olmstead essays

olmstead essays Every common working citizen in our nation has a set routine they go through every day, Monday through Friday. Usually in involves getting up around 5:00-8:00 a.m. every morning, fighting the same traffic every morning on the way to work, working for eight hours on basically the same job over and over again, gaingin more and more stress as the day goes on, inturn building our stress levels. Then we clock out, go home and try not to let the misurable day we had at work get us down. We need a balance, or harmony in our lives to keep us going back to work every day and putting up with the life of the city. I beleive we need a down time, or just a time to relax and think. We have places in our communities such as museums, cinemas, health clubs, libraries, etc. to help us achieve that balance. Unfortunately, these places are themselves in and amung the big buildings and busy city. We need a place for us to be able to just step out of character, so to speak, and look at where our l ife is going. I believe the places that provide us with the essential balance in our lives is city parks. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, our cities have become a huge collection of large buildings, even bigger factories, and of course the millions of people packed into these factories and buildings. Large American cities have just become an enormous disguisting ball of stress, metal and concrete. Our cities needed parks for, if nothing else, just simply scenery diversity and urban beauty. The parks break up the buildings and provide the city with a healthy, balanced, and cultivated look. Beyond the purpose of landscaping art, city parks controdict our hecktic work lives with a peaceful, beatutiful, and natural appeal. City parks are also an example of a compromising relationship between urbanism and nature. Since the beginning of European settlements here in America, its citizens have had an agrarian orientation. This agrarian mind set le...