The Improvement Of Boulder Colorado Report To The City Improvement Association

Author : Frederick Law Olmsted Jr
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781332142927
Total Pages : 120 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (429 download)

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Download or read book The Improvement of Boulder, Colorado written by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr and published by . This book was released on 2015-08-04 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Improvement of Boulder, Colorado: Report to the City Improvement Association Whether knowingly or not., everyone is affected by the appearance of his surroundings, and one of the important factors to he taken into account in all municipal improvements is the influence which their appearance has upon the mental and nervous condition of the people. As with the food we eat and the air we breathe, so the sights habitually before our eyes play an immense part in determining whether we feel cheerful, efficient and fit for life, or the contrary. The attempt to secure in the appearance of our surroundings those qualities which make for good may be called "beautification," but the maximum effects in this direction are never to be secured by means of things done purely for the sake of decoration; they are to be secured only by constant, intelligent, sensitive regard for the quality of the appearance of things whenever any physical change and improvement is undertaken Tor any practical purpose whatsoever. When the philosophers discuss the fine arts and the sense of beauty they tell us that at the root of it all is Order; sometimes subtle, complex, intricate and picturesque to a point that deties analysis, but always so far as analysis can carry us Beauty is Order, is dependent on the avoiding of the impression of disorder, although that is only the first step and it must be much more besides. When it comes to the practical problem now before us of making the appearance of municipal surroundings such as to contribute to a healthy, cheerful, progressive state of mind we can subscribe heartily to the words of one of these philosophic analysts: "I object to the word 'decoration' as commonly used by designers, because it implies that additions arc likely to be improvements. As designers we make additions, indeed, to achieve the greater simplicity of Order, and for no other reason. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.