Building. That was abandoned in 1994. Finally, Buffalo State College was permitted in the 1970’s to pave a very large portion of the former Women’s Garden and farmlands for student parking negatively effecting the views of the grounds from the northwest.

What was happening at the Buffalo Psychiatric Center and Buffalo State College in the postwar period was unique only in its particulars. The indiscriminate destruction of America’s built environment through Urban Renewal and highway construction led directly to the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and national and state registers of historic places.

Protection of historic resources in New York State was strengthened by the State Environmental Quality Review Act. These laws were meant to protect sites such as the Buffalo State Asylum, which, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. The buildings by Richardson were further declared a National Historic Landmark in 1984. That is  the highest honor and greatest protection the United States offers.

It is then disturbing to realize that Buffalo State College and other state bodies have gotten away with an expansion of the Buffalo State campus south of Rockwell Road, in the area that was Olmsted’s forested grove, and that had by attrition become the very nexus of Olmsted’s grand vision of 1871 as the only remaining link between the parkland of the original asylum and Delaware Park and Forest Lawn beyond.  

The project has irretrievably destroyed the last fragile tendril connecting Olmsted’s grand system together, allowing a building to be built that is brutally ignorant of its physical and historic context and woefully inadequate to the high standards of Olmsted and Richardson. Without a front door or so much as a window on the Elmwood Avenue (eastern) elevation, and with nothing but blank wall and metal louvers facing the Elmwood community to the south, the design raised public concern on urban design grounds as well. Picturesque it isn’t.

It features a largely windowless metal-clad box/blob combo by modernist starchitects Gwathmey/Siegal. The construction of the campus expansion, nearing completion, has destroyed all historic remnants preserved, subsurface or surface, on the project site. All of the historic resources on the site and the views to and from the site have been destroyed.
The varied views of the buildings through foreground, middle ground, and distant landscape elements are at the very core of Olmsted and Richardson’s collaboration. To destroy a key vantage point is to irretrievably change the art itself.

Now all that is left is to mitigate the impact of this transgression (or, as Prince Charles would have it, "this monstrous carbuncle on the face of a beloved friend"). A "Richardson Park," explaind in the post below, is the “big picture” resource that needs to be built. Everything else should be made subsidiary and harmonious with it.