Archeology Indirectly, the presence of writing among the ancient Slavs is confirmed by the excavations of Novgorod. On the site of the old settlement, writings were found - rods with which the inscription was applied to wood, clay or plaster. The finds date back to the middle of the 10th century, despite the fact that

K category: landscape design

Historical experience of gardening art and landscape design

The history of landscape architecture has not yet been studied enough. They consider mainly the history of landscape gardening art, leaving aside other areas of landscape architecture. At the same time, landscape gardening art is usually evaluated on the basis of its regional affiliation. The specific conditions for the development of socio-economic relations and the nature of the cultural and artistic development of society seem to fade into the background.

In fact, landscape architecture developed in the same stream with all types of material and artistic culture. And each socio-economic formation had its own ideology, its own understanding and purpose of architecture and art. Landscape architecture had its own specifics in the conditions of each of the formations: in the ancient, slave-owning period, during the times of feudalism, which lasted in the East until the 20th century, in the era of the formation and development of capitalist relations, and, finally, in our time, in the era of scientific and technical revolution.

Ancient world

Ornamental gardening appeared at the earliest stages of the development of human civilization. There is no doubt that gardening art was based on utilitarian gardens. But even the earliest gardens known to us belonged to the privileged top of society. Only wealthy people and the church had the opportunity to build and maintain gardens that served for pleasure. Until the XVIII - XIX centuries. public gardens were extremely rare; they were usually maintained by very wealthy patrons.

The oldest known gardens were in Egypt. There are references to ornamental gardens of the 4th - 3rd millennium BC. e. Gardens were located in the courtyards of palaces and rich houses, on the sacred sites of temples. Flowers were bred in the gardens, flowerbeds were arranged, alleys were planted. The hypostyle halls of the temples symbolized groves of trees, closely placed columns depicted palm trees or lotuses in a very conditional way.

By the 15th century BC e. refers to an example of solving the landscape environment of a city street. The main street of the city of Akhetaten was lined with palm trees on both sides for several kilometers. This oldest well-known alley as a compositional device was subsequently widely developed.

Gardens existed in all countries of the Ancient East: Mesopotamia, Iran, India, China. But very little is known about them. The most frequently mentioned are the so-called hanging gardens Semiramis in the South Palace of Babylon, considered one of the seven wonders of antiquity. They were built around the 7th century. BC e. Excavations have unearthed a significant number of brick pillars that supported the massive ceiling on which the famous gardens are believed to have been located. Information about the gardens of Iran, the Indus Valley, the Great Plain of China is even more scarce.

The landscape architecture of antiquity (VI century BC - IV century AD) is relatively better known. The amazingly complete fusion of Greek cities with nature, with the landscape is quite well known. The acropolises and theaters of the Greek and Hellenic cities of the Peloponnese and Asia Minor, which constituted the centers of urban compositions, seem to grow out of the landscape.

Greek gardens were numerous, but very small, occupying the courtyards - the atriums of residential buildings. Figurative, often mosaic paving, small ponds, flowers and shrubs in boxes and tubs formed small islands of wildlife in the carpet building system.

Greek and Hellenic cities provide interesting examples of the spatial organization of large streets and public squares-agoras. The classic examples of pedestrian streets are the streets of Ephesus - Trading and Ku-retus. The shopping street, which ran from the harbor to the grandiose theater that dominated the entire city, was formed by two colonnades on both sides. The agora was usually surrounded by colonnades. The Greeks skillfully used the vertical layout of the squares, dividing their space with the help of long stairs and low retaining walls. An excellent example of such agora is given by Priene. Sculptors actively participated in the formation of the open spaces of the Greek city.

In the nature of the landscape architecture of Greece and Rome, the predominance of two different trends in the relationship between human activity and nature can be traced. These trends are associated with general differences in the artistic culture of the two largest peoples and states that existed simultaneously in the Mediterranean at the turn of our era. The works of Greek architecture and art are characterized by the desire for harmony with nature. The Romans, unlike the Greeks, contrasted the aesthetics of geometric and rectilinear forms with the picturesque nature of the environment.

The gardening art of Rome existed in the form of gardens at houses and estates. Modest gardens in the atriums of urban residential buildings were similar to Greek ones. They are well known from excavations in Pompeii (1st century). The gardens in the country estates of the Roman nobility appear differently. The untold riches flowing to Rome from conquered countries along with slaves made it possible to build luxurious villas and palaces surrounded by decorative and utilitarian gardens. Roman aristocrats often had several villas. The description of such country estates was left by the famous Roman historian of the 1st century BC. n. e. Pliny the Younger. His villa at the Laurentinum, 30 km from Rome, stood in a picturesque place on the seashore, surrounded by gardens and agricultural land (Fig. 1). The landscape gardening art of Ancient Rome used almost the entire arsenal of ornamental gardening techniques known today. The composition of the gardens included pergolas, covered alleys, decorative sculpture, benches, fountains were indispensable elements of the gardens. The range of trees, shrubs and flowers was exceptionally wide. Pliny the Elder, who lived in the 1st century. BC e., describes a thousand different plants known and cultivated at that time.

Rice. 1. Villa of Pliny the Younger in the Laurentinum, ca. 100 BC

An important quality The walking garden was its connection with the surrounding landscape: panoramas of the surroundings opened from its terraces. The middle and lower parts of the Apennine Peninsula have a pronounced mountainous terrain and an exceptionally beautiful coast, especially the western one, where villas were mainly located. Relief was masterfully used in the gardens of Rome, and later in Italy. On the slopes of the mountains, systems of terraces were formed, connected by stairs and ramps. Regular gardens were laid out on the terraces, water flowing from the mountains was used to build pools, fountains, artificial waterfalls and cascades. Such gardens on the relief later received the name "Italian". This term, as well as the terms "French" and "English" gardens (which will be discussed below), cannot be considered strictly scientific, but it quite accurately and figuratively conveys the nature of the composition of the garden.

The gardens at the imperial villas-palaces were distinguished by a special scope. The most famous villa of Hadrian in the vicinity of Rome in Tivoli. Originally built in 117-138, it was repeatedly expanded and completed without having a single plan. The villa was a motley conglomeration of buildings, terraces with gardens broken into them, ponds and statues. All this was on the steep slopes of the river valley. The valley housed a landscape park called the "Valley of Time", in honor of the legendary forest that grew at the foot of Mount Olympus. The authors of the romantic gardens of Europe in the 18th century. no doubt inspired by the idea of ​​the Valley of Time at Hadrian's Villa.

History has preserved evidence of the wide development of the landscape architecture of Ancient Rome in its most modern sense. At the turn of our era, Agrippa, a relative of Emperor Augustus, built large baths in Rome with gardens, 700 pools, 500 fountains, and aqueducts. The art of building aqueducts, bridges, roads was amazing. And now the bridges of Hadrian, Fabricius and Cestius in Rome serve the people, the famous Appian Way is suitable for traffic on large sections. Remains of aqueducts are scattered throughout Europe and the Middle East. Unfortunately, with rare exceptions, very little attention is paid to all these structures, which are distinguished by high aesthetic merit.

The landscape architecture of the Hellenic cities and Ancient Rome is a special phenomenon. It has passed through the centuries, and Mayakovsky's line "how the plumbing, worked by the slaves of Rome, entered our days" sounds in relation to it not as a poetic metaphor, but as a reality. Indeed, after all, ancient Rome left us not only baths, temples and amphitheatres, but also the most extensive experience in organizing the environment of open spaces, from miniature gardens in the atriums of residential buildings to a thoughtful, architecturally developed system of roads and aqueducts stretching for hundreds of kilometers. Most of the techniques used now for arranging regular gardens, combining artificial structures with nature, using land, water and plants to create an artificial environment, originated in the ancient period. The ancient school of landscape architecture had a direct and strong impact not only on Europe, its influence spread to many regions of the world.

