**1. Introduction**

Olmsted is a fundamental figure in landscape architecture history. He founded the discipline of landscape architecture in America and completed nearly 500 projects during his lifetime [1]. The great works he left in hundreds of American cities were not only designed as environments for daily use, but also represent a collection of living design literacies and principles. 2022, the bicentennial of Olmsted's birth, is an appropriate time to contemplate Olmsted's legacy. In the parks that have served the public for more than 100 years, what design programs have survived and thrived? What design literacies and principles are still relevant to daily use? What new elements emerge that enhance experiences of the public space? Until we find answers to these questions, it is difficult to argue that our commemoration of Olmsted pertains to the design practice of still-relevant public spaces.

This study used New York Central Park as a case study. As Olmsted's famous and most representative work, this park was the first of its kind in the United States that truly served the public, and it remained of great significance to both Olmsted's legacy and the society for which it was designed, as well as contemporary society [2]. In designing Central Park, Olmsted created landscape design as an occupation, and chose it as his career [3]. Central Park marked the birth of public landscapes and the birth of the discipline of landscape architecture [2]. This does not mean that the park never faced challenges. In the 1830s, due to the influx of immigrants into New York, the grid layout of the city was destroyed, and Central Park provided entertainment places and healthy leisure areas for every citizen of all classes in the city [4]. When it was first built, Central Park was very popular, and the number of daily visitors reached 2% of the population of New

**Citation:** Zhu, X.; Zhang, B.; Xiang, S.; Zhao, W.; Mihalko, C. Testing Olmsted's Lasting

Legacy—Comparing Design Theory and the Post-Occupancy Conditions of New York Central Park. *Buildings* **2022**, *12*, 2217. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/buildings12122217

Academic Editors: Lucia Della Spina, Paola Pellegrini, Antonia Russo, Maria Rosa Valluzzi and Angela Viglianisi

Received: 1 November 2022 Accepted: 6 December 2022 Published: 14 December 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

York City [5]. However, its brilliance dimmed at the beginning of the 20th century. The maturation of public transportation made long-distance travel popular, which allowed people to experience real nature far from the city [4]. Park visitation fell sharply, and the park managers' ignorance led to its first decline [4]. In 1934, a large number of leisure and entertainment facilities were built, including 19 playgrounds, ballfields, handball courts, and Wollman Rink, to return it livelihood [6]. In the 1960s and 1970s, rapid suburbanization, and a lack of funds and personnel, led to the second decline. The park management committee, established in 1980 [4], effectively restored the park landscape and held largescale activities such as concerts, festival celebrations and protests [6]. Today, Central Park still responds directly to the expectations of the population and public life in New York [4]. The Park Conservation Association spends nearly USD 78 million a year on the care and maintenance of the park [7] (Central Park Conservancy, https://www.centralparknyc.org/ about accessed on 20 June 2022). Today, New York Central Park is loved by Americans and people throughout the world. Currently, more than 42 million tourists visit every year [8] (Kang, 2017, https://www.centralparknyc.org/articles/central-park-history accessed on 20 June 2022). By examining the historical maps (Figure 1), the changes to the park's program can be understood with greater clarity. However, the impacts of different programs in the park still remain little understood by most designers.

**Figure 1.** Pictures of plan changes in Central Park from 1836 to 2021 (Source: The maps of the park are from the Library of Congress website and were compiled by the authors.).

The overarching aim of the study was to explore the validity of Olmsted's design theory in the contemporary context. This raised the following research questions:


#### **2. Methodology**
