MEN, GARDENS AND CITIES—II History Shows Need For Preserving Public Spaces

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31329, 28 March 1967, Page 17

MEN, GARDENS AND CITIES—II History Shows Need For Preserving Public Spaces

(Written by RUTH FRANCE for the Christchurch Civic Trust)

In many respects man freed himself at this time, yet in others he became a follower of fashion to an unreasonable extent, so that while on the one hand we see in the plans of cities a more open and healthy lay-out, such as in the outer ring of Milan, on the other the concept of a city clung to that of a walled fortress, circular in shape whatever the lie of the land.

This was particularly the case in Italy, where the work of Vitruvius, an Augustan architect and town-planner, had been rediscovered in the fifteenth century, and exerted a great influence in the next 300 years, not only in Italy, but over the whole of Europe.

Certainly in Italy the defence of a city was one of its most important considerations, yet the ideal Vitruvian city was an inhumanly rigid geometric plan, and was seen at its best when modified, as in the rebuilding of Rome. The Netherlands cities, such as Bruges, retained their place as exemplars of good and sanitary conditions, with many houses of brick, built in terraces, though there was little interest in courts or gardens. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia was written, partly at least, in Antwerp, about 1515. His ideal cities were wellarranged and hygienic, with water supply and drainage, with open spaces, and with gardens. They remained a dream.

Though England was notable for the architecture and planning of her cathedral cities and universities, that of Salisbury dating from the early thirteenth century, London itself at the time of the great fire of 1666 was largely a densely packed city of narrow alleys and wooden houses, plague-ridden. Neglected Britain especially neglected the idea of the small-house courtyard. Francis Bacon’s essay on gardens applied only to the princely; he thought the area should not be under 30 acres, complete with alleys and fountains. It is significant that within a few days of the Great Fire, Wren produced a plan for a new and better London. The plan was not used. Yet the idea of gardens, even if only those of the princely kind, had grown tremendously. In Italy the great gardens began to flower: those of the Pitti Palace in Florence, laid out in 1550; the Borghese Gardens in Rome, laid out in the seventeenth century; those of the Villa d’Este, dating from 1549, and many others. In all Italian gardens water was used profusely, as well as statuary, those of the Villa d’Este at Tivoli, and the gardens of the Caetani Castle at Ninfa, being essentially water gardens, depending on fountains. Water was used in a hundred different ways, with all the ingenuity of engineer and architect, to create a sparkling, living accompaniment to green glades. Italian Formality Many Italian gardens were extremely formal, and spread beyond the palaces, such as that at Caserta, like great carpets on the countryside, and patterns formed by low box hedges. Others were built for privacy, in the form of rooms divided by walls and hedges, some of these rooms with a view over lake or countryside, some elaborate with stonework, statuary, and fountains.

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were formative periods in which neo-classic design in architecture was allied to the practical aspects of town-planning derived from the Vitruvian concept, yet with an elasticity and a regard for space which had its full achievement in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

That the great gardens of Italy helped towards this, apart from the fact that they were copied elsewhere in Europe and in England, is in-

• disputable. Certainly they i were for the pleasure of the ■ privileged, and some of the i gardens which were built around town villas crushed the lower classes into even ; more cramped quarters, if that were possible. Public Use Begins Yet as the fortunes of war took the wealth of the owners, some gardens of the Renaissance era which were near or within the city walls became available for public use, this being the first movement towards space for the use of the people, however much it was allied to the purely aesthetic function of showing off the grandeur of the new buildings. The difference between a palace and a town villa has been defined in the possession of a garden; a villa was a palace with a garden; a palace a villa without one. The greater villas and gardens of Rome lay outside the city walls, yet Florence, Bologna and Milan possessed gardens within the city which later became public places. This unifying of architecture and nature, indeed of man and nature, was an important consequence of Renaissance thought Petrarch in 1336 was perhaps the first man to climb a mountain for the sake of the view, and himself took ar. interest in gardening; Italian painters discovered nature along with perspective; cities discovered space and the use of gardens. Value Recognised This, however, was a gradual process, yet as the seventeenth century progressed all the major cities of Europe became aware of the value of space, sanitation, the distributed square and the public garden. Defence mechanisms such as walls and towers no longer were needed, though in some cases, as in London, these were clung to for much longer than was necessary, contributing to the cramped conditions which aggravated the spread of the Great Fire. There had already been in London a movement towards better planning. Covent Garden and Bloomsbury had taken shape under the hands of Inigo Jones, and later in the century squares of this kind and terraces in the classic manner were to appear in Westminster, Soho, St. James and other districts, yet on the whole the opportunity of rebuilding London to the best advantage after the fire was lost. London's Squares Wren’s open, methodical plan was rejected for the exigencies of the moment, the most pressing of which was the rehousing of 70,000 people. Yet with the eighteenth century and the Georgian age London squares were developed, which movement continued until the early nineteenth century, while precinctal planning, using open grassy spaces lined with trees, reached a high standard in the Temple area, early in the eighteenth century.

