A barbecue and a gazebo – that is, perhaps, all the small park architecture of our days. Whether it’s the gardens of the past. They were decorated with rotundas, hermitages, grottoes, Chinese pagodas and even Diogenes’ barrels!
Park folies (from the French folies – madness) swept the gardens of Europe in the XNUMXth century, after the fashion for the landscape style came from England, of which a variety of pavilions were an organic part. Each landowner tried to outmaneuver his neighbor by erecting endless gazebos, pavilions, and Chinese houses on their lands designed to decorate the landscape, give strollers rest, surprise and entertain.
Parks and gardens
Landscape designers had someone to take an example from: everyone had heard of the Bomarzo Monster Park, laid out in the XNUMXth century by Duke Pier Francesco (Vicino) Orsini.
Among other things, there was even a cave in the form of the open mouth of the Orc – the ruler of the kingdom of the dead. On his lips is a slightly modified quote from Dante: “Leave everyone who enters here to meditate.” Lavish dinners were served inside, after which the most distinguished guests were carried in a sleeping state to the falling house (one can imagine what their awakening was like).
Two centuries later, entertainers were found who, if not surpassed the duke, then made worthy competition to him. For example, the eccentric and even somewhat scandalous Sir Francis Dashwood in his West Wycombe estate, in addition to rotundas, temples and music pavilions, dug a cave at the base of the hill, and erected a church on the hill. In it, the sir arranged the “Hellfire Club”, where he regularly picked up with friends and arranged orgies that went down in history.
However, base entertainment did not interfere with the sublime. In the pavilion, which repeated the shape of the barrel of Diogenes, one had to conduct philosophical conversations, wandering through the labyrinth – to look for a difficult path to virtue, and entering the water grotto – to say goodbye to this world for the sake of the other world. In a word, what today seems to us to be a conglomerate , flower beds, fountains, gazebos and shady alleys, for the creators of garden ensembles of past centuries was a collection of carefully thought out emblems and symbols.
Greek Temple (1747-1749) in Stowe English Park.
Pavilions in the form of classical temples appeared in the gardens as early as the 1762th century. The architects of that time literally transferred buildings from the canvases of the classicist painters Poussin and Lorrain into reality. But the real discovery of antiquity took place in the next century, when the Grand tour became an obligatory part of the education of a young gentleman. The British lived in Rome for a long time, examined the ruins of Greece, and when they returned home, they reproduced the monuments of antiquity in the country estates. The book “Antiquities of Athens”, published in XNUMX, became the bible of architects, where several small temples were depicted, the main advantage of which was that, unlike they fit easily into the English landscape. The already mentioned Sir Francis Dashwood started a dozen decorative temples in West Wycombe: Venus, Winds, Apollo, Daphne, and another Kitty Lodge temple dedicated to a pretty peasant girl. Temples of Love, in which lovers met, and of Friendship, where friendly drinking parties were arranged, became a common place for park construction.
Grotto
The grotto (1592) Bernardo Buontalenti still adorns the Boboli Gardens in Florence today.
The architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) advised arranging cool grottoes (from the Italian grotta – “cave”) in the gardens. During the Mannerist era, grottoes were often used as baths or places of solitude, where one could admire a collection of minerals (often fake).
The interior of the grotto could imitate a dragon’s den or an underwater cave, the walls of which were decorated with shells and corals. The interiors were decorated with sculptures of mythical creatures living, according to legend, in the water, and were often equipped with hydraulic machines that made these statues move. The open grottoes of Italy in the countries of Europe with colder climates have turned into garden pavilions. Such a baroque grotto from the outside and similar to an underwater cave from the inside can be seen in the Moscow estate … A fountain was installed on its roof, jets of water flowed down the walls, and ladies and gentlemen inside felt like full-fledged rulers of the underwater kingdom.
The Hermitage in the Kuskovo estate – a baroque pavilion by Karl Blanc has survived to this day.
Since the 1728th century, the “hermitage”, known to us under the French name “hermitage”, intended for relaxation, reading, reflection, intimate dinners and conversations in a narrow circle, has become an obligatory attribute of every park. A little later, collections of rarities began to be placed in the Hermitages. By the way, the Hermitage Museum also began as a pavilion on the banks of the Neva, where Catherine II took a break from running the state and staged performances. The Hermitage in its natural environment can be viewed in Kuskovo. It was built under the direction of the architect Karl Blank (1793–XNUMX) and is equipped with a lifting mechanism that delivers food from the first floor directly to the table for guests who dined on the second.
Milk farm
The idyllic village of Marie Antoinette at Versailles, designed by Richard Meek between 1783 and 1785, is depicted in a XNUMXth century engraving.
Queen of France , although she was not known as a simpleton, she sometimes liked to pretend to be a shepherdess. For the queen’s pastoral entertainment, a Swiss village was built at Versailles, where Her Majesty, in a simple dress and with a shepherd’s rod in her hand, loved to walk among the perfumed and and flower garlands of cows. Following the example of the Queen of France, noble ladies throughout Europe played shepherdesses and farmers, equipping pavilions stylized as dairy farms in the secluded corners of their parks. A hut built of boulders and covered with a thatched roof appeared in 1782 in Pavlovsky Park near St. Petersburg. Its construction was personally supervised by the wife of Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich (future Paul I) Maria Feodorovna. The interiors of the farm were decorated with tiles, porcelain dishes were ordered from the Sevres and Meissen manufactories, and well-bred cows and sheep were ordered from Holland. The children of the Grand Duke loved to have breakfast on the farm, and in the evenings to descend into the hut for a glass of fresh milk. However, after a few years, the cows were removed from the dairy, apparently so as not to confuse the regal lovers of fresh cream with inappropriate sounds and smells.