The era of feudalism

The landscape architecture of the feudal era had a completely different character. First of all, the boundaries of our knowledge about it and about its most important branch - garden and park art are significantly expanding. The scope of study includes new regions - Central, South and East Asia. The first reliable information about the landscape architecture of these regions dates back to the middle of the first millennium of our era, that is, to the time of the beginning of the European Middle Ages. And each of them represents its own special world, determined by the peculiarities of the social life, economy and ideology of its countries. Nevertheless, there are some common features in the nature of the feudal culture of all countries, regardless of their geographical location, national and religious characteristics.

In the period of early feudalism, the church was in the foreground, and the development of culture, art and science proceeded within the framework of religious ideology. The art of gardens, like all other forms of art, served primarily the church. Only later, with the strengthening of absolutism and with the emergence of vast feudal empires, the art of gardening acquires, as in antiquity, a secular character. This process is especially intensified with the beginning of the development of capitalist relations, which coincided in Europe with the Renaissance. At the same time, after a long break, the art of consciously shaping urban open spaces - squares, streets, green spaces - reappears.

European harmful age

The medieval gardens of Europe have significantly decreased in size compared to the ancient ones, and their purpose has changed. Ornamental, pleasure gardens became a rarity and were reduced to tiny plots, sandwiched between the powerful walls of feudal castles. But these gardens were also used for the cultivation of medicinal plants. The monastery gardens were a little more diverse (Fig. 2). In large monasteries, they sometimes filled entire chains of monastic courtyards. The gardens were divided according to their functions - orchards, vegetable gardens, vineyards, flower gardens for church services, apothecary gardens.

Rice. 2. Medieval European monastery with an economic garden, vegetable garden and vineyard in the courtyards

They usually had a regular structure and were placed in square or rectangular courtyards.

The Middle Ages were the time of the development of the virtuoso art of artisans. Among them, the traditions of the craft and art of gardeners were formed, who achieved great perfection in the cultivation of ornamental plants; in the filigree art of decorating decorative elements of gardens - fountains, fences, benches, mosaic paving.

European medieval artistic culture was formed in cramped spaces, limited by fortress walls, isolated from the outside world. The isolation of the city was opposed to the landscape, the spatial structure of the city was revealed only inside. From the outside, the cities of Western Europe looked like monochrome monolithic masses, showing only the harsh planes of walls and towers, surrounded by deep moats. The diminutiveness of the gardens of the Middle Ages echoed the severe limitations of other open spaces in the city. Narrow streets were common, the width of which sometimes did not exceed 1.5 ... 2 m. Cathedral squares resembled expanded porches in front of the entrances to huge cathedrals.

Ancient Russia

Other concepts existed in medieval artistic culture and, in particular, in the landscape architecture of Ancient Russia, which occupied the territory of Eastern Europe. The social structure was different here, which determined the settlement structure different from the West. With the utmost brevity, A. S. Pushkin gave the image of the ancient Russian city: "... with golden-domed churches, with towers and gardens." The garden was the same indispensable part of the Russian city as the white-stone golden-domed church, as well as the diversity of the stone chambers and the patterned carvings of the wooden towers. Wall necklaces generously covered not only city houses and estates with their indispensable vegetable gardens, but also scattered gardens on the steep slopes of the Kremlin hills, small churches with cemeteries under the dense canopy of trees. A classic example Moscow can serve as such a city. On its earliest plans - "Peter's Drawing", "Kremlin-Lena-Grad", showing the city of the 16th century, the gardens in the Kremlin, the "Tsar's Garden" opposite the Kremlin on the right bank of the river, and several other gardens are indicated. These were economic, orchards. Decorative or entertaining "Red" gardens appeared in the 17th century. in Izmailovo, Kolomenskoye and in the Kremlin. A feature of the Kremlin garden was its placement on the roof, or rather on a platform supported by stone vaults.

Moscow and Moscow region monasteries provide vivid examples of monastic gardens, which have long combined economic and decorative functions. Gardens occupied up to 30% of the territory inside the walls. Their obligatory elements were fruit trees, vegetable gardens, berry fields, a pond for breeding fish. There is evidence of the existence in the XI century. apple orchard of the Kiev Caves Monastery. The remains of the gardens can still be seen in the Donskoy, Joseph-Volokolamsk, Borovsky-Pafnut-ev and many other monasteries. The gardens of princely and boyar estates were traditional. It is known that already in the XII century. such gardens existed in the estate of Yuri Dolgoruky in Kyiv across the Dnieper, in the estate of Andrei Bogolyubsky near Vladimir.

Middle East and India

With all the diversity of the gardens of the East, they can be divided into two large groups, corresponding to the distribution areas of the two largest religions of the East - Islam and Buddhism. Gardens, perhaps better than other types of art, reflected the foundations of a person’s worldview, his way of thinking, first of all, of course, in relation to himself with nature, or, as we are now

talking to the environment. The harsh and straightforwardly simple ideology of Islam was directly reflected in the composition of gardens, which in Islam were associated with paradise. The most luxurious were the gardens of the ruling class. Mostly located in the subtropical zone, the heavenly gardens of the rulers bizarrely entered the halls of the palaces that were open to the outside. The gardens abounded with ponds, connected by murmuring streams flowing over a marble bed, small lyrical cascading fountains. Exotic trees and fragrant flowers grew in the gardens, peacocks roamed around them, birds sang in gilded cages.

In the appearance of the gardens of Islam, in their scale, there is considerable diversity. The famous gardens of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, built between 1350 and 1500, were very small in size. Like other medieval gardens in Europe, they were located in the courtyards of the castle. They are distinguished by the Arabic structure of ornamentation, the characteristic Muslim system of water elements, especially in the so-called Lion's Court, which got its name from the fountain with the figures of lions.

The gardens of Central Asia, Iran, and India look different, familiar from many brilliant miniatures and from existing gardens that steadily preserve their traditional look. Among the best of them are the gardens in the Indian palaces of Agra, Fatehpur Sikri (XVI century), Shahjahanabad (Old Delhi, XVII century). Particularly interesting are the gardens near the tombs, where the idea of ​​the "Garden of Eden" was embodied to the greatest extent. Such were the gardens of the Mausoleum of Humayun in Delhi (XVI century) and the famous tomb of the Taj Mahal in Agra in India (XVII century) (Fig. 3). The principle of planning such gardens is extremely simple: the square of the plan is divided by channels passing along its axes into four smaller squares, and this division continues further. In the Taj Mahal, with a total garden size of 300X300 m, the smallest square is about 35 m. The main axes were lined with shrubs and trees.

A special form of open spaces of the Muslim East was the courtyards of mosques, which reached considerable sizes. The yards were paved with stone slabs, in the center of the yards there were pavilions, ablution pools or even a giant stone music stand for the Koran (Bibi Khanum in Samarkand). The culture of forming city squares was also developed, most often in front of mosques and madrasahs. A classic example of such a square is the Registan in Samarkand (XV - XVII centuries). The Lyabi-Hauz square in Bukhara of the same time, with a large pool in the center, is slightly inferior to it.

Rice. 3. Plan of the Taj Mahal tomb with a garden. 17th century

Far East

Medieval garden and park art of the Buddhist circle of countries differs significantly from the art of Islamic gardens. In contrast to the unchanged regular plans, a landscape or landscape park building has developed here.

The gardens of the largest countries of the Far East - China and Japan - stand out in particular. The complex and multifaceted religious and philosophical systems that existed in these countries had a direct impact on the understanding of the relationship between man and nature. The absolutization of the beauty of nature required the subordination of human activity to its laws. Chinese researchers believe that the history of Chinese gardens has more than three millennia and gardening traditions are consistently maintained.

