Feature

A Road to Match the Mountains
The most ambitious parkway project ever undertaken, the Blue Ridge Parkway offers lessons for 21st-century road building.
By Kim A. O'Connell and Mary Myers, ASLA

The 469-mile Blue Ridge Parkway is such a technological marvel that it points to a plight of this profession—a job so well done that, to the untrained eye, the hand of the landscape architect is never seen. In this new century, when landscape architects are rewarded for projects where their mark is obvious and avant-garde, the Blue Ridge Parkway is a paragon of a time when design appeared subordinate to nature—and to people's pure enjoyment of it.

"The parkway," noted its chief designer and landscape architect Stanley Abbott, "has but one reason for existence, which is to please by revealing the charm and interest of the native American countryside...The idea is to fit the parkway into the mountains as if nature has put it there."

…To read the entire article, subscribe to LAM!