To decorate the Chinese pagoda of Catherine II, 72 dragons, 16 white iron palms and 32 copper bells were made.
The Chinese Pagoda (1762) in London’s Kew Gardens was built by the court architect Sir William Chambers.
The next “discovery” of China by Europeans in the 1685th century turned into a real fashion for everything Chinese, and on the basis of the Rococo style, Chinoiserie blossomed, translated into Russian by the contemptuous “Chinese”. Everybody went to masquerades in Mandarin clothes, decorated salons with panoramic wallpaper, collected porcelain and laid out picturesque “Chinese gardens”. In the 1724th century, a whole library of books dedicated to them came out. The first of these was the 1712 bestseller “On the Gardens of Epicurus” by Sir William Temple – the first downshifter in history, that is, a man who abandoned his career for a leisurely life in nature. Sir had never been to China, which did not prevent him from admiring oriental delights and being horrified by the French regular park. In 1786, the Jesuit Matteo Ripa arrived from China to London, who presented the king with engravings with views of the Emperor’s summer palace in Kangxi, a little later another itinerant Jesuit published “A Comprehensive Description of the Imperial Gardens in the Vicinity of Beijing.” And one of the first Chinese tea pavilions appeared in the garden of the summer residence of Emperor Frederick II the Great (XNUMX-XNUMX) Sanssouci in Potsdam. Frederick turned out to be contagious, and in the 1750s, exotic Chinese houses and bridges began to grow in the vicinity of classical temples and sanctuaries, like mushrooms after rain. In 1789, the royal park of Kew near London was decorated with a copy of a porcelain pagoda in Nanjing, and Catherine II, who was not used to being penny-pinching, erected an entire Chinese village in Tsarskoye Selo.
Turkish pavilion
The Turkish bath (1850-1852) was built by the architect Ippolit Monighetti by order of Nicholas I. The last building on the territory of the Catherine Park in Tsarskoe Selo.
In parallel with the chinoiserie, the Turkeri style (that is, Turkish) flourished in the second half of the XNUMXth century. Fake Turks and Turkish women bowed at masquerades, men loved to spend time in oriental-style smoking rooms, and gazebos and pavilions with characteristic ornaments grew in gardens, on the shores of lakes and streams. Under Catherine II, the Tsarskoye Selo park was decorated with numerous columns, the “Turkish cascade” and the “Turkish pavilion”. The Empress nurtured a “Greek project” for the revival of the great Orthodox empire with a heart in Constantinople. But while the sultan was still living in his palace, the empress rested during walks in the park in a “kasyr”, the shape of which exactly repeated the exotic arbor. The interiors were decorated with carpets and furniture brought from Turkey, and the walls were painted with views of Constantinople. A later building has survived to this day – the “Turkish Bath”, which was erected in honor of Russian victories and looked like a mosque with a minaret.
Temple of Apollo (1740) in the park
Stourhead in Wiltshire, England.
Man-made ruins began to grow in gardens back in the Renaissance (they symbolized the frailty of life), but they spread everywhere only in the 1675th century, when the landscape of a Roman village saturated with signs of the past became a role model. However, they not only revived the dear corners of Italy in the memory, but also moralized. Thus, the ruins in the English Stowe Park bore the name “Temple of Modern Virtues” and symbolized the sad state of modern English mores. Nearby stood the “Temple of Ancient Virtues” – a classic rotunda inhabited by statues of the unshakable men of antiquity, Lycurgus, Socrates and Homer. The idea belonged to the owner of the estate, the founder of the “Society of Amateurs” Richard Grenville, Earl of Temple (1749-1771). The ruins were very popular in Russia as well. In 1730, Yuri Felten (1801-XNUMX), in honor of the capture of Ochakov, decorated Tsarskoe Selo with a tower-ruin, on the roof of which he piled a Turkish tent. This allegory meant the ancient power of Greece, which lies dormant under Ottoman rule.
Serpentine Gallery Pavilions
The Turkish bath (1850-1852) was built by the architect Ippolit Monighetti by order of Nicholas I. The last building on the territory of the Catherine Park in Tsarskoe Selo.
Few garden buildings have survived in their original form to this day. Probably the luckiest teahouse deep in Kensington Park. In 1970, the famous Serpentine gallery of modern art in London opened there. And since 2000, the gallery has been inviting famous architects to erect a temporary pavilion next to its building, in which concerts, lectures and debates are held in summer, and in the morning you can simply drink coffee and rolls. Zaha Hadid, Daniel Libeskind, Oscar Niemeyer, Rem Koolhaas, Toyo Ito, Alvar Siza and other stars have already noted in Kensington Gardens. In 2008, Frank O. Gehry’s first building in England will appear next to the Victorian-style Serpentine teahouse. The author describes his project as a synthesis of an amphitheater and a promenade made of glass and wood. Although it looks more like a dump of boards. Colleagues kindly joke about the deliberate negligence of the building. Well, the weirder it looks, the more it looks like a good old pavilion. After all, every time has its own park frenzy.