Here again London was developed first for the privilege!; until a century ago muca of the city grew by chanee, and it is by sheer good fortune that Hyde Park and Regent’s Park remained as cpen spaces, rather than by any plan. The pleasure gardens of the eighteenth century, Ranelagh and Vauxhall, reflected an elegance of living which did affect the lower classes to a greater degree than at any previous period; life became more comfortable for tradespeople, for instance, who might dream of retiring to the suburbs, and possessing a house with a small walled garden. Yet in spite of this improvement, and the elegance of life for the upper classes, both in the cities and in the great country mansions, many of whose gardens were modelled on the Italian, life for the poor was still unbelievably oppressed and sordid, and the state of the prisons corrupt as well as shockingly inadequate. Child labour was exploited; to be poor was to be damned, and hopeless. Planning In Paris Of all European cities Paris shows perhaps the result of systematic planning from

medieval times, so that it stands foremost in civic administration, in its support of culture and the arts, and in the beauty of its avenues and buildings. As in most other cities, however, the planning was not comprehensive, but grew from such starting points as the reconstructions of the Tuileries and Louvre in the latter part of the sixteenth century. This provided a motive for the great axis of the Champs-Elysees, the parkway which carries across Paris to the Arc de Triomphe and beyond, though this was not completed until the nineteenth century as a garden area.

As in other cities, parks and gardens were for long the preserves of the aristocracy; it was not until after the revolution that the Place de la Concorde was finished, the Tuileries Gardens extended, and parks and open spaces received attention. The great gardens at Versailles, built at enormous cost, became available to the people. Gradual Appearance In other European cities too, though the life of the common people was still arduous and insanitary, public gardens and parkways made their appearance. Brussels, in 1837, planned, and carried out, a ring road avenue replacing the medieval city wall, while in Vienna the Emperor Franz Josef approved, in 1858, a new plan for the inner city, with public buildings set in garden spaces, and with a wide ring boulevard. The Ringstrasse, built over medieval fortifications, coordinates and embodies the civic and cultural life of the city. Ring roads even then were not new. In the fourteenth century the growing city of Milan built new walls. The old inner walls, dating from the tenth century, became a ring road. Today we hear of ring roads as a means of relieving traffic congestion.

Of all European countries, England brought the art of conscious landscaping to its highest achievement. From the rigid formality of huge Renaissance gardens such as that at Chelsea, Middlesex, and that at Blenheim Palace, a reaction set in, partly through the theoretical comments of such men as Addiison and Steele, towards a more natural concept in the setting of great houses. This embraced a regard for view and for silviculture, and so for the preserving of forests and their replanting, as well as a concern for the setting of villages; indeed a consciousness of the whole of the English countryside. This eighteenth century advance was reflected in painting too; this was the era of the landscape artists; Gainsborough, Crome, and Turner. Certainly France and Italy shared the same advance, though not to the same extent as in England, where Capability Brown “planned gardens for posterity,” built slopes, lakes and streams, in fact created landscapes. His long term schemes of tree-planting are an enduring monument. Industrial Growth The Industrial Revolution wiped out much of the English countryside. Cities grew, spread quickly. There was no time for organised planning; land was too precious for the creating of parks and gardens. Much of the civilised elegance which the eighteenth century had gained for the upper classes, if not for the poor, was lost. The nineteenth century, in England particularly, saw the growth of huge industrial towns, of slums, of railway and industrial smoke, and the ever present disregard of sanitary conditions. The average age of death in England in 1840 was 29; one child in six died before the age of one year. Bernard Shaw regarded the nineteenth century as, in the main, “the most villainous page in history.”

The cult of antiquity which had such a profound influence on all forms of thought and art during the Renaissance era was felt as much on town-planning as on architecture.

Reformers, though, were at work; Edwin Chadwick, Lord Shaftesbury, Jeremy Bentham, J. S. Mill. Out of their efforts rose Health Acts and a new humanitarianism. Then Ruskin and William Morris with their theories relating art and life tried to repair some of the damage caused to man by urban sprawl and industrialism.

Out of the wreckage of Birmingham, Tyneside, and parts of London rose the concept of the garden city, a community of open spaces, with good and healthy sanitation, and with gardens of their own for ordinary people. First tame the village of Saltaire, in Yorkshire, in 1852. Cadbury’s removed their Birmingham factory to the country in 1879, and built the suburb of Bournville beside it, while Port Sunlight was built in 1888. In 1901 Ebenezer Howard organised the founding of Letchworth, the first “garden city” in England, in order to emphasis his belief in the classic principle of a limit to the size of towns, any extension being catered for by the building of satellites. In the colonies, particularly in the United States, an opportunity rose in the founding of cities which had never existed before. New York has been limited by its site, and Philadelphia by the earliness of its planning, in 1682. But Washington was an attempt at a model city, the site chosen in 1790, and the plan by L’Enfant adopted in the 1790’5. It must have been a very new concept for parks, gardens and avenues to be integral to the plan of a newly formed city.

Planning In Christchurch We have taken for granted the parks, gardens and avenues which were a part of the original plan of Christchurch, drawn before the arrival of the first settlers in December, 1850. When we think of the condition of English cities at that time we have reason to be more than grateful. When Letchworth was founded in 1901 Christchurch was already a garden city, where every house had its plot of ground, even when built in terraces after the English fashion. Lack of land and the demands of the mechanised age are now eating the hardlywon garden and air-space of the private citizen. Highdensity housing has become an accepted part of city life, in New Zealand as well as overseas, while the demands of motor transport are as likely to lay waste the cities as did the industrial revolution. One answer is to defend the public parks and gardens. These, as well as rest and relaxation, give the citizen fresh air and health, and, if he casts his mind back to Versailles and the Villa d’Este, an association with princes. The benefits of bringing a little of the countryside into the city have been too hardly won to be discarded lightly. Aristotle and Vitruvius believed in a predetermined size and form, which in modern cities has been found to be impossible. Yet Vitruvius gave the first lesson in the relation of space to solid, by which the requirements of health and coherence might be maintained. This is a lesson which must be taught, at all stages of history, and of city planning. • (Concluded)