The most famous are the imperial gardens. The free planning of these gardens is combined with strictly symmetrical compositions of palace buildings, which are chains of rectangular courtyards. The most expressive elements of the landscape are marked by characteristic pavilions, bridges, usually painted in bright colors - red, emerald green, yellow, etc. Beijing was the largest center of imperial park construction. The most developed here is the Yuanming-Yuan Park (XVII century), occupying an area of ​​75 hectares near the city. The parks of the Three Lakes - Beihai, Zhonghai and Nanhai (XVII - XVIII centuries) in the center of Beijing and the Yiheyuan Park near Beijing (Fig. 4) are widely known.

According to the Chinese, the philosophy of the Chinese garden is best embodied in the so-called gardens of scholars or gardens of literature. The Suzhou area in southern China is famous for such gardens. In the gardens of Suzhou (there are now about 60 of them) there is no official splendor of imperial parks.

The elements of the gardens were small lakes with characteristic high arched bridges, pavilions with tiled roofs, pagodas, natural stone compositions. The garden, separated from everything around by a fence, embodied a special world of silence, peace and beauty of nature. The oldest gardens of Suzhou - Liu-Yuan, Zhouzhen-Yuan and others have existed since the 16th century.

Rice. 4. Plan of the Yiheyuan Garden near Beijing

Exotic for Europe, Chinese gardening had a noticeable impact on European gardening art of the 18th - 19th centuries.

A curious feature of the medieval landscape architecture of China was a kind of canonization of especially expressive landscapes. These include, for example, the mountain landscape, amazing in its exotic beauty, on the Liyang River near the city of Guilin, called "the most beautiful place in the world." The traditional attitude towards such natural phenomena is reminiscent of the modern idea of ​​national parks.

The Great Wall of China can also be considered a forerunner of the modern approach to the design of artificial structures in the natural landscape. It fits into the landscape in the same way that modern highways fit into it now.

Japan has an exceptionally high culture of creating picturesque landscape gardens. Now Japanese gardens have become popular all over the world. If in China gardens were made by improving, aesthetic refinement of beautiful corners of wildlife, then Japanese landscape gardening art is based on the reproduction of wildlife on a given, predetermined scale. It was in Japan that the amazing art of growing miniature, fully grown trees, including the traditional sakura - cherry, developed. Here there is a unique art of making "old" stones and garden elements - lamps, benches, etc. from "old" stone. “Ancient” sculptures, plates with inscriptions are specially made, ornamental fish are bred for reservoirs and, of course, an infinite number of shrubs, flowers and other plants as material for creating artificial nature.

For many centuries, the ancient capital of the country, Kyoto, has been a particularly large center of landscape art. Here are the palace landscape gardens, dating back to the XIV century. and still retain the basic principles of their composition. Among them are the well-known gardens of Jito-ji (Silver Pavilion Garden), Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavilion Garden), Saiho-ji (“Moss Garden”), Heiyan-ji (Heiyan is the old name of Kyoto). The most famous is the famous "Rock Garden" in Ryoan-ji Park. This garden is a purely Japanese composition. In front of the monastery cells, standing in a landscape garden, there is a platform measuring 12x25 m, covered with small leveled pebbles. It contains several groups of large natural stones, forming a generally picturesque balanced composition. It is believed that this garden symbolizes the philosophy of Zen Buddhism. The Ryoan-ji stone garden was one of the first in a chain of similar "stone" compositions.

Along with the imperial and monastic gardens typical of the feudal Middle Ages, the art of miniature gardens at residential buildings is exceptionally widely developed in Japan. Sometimes such gardens are made on an area of ​​​​several square meters, while possessing the necessary garden elements - a miniature pool, "wild" stones, trees, paths, flowers.

The landscape architecture of the feudal era, mainly represented by landscape art, had a significant number of local schools in Asia that were very little studied. Among them are the original schools of Indochina, Nepal and Tibet, Sri Lanka and many other countries. Together with the countries of Central Asia, the Middle East, Hindustan and the Far East, they have become a significant part of the world's treasury of artistic culture.

Italian Renaissance

The Renaissance marked the beginning of a new flowering of artistic culture in Europe. In the XV century. Italy resolutely comes to the fore, having at that time extensive trade relations with the whole known world at that time. Patrons, represented, on the one hand, by the trade and craft aristocracy, similar to the famous Medici family, and, on the other hand, by the Catholic Church in the person of the Pope and his inner circle, invest heavily in the construction of villas surrounded by gardens, in the improvement and decoration of cities.

Gardens at palaces and villas revived and developed the traditions of the "Italian" garden, which was formed in the era of Ancient Rome. The most famous gardens are concentrated mainly in the areas of Florence and Rome - in the provinces of Tuscany and Lazio. The creative beginning in the gardens of the Renaissance, and then the Baroque, found a rich expression in the variety of compositional solutions and in the dynamic development of the general principles of planning. The early gardens of the Renaissance had regular, but rather freely decided plans without axial dominants. The culminating centers of the gardens - palaces and villas - did not occupy an indispensable dominant place, as was usual in the compositions of the 16th - 17th centuries.

The gardens of Tuscany and Lazio were terraced. Small regular parterres or bosquets were broken on the terraces. Mandatory elements were water devices - fountains, waterfalls, cascades, small pools. The simplicity and austerity of the architectural elements of the garden of the early Renaissance were gradually replaced by the juicy rich plasticity of the late Renaissance and Baroque.

The logic of the early Renaissance is well expressed in the garden of the Medici Villa in Fiesole, a picturesque ancient town 10 km north of Florence. From the slopes of the Fiesole hill one of the best panoramas of Florence opens up with the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore in the center. It was here that several villas were built, the best of which is considered to be the villa built in 1450 by the famous Michelozzo for the noble philanthropist Cosimo Medici. The composition of the garden is built on a free combination of several terraces, each of which has an independent structure, formed by parterres and high greenery. The garden is designed for gradual perception, and only the upper terrace is directly compositionally connected with the building of the villa, standing at its end.

Florence, 16th century represented by the Boboli Gardens, created at the Palazzo Pitti. They were begun by the architects Broccini and Ammanati in 1550, but completed only in the 18th century. (Fig. 5). The composition of the Pitti complex can be called classic for a city estate, which subsequently received the widest development. From the side of the city, the famous building of Brunelleschi adjoins the front square-yard, paved with stone squares. The building, as it were, separates the stone city from wildlife. The garden opens only behind the palazzo. It rises up from him and therefore reveals itself most expressively. The eye covers its entire main axis - from the lawn, surrounded by an amphitheater, to the fountain of Neptune and further to the statue that closes the perspective. The Boboli Gardens is one of the few Renaissance parks whose composition can be seen almost entirely from the 2nd and 3rd floors of the Pitti Palace. They have all the classic elements of the Italian garden - terraced construction, a system of regular bosquets, ponds, fountains, an abundance of sculpture and small forms. After the solemn grandeur of the front courtyard and the halls of the Palazzo Pitti, the atmosphere of the Boboli Gardens is especially impressive with harmony, beauty and peace.

Tuscany is known mainly for its secular gardens. Lazio, with its capital Rome, is famous for the Belvedere of the Vatican, founded by Bramante in 1503, and the gardens that belonged to the highest Catholic clergy. These gardens differed from the Tuscan ones in their emphasized solemnity and richness. Particularly interesting is the composition of the garden of Villa d'Este in the town of Tivoli, 6 km from the ancient Roman villa of Hadrian. The garden was designed by the architect Ligorio in 1575 for Cardinal d'Este. The terraced garden of 4 hectares, which rises to a height of about 50 m to the villa building, belongs to the late Renaissance by the nature of its plan. It still retains the simplicity and clarity of the plan, it still does not have the unconditionally dominant central axis characteristic of Baroque compositions. Two perpendicular axes running along the slope have an expressiveness that is not inferior to the central axis.

