Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/157

Rh acquisition of such additional spaces as are deemed necessary to create a modern park system; and of selecting for purchase and improvement suitable connections between the various park areas.

If Washington were not a nation's capital, in which the location of public buildings is of the first importance, and if the city itself were not by its very plan tied to a historic past, the problem would be less complicated. The very fact that Washington and Jefferson, L'Enfant and Ellicott, and their immediate successors, drew inspiration from the world's greatest works of landscape architecture and of civic adornment made it imperative to go back to the sources of their knowledge and taste in order to restore unity and harmony to their creations and to guide future development along appropriate lines. Indeed the more the commission studied the first plans of the Federal City, the more they became convinced that the greatest service they could perform would be done by carrying to a legitimate conclusion the comprehensive, intelligent, and yet simple and straightforward scheme devised by L'Enfant under the direction of Washington and Jefferson.

L 'Enfant's plan shows that he was familiar with the work of Lenôtre, whose examples of landscape architecture, not only in France but also in Italy and England, are still the admiration of the world. We know, also, that L'Enfant had the advantage of those maps of foreign cities, 'drawn on a large and accurate scale,' which Jefferson gathered during his public service abroad, and we learn from Jefferson's letters how he adjured L'Enfant not to depart from classical models, but to follow those examples which the world had agreed to admire. In order to re-study the same models and to take note of the great civic works of Europe, the commission spent five weeks of the summer of 1901 in foreign travel, visiting London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Budapest, Frankfort and Berlin. Among the many problems with which the commission is called upon to deal, there is not one which has not been dealt with in some one of the cities mentioned, and