PARK

PARK

Landscape style in horticulture or a form of urban green areas, developed in the eighteenth century in England, popularised in the nineteenth century throughout Europe, initially characteristic of large rural estates.

In the 19th century it was introduced in towns as a public city park. The park is a response to the formal style in horticulture, which was manifested in the French garden (e.g., Le Nôtre in Versailles), perceived as a manifestation of absolutism, contrary to the freedom pursued in the programme of English landscape parks. It was also a reaction to Addison’s appeal to transform existing gardens into “beautiful landscapes”. Historians of garden art point to garden forms preceding the park, such as the Renaissance flower meadow, hunting park, Chinese garden, but the final form and aesthetics of the landscape park were developed by English aesthetics, designers and gardeners (e.g. Addison, Price, Kent, “Capability” Brown, Repton). The following terms are sometimes used interchangeably: landscape park, English park, picturesque park, romantic park. In the city, the park was to fulfil recreational and hygienic functions (it was to improve health conditions and eliminate air pollution), as well as provide entertainment for the working population within the city limits.

Garden and park art in the landscape trend is a way of designing the environment taking into account climatic, geographical and cultural conditions in conjunction with the surrounding landscape. Indication of the park’s stylistic programme as a search for diversity, asymmetry and variability required the mapping out of walking paths, terrain (hills, artificial rivers and lakes), introduction of architecture (bridges, artificial ruins, cascades, caves) and significant places, symbolically characterised by the architectural programme (temples, obelisks, monuments). An important factor taken into account when establishing a park and designing its character was the time that vegetation needs for optimal, free growth in order to achieve the assumed landscape effect. New rules for designing park areas were introduced: painting sketches of future views were decisive, not architectural plans. The whole was supposed to create a carefully thought-out composition, constructed according to strictly defined rules of the picturesque, fully revealed during the journey, following the marked routes, but also the viewpoints located on their way. The park was to function as a “picture gallery” of sorts, read “in motion” by a stroller/wandering person and on the grounds of their multi-sensual, but above all visual experience. The most famous and interesting parks of this kind are Stowe in England, Mużakowski Park on the Polish-German border or Zofijówka in Ukraine.

The model of landscape parks entered the cities in the nineteenth century as a public city park, established from scratch or transformed from a private park (palace, manor park) and open to residents. The introduction of the park’s landscape style into the city changed it into a type of green enclave isolated from the hustle and bustle of the city, reminiscent of a natural extra-urban space, encouraging walks and recreation. All city parks had several elements in common: often a location in the city centre, a dense frame of trees separating the park from the city, open spaces covered with lawns and clearings, recreational and sports areas (from pitches to aqueducts), garden architecture (benches, gazebos, pavilions, restaurants). The park was supposed to be a self-sufficient space with various functions, whose main purpose was rest, recreation and education. As the “green lungs of the city”, the park was supposed to balance the growing population and urban pollution. In London, the most interesting examples from this period are: Regent’s Park (open to residents in the 1830s) and Battersea Park, both in landscape style, with a rich and varied garden plan, in which numerous clearings, roads, walking alleys, a pond, a botanical garden, places for recreation, games, team games, restaurants have been designed. The most famous and largest public parks include Central Park in New York, Hyde Park in London or Tiergarten in Berlin. In Poland, on the other hand, it is worth mentioning Łazienki Królewskie in Warsaw or Krakow’s Planty.

Contemporary city parks, while maintaining the same range of functions attributed to them, depart from the idea of a landscape park, setting the principle of stylistic diversity, but maintained in the spirit of sustainable development: from industrial parks to ecoparks. Less frequently they are created in city centres (with the exception of so-called pocket parks, squeezed into small, undeveloped areas and integrated with architecture), located rather on their outskirts, in reclaimed or post-industrial areas, in an environment degraded in social terms and in terms of landscape.

Among the new forms of parks, amusement parks such as Disneyland and in Poland the dinosaur park (e.g. in Rogów near Biskupin, which can be seen as an archaeological family park), which offer completely artificial, imagined spaces, serving only for fun, offering a kind of hyper-reality and simulacrum in place of what is real.

A new form is also a sensory park, i.e. a park that is designed to affect all the senses, with an emphasis on non-visual stimuli. Parks of this type have an educational, therapeutic and relaxation character and are often addressed to the disabled (especially blind people). In the structure of the sensory park, sound effects are used, such as water noise, bird singing or the crunch of gravel, as well as fragrances generated by specially selected plants. Hugo Kukelhaus was the forerunner of the idea of the sensory park. One of the first sensory parks in Poland is the “Stanisław Lem Experiences Garden” established in 2007 in Czyżyny near Kraków.

The term park (national, landscape) is also used to refer to legally protected natural and cultural areas, taking into account cultural, historical or landscape qualities.

[B. F.]

Literature:

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Hunt, John Dixon. The Figure in the Landscape. Poetry, Painting and the Gardening during the Eigtheenth Century. London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.