Rice. 5. Boboli Gardens in Florence. Archite. Broccini and Ammanati. XV - XVI centuries.

The upper axis is formed by the avenue of the Hundred Fountains and completed by the Oval Fountain with a cascade falling like a semicircular wall into an oval pool. The lower axis is emphasized by a chain of pools leading to the Organ Fountain, in which the complex arrangement of the hydraulic organ creates a unique sound effect. Between the two transverse axes on the main axis there is a fountain of Dragons with powerful vertically beating jets of water. The entire hydraulic system works under natural water pressure. A large number of beautiful sculptures and park structures, which were built over two centuries, are concentrated on the territory of the garden.

The relationship between architecture and landscape in the compositions of the Palladio school in the Veneto region was quite peculiar. Palladio placed the villas directly into the landscape, without laying out ornamental gardens nearby. A classic example of such a villa, free-standing in a natural setting, is the well-known Villa Rotonda (or Capra) in Vicenza, built in 1552.

In the middle of the XV century. Alberti paid serious attention to the layout of gardens in his "10 books on architecture". The Medici Villa at Fiesole is considered the earliest embodiment of these Alberti ideas. He was also the first theorist of the Renaissance, who developed questions of the composition of urban open spaces. His recommendations for the ratio of the width of streets and squares to the height of the surrounding buildings, his thoughts on urban planning had a direct influence on the formation of Renaissance and Baroque landscape architecture in the broadest sense.

The architecture of the open spaces of the city was formed in Italy in the Renaissance and Baroque eras gradually. Thus, the 15th century was the time of the creation of separate, local squares, the time of developing methods for their solution, and the 16th century was marked by the design and construction of squares and streets that formed entire systems of open spaces in the city. Florence and Rome have the most expressive of these compositions. In Florence, a continuous and consistent connection has developed between the largest spatial nodes of the city: Cathedral Square - st. Calcaioli - Senoria Square - Uffizio Street (architect Vasari) - a gallery above the embankment and the Vecchio bridge leading to the Pitti Palace. This multifaceted and exceptionally expressive system united squares of different eras, a river, a bridge and, finally, the complex of the largest palace with a garden into a single chain. The second, bold and grandiose undertaking, begun in the 16th century, was the creation of a system of streets and squares in Rome, united by visual landmarks. The author of the project, Domenico Fontana, placed obelisks in several key squares of the city and connected these squares with straight streets, and in such a way that the streets turned out to be oriented towards the obelisks.

In 1538, starting the reconstruction of the Capitol in Rome, Michelangelo for the first time after ancient Rome placed an equestrian statue of Emperor Marcus Aurelius in the center of the square. She subjugated and organized the entire space of the square. capitol laid down

Rice. 6. Vatican. Plan of the complex with St. Peter's Square (architect Bernini), Belvedere Palace (architect Bramante) and gardens. XVI - XVII centuries.

the beginning of the construction of solemn decorative squares in Rome, and then in other European cities. Sculpture, fountains, balustrades became essential elements of the baroque square. Particularly interesting are the works of the architect and sculptor G. Bernini (1598-1680). He owns the decision of the largest of the Roman squares - St. Peter. Like the Pitti complex in Florence, the Vatican ensemble consists of a front square facing the city, a cathedral with a papal palace, and a beautiful extensive garden in the background (Fig. 6).

Diverse and full of high artistic merit, monuments of landscape architecture of the Italian Renaissance, and then the Baroque, had the most direct and strong influence on the development of all landscape architecture not only in Europe, but also on other continents in the 17th and subsequent centuries.

Baroque, 17th century

In the 17th century centers of intensive development of landscape architecture are moving from Italy to the north, primarily to France. It was here that it was created and reached the highest degree perfection of the so-called "French" garden. On the one hand, he inherited the traditions of the medieval methods of monastic and castle gardening, with its attention to the smallest details of the garden. On the other hand, the rulers of France, which had become by the 17th century. powerful power, attracted the scope and size of the palaces and gardens of papal Rome. Using the heritage known to them, the French created their own school of gardening art. In contrast to Italy, where the gardens were predominantly architects and fountain makers, in France whole dynasties of professional gardeners have grown up, whom we can call landscape architects. Among them, the Lenotrov family stands out. The youngest of three generations of Andre

Le Nôtre went down in history as one of the best masters of landscape art. Le Nôtre created Versailles, the greatest creation of architects and gardeners in Europe. He also owns such brilliant examples of gardens as Vaux-le-Vicomte near the Tuileries in Paris, Marly near Versailles, Greenwich Park near London, and many others.

French landscape art of the 17th century. developed in conditions completely different from Italy. The plains, overgrown with forests, smoothly flowing rivers were strikingly different from the mountainous landscapes of Italy. The builders of the gardens were the richest people of their time - the "sun king" Louis XIV and his nobles, starting with the Minister of Finance Fouquet. It was for him that in 1656 Le Nôtre, in collaboration with the architects Levo and Lebrun, built one of his first masterpieces - Vaux-le-Vicomte. In this complex, which stretches for 2.5 km and covers an area of ​​more than 100 hectares, all the indispensable elements of a French park already exist. First of all, it is a strong compositional axis, the core of the entire regularly planned, widely spread space of the ensemble. The middle third of the axis is occupied by the semantic center of the composition - the castle and regular gardens. The periphery of the ensemble is a forest park. The central group is completed by two semicircular squares, to which the alleys of the forest park converge like rays.

The success of Vaux-le-Vicomte was triumphant. Already in 1661, Le Nôtre and Le Vaux received an order from Louis XIV to design a grandiose palace and park in Versailles, a small town on the outskirts of Paris. Seven years later, by the end of the 1660s, a giant palace and park complex arose here on the site of the garden of Louis XIII with an area of ​​\u200b\u200babout 100 hectares (Fig. 1.7). Planning activities covered an area of ​​about 10,000 hectares. The palace, which architect Mansart completed after Levo, stretched out for 500 m. Like Vaux-le-Vicomte, the whole composition was built along the main east-west axis, which stretched only within the ensemble for 4 km.

Versailles has a lot in common with Vaux-le-Vicomte in the principle of constructing a plan, in the concept of a spatial solution. At the same time, Versailles represents a qualitative step forward. Le Nôtre skillfully combines the large-scale urban planning of a planned solution with a thorough study of local ensembles and details.

Rice. 7. Versailles. Archite. Le Nôtre Plan. 1661 -1700

Versailles was created on a low swampy place. The very process of its creation reflects the philosophy of the French garden, as a creation of human hands, opposed to nature. Everything has been done anew here, including terrain drops, reservoirs, buildings, green spaces. Not only building materials were brought here, but also soil, trees, bushes. It cost a lot of invention and huge labors to install 14 thousand (!) Fountains. The construction of Versailles went on throughout the 18th century. However, the main buildings of the complex were completed by the time of Le Nôtre's death in 1700.

Le Nôtre created his creation, consciously using the experience of the past available to him. It is no coincidence that in Versailles there are associations with Florence. The composition of the palace and park ensemble directly echoes the composition of the Pitti Palace and the Boboli Gardens. In both cases, the emotional perception of the main elements of the ensemble is associated with a sharp contrast of spaces separated by the palace building. Paved squares without the slightest piece of greenery on the side of the city are contrasted with rich park panoramas on the other side of the palaces, but the effect of Versailles is especially expressive due to the huge absolute size of the ensemble.

The ensemble develops in the course of the sun, from east to west. The beginning is Army Square, one of the largest in Europe, to which three radial alleys lead from the city. On the other side of the square is a palace. From here, from the second floor, a breathtaking panorama of a giant garden opens up, which is the exact opposite of the front squares clad in stone. The perspective of the main axis looks especially majestic with two mirrors of the water parterres in the foreground and with the Grand Canal going to the horizon, over which the red ball of the setting sun hangs in the evening.

