Big Plans: Picturing Social Reform, an exhibition currently on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, examines how landscape architects and photographers concretized contemporary social critiques through their work in American cities during the late 1800s and early 1900s. 

The exhibition highlights city plans, maps, photographs, and other archival materials to showcase how seminal urban design efforts by Frederick Law Olmsted, Calvert Vaux, Charles Eliot, and Daniel Burnham were inspired and shaped by the photographic works of Lewis Wickes Hine and by the cultural concerns of social reformer Isabella Stewart Gardner.  

Included in the exhibition are Olmsted and Vaux's plans for New York City's Central Park, Boston's Emerald Necklace, and Chicago's Jackson Park, efforts that, according to exhibition text, were crafted as a "response to the social and environmental situation of working-class immigrants in the industrial metropolis." 

These projects, which often sought to improve living conditions and mitigate perceived environmental threats to growing cities while shaping future urban development, created a theoretical, social, and aesthetic foundation for the landscape architecture discipline that continues into today. 

The exhibition is on view through September 15, 2019.