During the last weeks of his practice, Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., wrote that the future of his firm depended on developing an appropriate landscape style for the arid West. Christine Edstrom O'Hara tells how his sons' firm, Olmsted Brothers, set out to reach that goal in their unbuilt proposal for the 1915 San Diego Panama-California Exposition, in what is now Balboa Park. The Panama-California Exposition, San Diego, 1915: The Olmsted Brothers' Ecological Park Typology is the story of their innovative embrace of regionalist aesthetics and a respect for local ecology, topography, and weather. The ideals of their design, however, were not taken up by their clients. The Olmsted firm was fired, and the fairgrounds that welcomed visitors to San Diego in 1915 had architecture that was more appropriate to large cities and a landscape better suited to a wet climate.
University of California Press