The heyday of French gardens coincides with the Baroque period, which was widespread in Europe in the 17th century. and found in landscape gardening art a very bright and original embodiment. The splendor and quirkiness of the style was reflected in the creation of an unusual artificial nature - sheared trees, large smooth pool mirrors in elegant carved stone frames, intricate drawings of flower beds. Particularly characteristic were the rich and expressive sculpture, generously decorating the parks, and the complex pictorial forms of park structures. The desire for the illusory nature of space, characteristic of baroque art, was perfectly reflected in the landscape architecture of the 17th - first half of the 18th centuries.

Le Nôtre's works had a direct impact on the art of landscape gardening in many European countries. Even before the completion of Versailles, starting from the 70s - 80s of the XVII century. small regular gardens began to appear here at the castles of kings and nobles. They were much smaller than their prototype in size, but with sufficient confidence they reproduced the basic principles of composition formation.

English regular parks of the 17th century. may be represented by Chatsworth (1680), Hampton Court (1699) and Longleat (1685-1711), in whom the Versailles prototype reveals itself most clearly. However, in England such parks have not received much development.

The situation was different in Central Europe. Here, on the territory of Germany and Austria during the 17th and a significant part of the 18th century. dominated by the so-called feudal absolutism. The unlimited power of the electors in their possessions contributed to the widespread development of the construction of palaces with gardens.

A whole necklace of brilliant baroque gardens of Saxony stands out, concentrated mainly in the vicinity of Dresden. They were created during the reign of Elector Augustus the Strong at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries. Their most striking examples are associated with the name of the architect Poppelman. Gros Saddle Park is built on a peculiar interpretation of the elements of Versailles and Vaux-le-Vicomte. Fragments of the park - mirror pools, stairs, greenhouses, small forms - for the most part have direct prototypes, but their scale is reduced and the overall construction of the composition on three parallel axes has no analogues. Great expressiveness was achieved in the German Baroque by park sculpture and architecture of small forms, distinguished by juicy, “Rubensian” plasticity.

The significance of Versailles was not limited to the sphere of landscape art. He had a significant influence on the entire course of development of urban planning ideas of the 17th - 18th centuries. The aesthetics of regularly planned vast spaces formed the basis of many compositions of this time. Following Italy, baroque compositions of open spaces spread in the practice of urban planning in other European countries.

Expressive examples of such compositions were Places des Vosges and Vendôme in Paris, built at the very end of the 17th century. with equestrian statues of Louis XIII and Louis XIV in the center. Geometrically regular squares with equestrian monuments in the center and with figured paving, which appeared in the 16th and 17th centuries, served as an example for the creation of similar compositions in many cities of the world throughout the 18th and even 19th centuries. The stylistic orientation changed, the baroque was replaced by classicism, then eclecticism, but the overall compositional structure of city squares and streets remained close to that created by Michelangelo and Bernini. The main structural elements of the squares were also preserved - monuments, fountains, obelisks, ornamental paving and decorative fences.

Petersburg became the most interesting and significant of the compositions associated with the aesthetic principles of the baroque gardens of France in the 17th century. It was founded just three years after Le Nôtre's death. Its founder, Peter I, himself saw the parks of Le Nôtre in Greenwich near London and in Dresden ("Great Garden"). The aesthetics of the open spaces of Baroque parks, combined with the domestic experience of high-speed construction and the traditions of erecting vertical urban dominants, led to the success of the first attempt in the history of world urban planning to create a city of a fundamentally new type - St. Petersburg. Such cities, properly planned, without the usual ring of fortifications around the perimeter, have not been anywhere else in the world.

Classicism and Romanticism of the 18th - 19th centuries

Western historiography calls the XVIII century. the Age of Enlightenment. In contrast to the baroque pomp of absolutism and catholic church ideas of classical simplicity, appeal to nature, romanticization of the mythical times of the golden age of antiquity were put forward. The process of change in art and architecture proceeded gradually. The features of the outgoing baroque and the emerging classicism coexisted in the work of many leading masters late XVII- early 18th century The exception was gardening art. The difference between baroque gardens and classicist and romanticist gardens was obvious. If the regular Baroque gardens are primarily associated with France and are called "French", then the landscape gardens of classicism were an indisputable belonging to England, having received the name "English".

Several factors lay at the origins of the new style. First of all, it was the idealization of antiquity and the development of natural-philosophical ideas that arose in antiquity. They prepared the ground for those brought in the 17th century. from China to the principles of formation of landscape gardens. And in Europe itself, since the first centuries of our era, gardens with a free layout have been known, for example, the "Valley of Time" in Hadrian's villa near Tivoli. Another important factor was the growth of industrial cities, which became a symbol of formidable forces opposed to nature. Romantic nature became the antithesis of the smoking chimneys of manufactories and factories.

Back in the 17th century. the flourishing of the romantic landscape in painting began, which contributed a lot to the triumphant development of romantic landscape gardens. The work of Ruisdael, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and later Hubert Robert was most directly related to the formation of the ideals of a new trend in landscape art.

New ideas began to develop most intensively in England, where both nature and history contributed to the emergence of romanticism, where by the beginning of the 18th century. favorable social and economic conditions for its development were created. In 1738, the architect and artist William Kent redesigned Stowe Park, 100 km from London (Fig. 8). This park was the complete opposite of the regular "French" gardens. It reflected the new aesthetics of gardening art with the utmost persuasiveness. Clearly, regularly planned stalls, bosquets, pools were replaced by a layout without straight lines, a garden in which all its elements, details, were, as it were, created by nature itself. But this was not a simple "ennoblement" of natural landscapes. The park was created by human hands, there were no random elements in it. There was a well-thought-out system of paths, following which you can see a successive change of picturesque landscapes, alleys, perspectives, where palace buildings and park pavilions played an important role. A well-thought-out ratio of open spaces with emerald greens of typical English lawns and tall vegetation, skillfully formed from different tree species, was created.

Rice. 8. Stowe Park near London. Archite. W. Kent. 1738

In the XVIII - XIX centuries. landscape parks are the most widespread. In France, England, Russia, theoretical works and practical guides on landscape gardening art appeared.

The widely known treatise on park building was written in 1803 by the English architect Repton. He also had extensive practical experience. In his parks, he combined landscape composition with regular elements. One of his most famous works, made at the beginning of the XIX century. with the architect Nash, was Regent's Park in London. The sharp combination of rectilinear axes and a circle with a free landscape layout of water and greenery made this park especially expressive. Regent Park developed the ideas of a landscape city park that appeared in the middle of the 18th century. in the composition of the landscaped squares of the English city of Bath, implemented by the architect Wood.

The construction of landscape parks was especially widely developed in the 19th century. At the beginning of the century, the German school came to the fore. Its representatives Lenne and Püclair created beautiful compositions that have been well preserved to this day. Central to the work of Lenné is the famous Sanssouci Park in Potsdam. Its foundation was laid in the middle of the 18th century. during the construction of baroque palaces and small regular gardens attached to them. At the beginning of the XIX century. Lenné completed the ensemble by creating a system of meadows and groves around the central alley connecting the palaces, pierced by gently curving paths and paths. The Charlottenhof Palace, the Roman Thermae, the Chinese pavilion, and park sculpture were inscribed in this system, standing in a masterfully made local environment.

Lenne's successor was the wealthy Prince Pückler-Muskau, who devoted his life (and fortune) to the construction of landscape parks. Pückler created a huge romantic park in the Neisse valley around the town of Muskau. It took about 30 years to create picturesque compositions of meadows, copses, trees planted in groups and separately, to select routes for walking paths along the slopes of hills, along the banks and in the river valley. Pückler's sentimental romanticism was especially evident in a relatively small park near the town of Branitz. In a picturesque mysterious park, he erected two earthen pyramids, one on the lake, the other on the shore. The pyramids were tombstones for Pückler himself and his lover.

