Regent’s park is truly an epitome’ of the history of art and architecture that brings beauty and life as of today’s generation. In London, the architecture and planning of the Regent park started and that there affects the development of capital as projected and carried to completion as the plan for the park creation was possible for the realization of the metropolitan improvements of Regency – being the plan which embraced the Regent’s Park layout as well as the Regent Street as well as the cutting of the Regent’s Canal, with its branch and basin to serve Regent’s Park. The wholeness of the colossal plan have provided useful spine to London’s far-reaching effect expansion being carried out by the genius . There was the success to seize and unite number of opportunities which presented with blessed promptitude beginning the Regency and that has set out liberal and enticing program for the development of the Park, relating the project that will extend the Park to Carlton Home. Aside, there was indication that presented something innovative – the high picturesque conception of a garden city for the aristocracy along with panoramas showing a composition of alluring groves and elegant architecture of Parisian character. ‘’During the year 1811, the Prince and Nash were clearly the moving powers in the planning scheme. The Prince talked enthusiastically about eclipsing Napoleon’s Paris, while Nash designed a Royal pleasaunce, for Regent’s Park and planned Regent Street as a “Royal mile” from Carlton House with the promoters of a canal scheme and introduced a stretch of it picturesquely into the Park.’’ (1935)
‘’The design for the Park was elaborated as well as dramatic, the Villas are dotted everywhere in woody grooves. The guinguette has a strip of formal water in front of it, while the arms of a serpentine lake embrace the centre of the area in great double circus with a National Valhalla in the middle. Pound the margins are terraces and in the south-east corner is the marketing and working class quarter. Where the southward road crosses the New Road is another vast circus, with a church in the middle. Thus, as a piece of planting it is bald and uninteresting, lacking as it does the rich gardens and groves of the forty or fifty intended villas. Its architectural beauties are confined to the margins with their noble approaches and the belt of terraces, interrupted across the north, so that the view of Hampstead and Highgate should be preserved The Regent’s Park terraces are greatly loved today more so than ever they were when they were new, when their shortcomings in detail and finish grated on the susceptibilities of critics bred in an exacting school. The truth is that these buildings, careless and clumsy though they are in many ways, have an extravagant scenic character which, perceived through nostalgic mists of time, makes them irresistible. Carved pediments, rich in allegory, top the trees; massive pavilions, standing forward like the corps de garde of Baroque chateaux are linked to the main structures by triumphal arches or columnar screens; each terrace stretches its length in all the pride of unconfined symmetry – magnificent.’’ (1946 )
Source: (1946). Georgian London Charles Scribner\’s Sons
Where the eye apprehends a mansion of great distinction, supported by lesser mansions and service quarters, the mind must interpret it as a block of thin houses, with other blocks of thin houses carrying less ornament or none at all. The sham is flagrant and absurd. The terraces are architectural jokes and though Nash was serious enough in his intention, the effect is an odd combination of fantasy and bathos which only the retrospect of a century can forgive. The earliest architectural feature of Regent’s Park is the lovely, unpretentious, neatly detailed Park Crescent, the design of the square is less happy, the façades being crowded and coarse in design, but the arrangement as a whole, considered as a formal approach from a thoroughfare to a landscaped park is admirable and the simple appropriateness of Park Crescent with its Ionic colonnades is beyond criticism. With the development of Regent’s Park proceeded the cutting of Regent Street. This great thoroughfare is unique in the history of town-planning. Its amazingly successful blend of formality and picturesque opportunism could have happened nowhere and at no time but in England of the period of the picturesque. It might be said of Regent Street as Rasmussen said of the Adelphi, that it was “not only a dream of antique architecture” but “just as much a finance-fantasia over risk and profit”; the financier was an artist and the artist a financier. To some extent it was a masterly, calculated solution; but also to some extent it was a no less masterly improvisation. ( 1946)
‘’The central pediments are redundant, though the florid ornament they contain is excellent of its kind. The attics on the end pavilions are over-emphatic and inappropriate to the academic character of the design as a whole. The Corinthian columns are sloppily executed and lack the precision essential to the effective use of that order. The story of Regent’s Park and Regent Street as official building projects of the Crown goes back though it is evident that the Regent’s Park idea had been growing in his mind for some time. This is proved by the existence of two long panoramic sketches for buildings in and around the park, buildings which do not connect with any known plan and which must be earlier than 1810. Nash has kept the Bath tradition well to the fore in approaching the park problem. The double circus he planned for the high ground in the centre is an obvious theft from the St John’s Wood scheme there is Park Crescent and the terraces with their highly architectural symmetry derive ultimately from John Wood’s north side of Queen Square, Bath. The Regent’s Park conception was far more than a continuation of this excellent native tradition.’’ (1946)
‘’Nevertheless, Regent’s Park cannot be explained without some inquiry into the lofty and dramatic comprehensiveness which characterised its beginnings. If taken into Ledoux’s book came into Nash’s hands, it is not improbably the source of that feeling for the play of social factors as determinants of design which informs the original Regent’s Park project and makes it something wholly new in the history of English town-planning. Today, Regent’s Park is fragmentary and dissolute reflection of the brave image of the year 1812 London’’. ( 1946 )