The 18th century was marked by a significant development of urban landscape compositions. The cities of the era of a new social formation - capitalism lost the functions of fortresses, quickly grew territorially, were subjected to restructuring and reconstruction. City squares in Europe continued and developed the traditions laid down in the Baroque era, small forms and sculpture were widely used here. Among the best examples of European squares of the XVIII century. Place Vendôme and Place de la Concorde in Paris belong. The squares of the city of Bath in England mentioned above became the starting point in the formation of a new type of urban space - the square, or otherwise planted trees and shrubs in the city square. In some major cities, city walls have begun to be demolished. On the wide spaces formed, boulevards were laid out, similar to those made by Le Nôtre on the Champs Elysees in Paris. The first Parisian boulevards replaced the demolished walls at the very beginning of the 18th century. Moscow was next, where the walls of the White City were demolished in the 1770s and the Boulevard Ring was set up in their place.

City squares, squares, boulevards received regular, geometrized plans. Landscape compositions remained characteristic mainly of the garden and park art of the classicism era. The earliest public city parks had free plans. Following Regent's Park and London's Hyde Park, city parks in other countries began to receive landscape planning. One of the first such parks was the Bois de Boulogne in Paris.

Baroque and classicism in Russia in the 18th - 19th centuries

Peter's reforms and the construction of St. Petersburg were the frontier at which Russia became especially actively involved in the pan-European process of cultural development. Early 18th century marked the beginning of a wide penetration into Russia of the artistic ideas of the West. But it was not a simple borrowing. Founded in 1703, St. Petersburg inherited many of the ideas of the European Baroque, but we should not forget that these ideas were used to build the world's first city of a new type - with a regular plan, without defensive structures that were obligatory for that time, with a fundamentally new aesthetics of urban open spaces . A striking originality was also noted in landscape architecture, which, from the very beginning of the century, widely included new ideas of the “French” and then the “English” garden. They organically intertwined with the long tradition of urban and rural estate construction, as a result, in the 18th century. emerged in the 19th century. developed an original and unique phenomenon of the Russian estate. Her house, services, garden and surrounding landscape constituted an organic whole ensemble imbued with lyricism and humanism. Attention is drawn to the priority of Russia in the creation of public gardens. Already in 1717, the draft plan of Vasilevsky Island showed three extensive gardens with a "French" layout, with canals, pools and fountains. At least one of them - at 12 colleges - was carried out by 1725. The famous Summer Garden in St. Petersburg, which existed at the same time, also had a public character. Later, it was improved several times, but retained its baroque plan and a significant number of marble statues. As for the gardens in the suburban residences of the kings and the highest nobility, in the XVIII century. Russia holds the undisputed superiority here both in terms of scope and variety of compositions of planning and spatial solutions.

Even during the life of Peter I along south coast The Gulf of Finland stretched out a chain of country palaces with gardens. The common features of these ensembles were the terraced construction and the presence of "upper" and "lower" gardens in each of them, separated by palace buildings. The lower gardens overlooked the bay. The construction of ensembles began under Peter I, invited from abroad by architects Leblon, Michetti, Schedel and others. They built their compositions on the model of the works of Le Nôtre, Levo, the masters of the Italian Renaissance. And yet, even the earliest of the palace ensembles of the new type differ significantly from the French, Italian, German prototypes. First of all, this is the originality of the natural environment, the proximity of the sea, the peculiarities of building materials and the invariable presence of Russian decor traditions in the details of the compositions, and, of course, the creative individuality of the masters who worked in conditions that were unusual for the West in Russia.

Already in the first half of the XVIII century. the construction of palace ensembles was continued and developed by Russian masters and children of foreigners born in Russia - Zemtsov, Rastrelli, Neelov. New architects who found a second home in Russia - Rinaldi, Cameron, Gonzaga - also contributed to the creation and development of natural parks and palaces. In parallel with the seaside ensembles, the garden and park compositions of Tsarskoye Selo (Pushkin), Pavlovsk, and Gatchina developed. All of them are a surprisingly organic unity of beautiful architecture and high art of park building.

It is difficult to apply the usual classification into regular "French" and landscape "English" to the suburban park ensembles of Leningrad. Even the earliest of them in Strelna has elements of free planning, and in the most brilliant landscape composition of Pavlovsk there are fragments of regular parterre compositions. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries parks in the vicinity of St. Petersburg grew and developed, combining both principles, while each of the ensembles has an exceptionally bright individuality both in general and in details.

In Peterhof (Petrodvorets) there is a unique, unparalleled system of fountains in the world. All of them work from the natural pressure of water supplied through canals from distances up to 22 km. Fountains are infinitely varied and numerous. They show the glory of Peterhof and its soul.

The basis of the composition is the Upper Garden in front of the Grand Palace, which is a large, 15 hectares, baroque parterre with pools and small fountains, and the Lower Garden, lying on the other side of the palace, on the lower terrace overlooking the sea. The complex planning composition, which occupies more than 100 hectares, is based on the intersection of two three-beam systems saturated with fountains, park pavilions and other structures. The central place in the entire composition is occupied by the majestic Grand Cascade with the Samson fountain. In terms of their stylistic characteristics, both the Grand Palace (architect Rastrelli) and park compositions belong to the best examples of Russian baroque. At the end of the XVIII - beginning of the XIX century. large landscape parks were built around this central core of Petrodvorets - Alexandria, English, Kolonistsky, Lugovoi.

The parks of Tsarskoye Selo (Pushkin) appear absolutely valuable (Fig. 9). Two main parks - Ekaterininsky and Aleksandrovsky represent a single compositional whole. Usually they are considered as a kind of independent garden and park formation. However, it is not. The parks of the city of Pushkin are inseparable from the planning fabric of the city; they were designed and grew together with this small aristocratic town, which became the largest center of Russian poetry and culture, bringing up a galaxy of famous names from Pushkin to Gumilyov. The center of the composition is Rastrelli's Catherine Palace. The main axis of the ensemble passes through the regular baroque - Catherine's Park, on one side of which there is a pond with a landscape part of this park, and on the other - city blocks. The axis passes through the center of the palace and further, crossing the main courtyard and the regular part of the Alexander Park, ends in the green massif of the Menagerie. Dozens of outstanding masters of architecture worked in Pushkin. The central place in the creation of palaces and parks belongs to Rastrelli (Catherine's Palace and regular park), Cameron (landscape park) and Quarenghi (Alexander Palace and park). The ensemble of palaces and parks in the city of Pushkin does not have a unity of style. Baroque and classicism are intricately intertwined in his composition, forming a harmonious and inseparable whole. At the end of the XVIII century. the architect Babolovsky Park adjoined the existing parks from the southwestern side. Neelova. And at the same time, the foundation was laid for the Separate Park, lying between the city of Pushkin and the city of Pavlovsk.

The Pavlovsk palace and park ensemble is one of the best works of landscape park construction (Fig. 1.10). Unlike the ensembles of Petrodvorets and Pushkin, which were formed over a long time and are the result of the work of many architects and artists, Pavlovsk was conceived and implemented mainly by one author, the architect Cameron in the 1780s. Brenna, Gonzaga and other masters who later worked in Pavlovsk did not make significant changes to the central core of the ensemble. The composition of Pavlovsk develops along the valley of the small river Slavyanka. Here, with the help of groups of vegetation, paths, viewing platforms, small architectural structures a chain of landscapes of a lyrical-romantic character was masterfully formed. The park compositions of the Big Star, Old and New Sylvia, White Birch, imperceptibly flowing into the natural environment of the park, adjoin the main walking area along the river.

Rice. 10. Plan of the palace and park in Pavlovsk. Archite. Cameron, Brenna, Gonzaga. End of the 18th century: 1 - palace; 2 - pavilion "Three Graces"; 3 - "Temple of Friendship"; 4 - colonnade of Apollo; 5 - aviary; 6 - mausoleum "To the benefactor's spouse"; 7 - obelisk; 8 - pink pavilion

Each of the considered gardens has an individual emotional coloring. And at the same time, all these ensembles are united by a great internal logic of compositions, a single humanistic scale, which provides a convincing aesthetic perception of each of the ensembles as a whole and its individual fragments.

Implemented in St. Petersburg and its environs, the ideas of landscape art, new to Russia, spread in the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries. throughout Russia. The artistic principles of baroque with its regular gardens and classicism with its landscape compositions not only coexisted, but also mutually enriched and complemented each other. The leading type of garden in the second half of the XVIII - first half of the XIX century. became manor gardens. In urban estates, the house was separated from the street by a front yard - court d'honneur. There was a garden behind the house. Often the garden overlooked the river or ended with ponds. Country estates had a similar structure, only the street did not lead to the front courtyard, but the road, often in the form of a fairly long alley.

Among the best Moscow estates is the Pashkov House (architect Bazhenov) and the Golitsyn Hospital (architect M. Kazakov). The garden of Pashkov's house overlooked the Kremlin, the Neglinka River. The garden of the Golitsyn hospital was especially beautiful. It descended in terraces to the ponds and then went out to the Moskva River, ending with two pavilions that still stand now. This garden, which was no different from the manor gardens, was nevertheless a public, hospital garden. Such gardens became common and were built at hospitals until the beginning of the 20th century.

By the end of the XVIII century. the type of Russian estate was finally formed. Its center was a manor house, flanked by outbuildings, vegetable gardens and utility gardens. The manor garden began with a regular "French" parterre adjoining the house and turning into an "English" landscape park. The sizes and compositions of estates varied endlessly. In the simplest of them, the "French" part could be designated by a flower bed, and the "English" park was limited to clearing a clearing in front of the house, which opened up a view of it. Large estates belonging to the rich nobility, in scope and luxury, approached the palaces of the surroundings of St. Petersburg. These included the Moscow estates of Kuskovo (Fig. 11), Ostankino and Arkhangelskoye, Ukrainian Sofiyivka and Alexandria, and many others.

Russian manor gardens are distinguished by their special lyricism. They are always spatially connected with the surrounding landscape, the forms of manor gardens are close to natural ones. The scale proportionality of these gardens to man is invariable. It is also emphasized by garden buildings - benches, gazebos, grottoes and a skillful arrangement of large and small open spaces. In the Russian estate, economic and aesthetic functions are organically connected with each other. The composition often included, for example, orchards and fish ponds, cellars were built, crowned with gazebos.

Rice. 11. Plan of the Kuskovo estate in Moscow. Archite. Argunov and Mironov. XVIII century: 1 - palace; 2 - church; 3 - kitchen; 4, 16 - grotto; 5 - Italian house; 6 - Dutch house; 7 - Hermitage; 8 - greenhouse; 9 - Big pond; 10 - bosquets; 11 - U-shaped channel; 12 - belvedere; 13 - Guy; 14 - channel to the cascade; 15 - menagerie; 17 - Green Theater

The development of Russian horticulture was greatly facilitated by the works of the founder of Russian agronomic science and writer Andrei Bolotov. He was born in 1738 and lived for 95 years, leaving not only a huge literary and scientific heritage, but also building in 1783-1785. in the city of Bogoroditsk, Tula region. one of the most interesting landscape gardens in Russia. Bolotov developed and completed the ensemble of the estate of Count Bobrinsky, built by the famous Starov. Not only the garden itself has been preserved, but also its project and a large album of watercolors for it. The name of the architect N. Lvov is closely connected with the gardens of Russian classicism. His landscape gardens in the estates of Znamenskoye-Rayok and Vasiliev near the city of Torzhok and others reflect the period of high prosperity of Russian estate architecture, which coincided with the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The architecture of urban open spaces was in Russia in the XVIII - XIX centuries. very highly developed. Its direct connection with gardening art is noteworthy. The compositional foundations on which the plan of St. Petersburg was built were developed in redevelopment in the second half of the 18th century. more than 400 Russian cities. The aesthetics of French gardening art, which had a serious impact on the design of St. Petersburg, then spread throughout the entire territory of vast Russia. Wide streets and embankments, lined with trees, became by the turn of the 19th century. ubiquitous practice. At this time, standard projects of landscaping elements - sidewalks, pavements, barriers, booths, embankments, fences - became widespread. In many ways, it was thanks to these projects that Russian cities in the first half of the 19th century. acquired a specific "Empire" look and had well-maintained centers. City gardens were also developed, which were laid out specifically for the "festivities" of the townspeople. Moscow boulevards, embankments of St. Petersburg, Yaroslavl, Tver, city gardens of Vladimir, Penza, Voronezh still perform their original functions, testifying to the widest spread of the culture of urban landscapes in Russia.

Modern trends in the development of landscape architecture

Mid 19th century was notable in history for a number of reasons. For the first time, the question arose of regulating the relationship of man with his natural environment.

The turning point in the development of landscape architecture is associated primarily with the name of Frederick Olmsted. Having no special education, in 1858 he won a competition for the design of Central Park in New York, calling himself a "landscape architect". The Central Park project (Fig. 1.12) implemented the idea of ​​preserving a piece of untouched nature in the center of an urban area. Its landscape layout was fundamentally different from the "English" garden. The principle of the "English" garden was the artificial formation of a romantic landscape. Olmsted's idea was to preserve the natural scenery and show it from the best vantage points. This idea formed the basis for the creation of the first US nature reserve in the Yosemite Valley in California. A number of events were held on its territory, which ensured the display of the most picturesque places and the organization of recreation for visitors. The idea arose in 1864, but another 50 years passed before the US National Park Service was organized in 1916.

Rice. 12. central park in NYC. Archite. F. Olmsted. 1858: 1 - road; 2 - trail; 3 - forest; 4 - lake; 5 - array; 6 - lawns

Olmsted's work was perfectly in tune with the spirit of the times. Second half of the 19th century was marked not only by the beginning of understanding the value of natural landscapes, but also by a significant expansion of the construction of gardens and parks, mainly in cities. The new parks were diverse in their appearance, in their stylistic characteristics and in their purpose. The clear division of gardens into "French", "English", "Italian" disappears. Plans, in which geometric shapes and straight lines are combined with the free outlines of ponds and paths, are becoming leading in the park building. Characteristic of their time were Bethersea Park in London (architect D. Gibson) and Sefton Park in Liverpool (architect E. Andre), built in the 60s of the 19th century.

The middle of the century was marked by the emergence of new types of specialized green spaces. Even at the turn of the XIX century. in Paris and London, the first zoos organized on a scientific basis were built on the territory of Regent's Park. In the second half of the century, zoos appeared in many major cities in Europe, Asia and America. The zoos of Moscow (1864) and St. Petersburg (1865) were advanced for their time.

In 1851, the first world exhibition was opened in London, in Hyde Park. She became famous for the Crystal Palace, which marked the beginning of a new direction in architecture. But this palace stood in an already established park.

The special design of exhibition areas was formed gradually from exhibition to exhibition and in the 20s of our century resulted in an independent branch of landscape architecture. In the Soviet Union, one of the first countries, large complexes of agricultural exhibitions were built in 1923 and 1939. (Fig. 13). The complexes of world exhibitions in Paris and New York gained wide popularity. As an integral part of the exhibition areas, they first appeared at the beginning of the 20th century. and sports areas. And here our country went ahead.

The sports complex "Dynamo" opened in Moscow in 1928, and in the mid-1930s there were already about 650 stadiums in the country. In 1934, architects N. Kolli, S. Andreevsky and others designed the Central Stadium of the USSR in the Izmailovo area. In terms of the depth of development, this complex, designed on an area of ​​more than 300 hectares, had no equal.