Source: (1960). The Architecture of John Nash, Studio
Source: Terence Davis (1960). The Architecture of John Nash, Studio
FIRST PLAN FOR REGENT’S PARK
Source: (1960). The Architecture of John Nash, Studio
Source: (1960). The Architecture of John Nash, Studio
Regent Street, LONDON 170
Source: (1960). The Architecture of John Nash, Studio
WATERLOO PLACE, LOWER REGENT STREET, LONDON
Source: (1960). The Architecture of John Nash, Studio
‘’Mentioned it again in connection with ‘Capability’ Brown, who reduced the new irregular landscaping to a system of his own in which the main elements were clumps, belts, and lakes distributed in an otherwise close-shaven terrain. Finally, we noted that Sir William Chambers, in his mockserious Dissertation on what purported to be Chinese gardening, ridiculed Brown and opened the door to further reconsideration of the subject. The style and composition of the house remained unaffected by the changing notions of how its setting should be composed. True, there was the problem of disposing of the service quarters so as not to obtrude them in a landscape so carefully groomed. Brown, for instance, liked to sink them under the house; others hid the service wing behind shrubs, there was always the question of ornamental buildings within the landscape temples but although carefully set relative to the pictorial conception of the scene, were not necessarily modulated to the key of the landscape and during the last phase of the Georgian art of landscape that architecture began to feel the effects of the picturesque idea. It was only then, indeed, that ‘picturesque’ began to take on precise meaning only then that an aesthetic of the picturesque, charging the word with a much weightier significance than it had hitherto possessed, was evolved. ‘Picturesque’ had meant, roughly, the kind of landscape which recalled landscape-paintings, something more abstract than that, as when Robert Adam defined his conception of ‘movement’ in architecture as being calculated greatness of the picturesque of the composition’. Moreover, Repton was friendly with both Knight and Price, and although the views of the three men never precisely coincided and, indeed, diverged considerably as time went on, he can be considered, with them, as one of the chief protagonists of the movement.’’ ( 1530 to 1830) ‘’Throughout the nineteenth century, the leading landscape architects and park advocates believed that parks were important instruments of enlightenment and social control. Consequently, they praised and promoted parks for their healthgiving characteristics and character-molding capabilities, landscape architects used these arguments to convince city governments to invest in elaborate urban parks. The escalating tensions between the middle and working class led to working class activism for increased access to park space and for greater latitude in defining working class leisure behavior.’’ (1999 )
‘’Olmsted and other park advocates also believed in the restorative and calming powers of parks, and in their ability to help the classes bond, thereby, reducing their antagonisms towards each other. Olmsted thought the parks would inspire communal feelings among all urban classes, muting resentments over disparities of wealth and fashion. Gregarious recreation, the coming together of thousands of people of various walks of life in the parks, was the remedy for the anomie, alienation and hard selfishness of urban life (1999 , 1967; 1976; 1997; 1868; 1853). ‘’Recognizing that such funding schemes could exacerbate inequalities and limit access to urban parks, Olmsted opposed the private financing of parks. Olmsted declared: The enjoyment of the choicest natural scenes in the country and the means of recreation connected with them is thus a monopoly, in a very peculiar manner, of a very few, very rich people. The great mass of society, including those to whom it would be of the greatest benefit, is excluded from it private parks can never be used by the mass of the people in any country nor by any considerable number even of the rich, except by the favor of a few, and in dependence on them… The establishment by government of great public grounds for the free enjoyment of the people under certain circumstances, is thus justified as a political duty’’. ( 1999 , 1865)
‘’It therefore results that the enjoyment of scenery employs the mind without fatigue and yet exercises it, tranquilizes it and yet enlivens it; and thus, through the influence of the mind over the body, gives the effect of refreshing rest and reinvigorating to the whole system’’. ( 1999; 1865) ‘’Olmsted sought to use subtle designs in his parks to create this mood. However, it was not Olmsted’s intent to recreate the grand and sensational scenery. Instead he intended to use the subtlety of domestic arrangements to stimulate the unconscious, and elevate people to higher plane of thought and clear the way to explore other thoughts and feelings’’. (1999, 1997)
Source of the above:
Landscape Architecture Guide – Garden Visit and Travel Guide Gardenvisit.com Garden History Reference Encyclopedia Tom Turner
Being one of the finest urban park which launched Frederick Law Olmsted in profession of landscape architecture. New York’s Central Park was an example of brilliant landscape planning: it was the right type of space, created in the right place at the right time. The best usage of Central Park is as a greenway leading from the Millennium Village to North Greenwich Underground Station.
The Central Park on the Greenwich Peninsula
Source of the above illustrations: Landscape Architecture Guide – Garden Visit and Travel Guide Gardenvisit.com Garden History Reference Encyclopedia Tom Turner
The Royal Park encircled by Regency terraces that were seen across the lake within lawns and trees as Nash’s planning and Repton’s landscape conception had profound influence on 20th century planning.
Source of the above illustrations: Landscape Architecture Guide – Garden Visit and Travel Guide Gardenvisit.com Garden History Reference Encyclopedia Tom Turner
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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