Already at the very beginning of our century, there was a conscious need for purposeful training of specialists, and in 1901 the first school of landscape architects was opened at Harvard University in the USA. The United States has confidently taken a leading position in the development of a new profession. Landscape architecture vigorously expanded the scope of its activities, covering more and more vast spaces and solving the most diverse problems of organizing their environment. In 1907, another architectural profession separated from it - planning or district planning.

At the beginning of the XX century. in a number of industrialized countries, a public understanding of the need to develop landscape architecture has begun to assert itself more and more clearly. Following the United States in England, France, Japan, Australia, a movement arose for the preservation of valuable natural landscapes, the systematic development of the natural environment and the establishment of control over the unbridled growth of cities. After all, if at the beginning of the XIX century. in the cities of developed industrial countries lived 1/4 of the population, then in 1901, more than half. Back in 1898, E. Howard published his famous book "The Garden City of the Future", in which he put forward the idea of ​​the widest penetration of nature into the urban environment (Fig. 14). According to Howard's theory, large cities were supposed to be surrounded by a green belt of agricultural land. Further, a ring of garden cities should adjoin the green belt, connected with each other and with the central city by a system railways. Howard's theory won many supporters, and already in 1903 the "First Garden City Company" arose in England, which began the construction of the garden city of Letchworth in the vicinity of London. The business went well, by 1914 the number of inhabitants of the city reached 9 thousand people. But the city-gardens did not receive wide development. Their construction turned out to be difficult and unrealistic under the conditions of capitalism of that time and private land ownership. The idea of ​​a garden city was most fully embodied in the planning of the Australian capital Canberra, the construction of which was designed by the architect. Griffin began in 1920. And yet, until the end of the Second World War, landscape architecture existed mainly in the traditional guise of landscape gardening art.

After the Second World War, a new important period began in the development of landscape architecture. It is associated with a sharply increased level of danger of human impact on the natural environment. The first signal was the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Intensive and thoughtless technical activity of man began to cause damage to nature, the consequences of which we still cannot fully imagine. The disappearance of the world's largest tropical forests and the advent of sandy deserts are proceeding at a rapid pace. The World Ocean is polluted, the composition and structure of the earth's atmosphere are changing. The phenomena of degradation of the natural environment have also appeared in our country. The Volga has been turned into a chain of stagnant lakes, the threat of pollution hangs over Baikal, the deserts of Central Asia are growing, the Aral Sea is disappearing. The degradation of the environment is especially acute in giant cities, where air poisoning from exhaust gases from cars and industrial waste is growing rapidly. Under these conditions, the role of landscape architecture increases. It resolutely goes beyond the framework of park construction, and begins to take an ever wider part in actively influencing the formation of the most diverse types of landscape environment.

Rice. 13. General plan of the First All-Russian Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow. Archite. I. Zholtovsky. 1923

The social activity of landscape architects has increased. In 1948, in Cambridge, England, representatives of nine European countries founded the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA). The profession received recognition and was included in the official list of professions of the International Labor Organization at the UN. Representatives of more than 50 countries on all continents now participate in IFLA activities, and most of them train landscape architects. IFLA congresses are held annually, each of which is dedicated to one of the most pressing contemporary problems.

Until the mid-1950s, the Soviet Union occupied one of the leading places in the development of landscape architecture. The construction of parks proceeded rapidly, green systems of cities were implemented, work was carried out to restore landscapes disturbed by industry, and the foundations of large-scale landscape planning were laid. In the 1960s, the professional approach to landscape design began to decline. Emphasis was placed only on the quantitative growth of green spaces, the training of landscape specialists was reduced. Only in the 1980s were the first steps taken to revive the lost positions.

Rice. 14. Diagram of an ideal garden city. Archite. Howard. 1898

In modern landscape architecture, there are now several directions of development. Of exceptional importance is the so-called "landscape planning", which is closely related to the preservation and development of various types of landscape environment from untouched protected nature to natural areas intensively exploited by man. The range of issues covered by landscape planning also includes restoration of destroyed landscapes, tracing and design of roads and road structures, landscape organization of industrial and agricultural territories, recreation areas, tourism and other planning objects. There are many major expressive works in the field of landscape planning.

During the "great crisis" that began in 1929, massive work was launched in the United States to lay new modern highways. A little later, similar work began in Germany, Italy and other European countries. Route 17 in the northeastern United States and the Sun Road from Rome to Milan in Italy are among the outstanding works of landscape architecture.

Interest in territorial landscape planning has noticeably increased in recent years. In the mid-1980s, a project was developed to develop the landscape structure of the Lake Balaton region in Hungary with its primary use as a recreation area (or recreational area). In our country, systems of recreational zones are being developed for a number of traditional recreation areas, in particular, in the Baltic States, Crimea, Transcarpathia, etc.

The second major direction of landscape architecture was the formation of the landscape structure of cities and urban areas. This direction has caused a large number of particular problems. The central one was the problem of creating effective systems of urban greening. Howard's work laid the foundation for research in this area and a number of practical proposals that are of considerable interest. The Soviet Union was also a pioneer here. Proposals for the master plan of Moscow in 1920, 1935 and 1971 were of fundamental importance, creating a systematic approach to greening the city. The Voisin plan, made by Corbusier in 1925, and Leonidov's proposals for Magnitogorsk (1930) contributed to the understanding of the new approach to the relationship between urban development and vegetation. In practice, the indisputable priority in the creation of green systems in large cities belongs to our country. Even the world's largest new cities - Chandigarh and Brasilia - have failed to convincingly implement them. On the other hand, in the Soviet Union there are really implemented green systems of dozens of cities. Among them, the systems of Minsk, Yerevan, Kyiv and, of course, Leningrad stand out for their high architectural merits.

The third, most extensive area of ​​landscape architecture can be considered the design of individual objects for various purposes. This direction, of course, is closely related to the two previous ones and is distinguished by its particular diversity. First of all, it is the design of gardens and parks.

Gardens and parks differ in their functional purpose. They can be decorative, walking, special purpose (for example, botanical, zoological, children's, sports, etc.). They also differ in technical features, being built on the ground, on roofs, in enclosed spaces, from artificial materials. It is difficult to even list all the varieties of modern gardens and parks. The design of gardens is closely related to the work on the landscape environment of individual buildings and on the landscape structure of architectural complexes. In Western countries, the landscape architect is usually one of the members of the main group of authors of all significant objects. Landscape projects were carried out by many well-known architects. A large ensemble of Lumbini gardens in Nepal was designed by Tange. The works of Venturi are interesting, who made, in particular, the project of a new embankment in Manhattan in New York.

National and historical parks have become a special type of landscape objects. The United States has made significant progress here. Along with large parks, sometimes covering hundreds of square kilometers and located mainly in the Rocky Mountains and Alaska, there are hundreds of smaller parks. Often they are organized to protect and display, say, one waterfall or a historic building with its immediate surroundings. National parks exist now in many countries. The first parks are organized in our country. Among them are the Samara bow on the Volga, the Gauja river valley in Latvia, Losiny Ostrov in Moscow. The design and development of our national parks is just beginning. There is still considerable work to be done to develop them, and the experience of the United States can be of great help to us.

It is impossible not to name another important direction in the development of landscape architecture. This is the reconstruction and restoration of park ensembles of the past. Landscape monuments require constant care; without it, gardens overgrow and disappear. But even with proper care, vegetation changes, ages and dies. There is a need to restore the gardens, their restoration. The most significant monuments such as Versailles, Taj Mahal, Boboli Gardens are constantly maintained and restored.

Landscape architecture around the world is coming out on new stage of its development. She has won recognition as an important independent architectural profession and she has a lot of work to do to create and improve the spatial environment for human life in the broadest sense of this problem.