Ibirapuera
Sao Paulo, 1954
Sao Paulo is a harsh city, brooding and landlocked, which makes the 221 hectares of Ibirapuera Park all the more essential. It is the work of Roberto Burle Marx, the great landscape architect who combined cubist and surrealist inspiration with a deep knowledge of Brazilian botany. The park is lush, curvilinear in every direction, sometimes mysterious, sometimes breaking out into powerful colour. Burle Marx often played second fiddle to the architect Oscar Niemeyer, with whom he frequently collaborated. Here, the park is the star, even though it contains the huge and dazzling pavilion that Niemeyer designed for the city’s art biennial.
Buttes-Chaumont
Paris, 1867
A vertiginous work of ravines, rocks, follies and bridges, 25 hectares of toy savage landscape formed out of old quarries by the engineer Adolphe Alphand under the direction of Baron Haussmann, the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont is the alter ego of the straight-lined order of the Baron’s famous boulevards. It inspired the surrealist writer Louis Aragon, for whom it was “ludicrous and alluring”, “a test tube of human chemistry” and a “crazy area born in the head of an architect from the conflict between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the economic conditions of existence in Paris”. It is all these things and more.
Boboli
Florence, 16th century and later
Once the Medicis’ principal playground, the Boboli Gardens are, at their simplest, a nice place from which to get a view of Florence, but they are very much more than that. They play out a duel between culture and nature that ranges from a symmetrical central theatre to shadowy woods and the be-stalactited Grotta Grande, whose statues of Venus and of Paris and Helen snogging are, frankly, pornographic. The placing of planes of water on its steep slope gives the garden a levitating quality. The Italian renaissance is sometimes seen as the triumph of order and taste: the Boboli shows it was more interesting than that.
High Line
New York, 2009
Impossible to omit, although its popularity means that it is often now not a park so much as a slow shuffling queue of visitors, who might get some glimpse of Piet Oudolf’s planting, which beautifully developed the self-seeded wilderness that grew on the abandoned railway viaduct on which the High Line is made. The genius of the place is, more generally, its creative enhancement of the accidents of time and place that led to a park in the air. It is now spawning purported “high lines” all over the world. All miss the point, which is that it is unrepeatable.
Landschaftspark
Duisburg-Nord, Germany, 1989-99
Before there was the High Line the landscape architect Peter Latz created another park out of derelict industry, on a far larger scale. A contaminated ensemble of collieries and steelworks has been populated with art, culture and places of work. Concert venues and climbing walls have been formed out of the steel frames of old factories, hulks of blast furnaces and slag heaps. Particularly smart is the approach to cleaning up the filthy land: it is allowed to take its time, with water and planting that assists the process forming part of the design of the park.
Hampstead Heath
London
Another that is impossible to omit. It is everything that people say it is, a powerful illusion of rustic nature within a metropolis. As with the Boboli, the view of the city is part of the experience, making it a place to escape, look back and reflect. Perhaps for this reason it has inspired artists, poets and visionaries, such as Constable, Keats, and the semi-criminal American tycoon Charles Tyson Yerkes, who was inspired by a visit to the heath to build much of what is now the London underground. But for vigorous campaigns in the 19th century, the heath could have been lost to housing.
Park Güell
Barcelona, 1900-1914
Park Güell was partly a property speculation, as the centre of a proposed garden suburb of expensive villas. It was also, according to Antoni Gaudí’s biographer Gijs van Hensbergen, a “living essay on Catalan nationhood and Catholic piety”. It includes the emblems of the local dark ages hero Wilfred the Hairy and refers to a belief that the Garden of Eden was located in the region. All of which are pretexts for a convulsive mating of construction and nature, in which it can be hard to tell where one ends and the other starts. Also includes never-bettered decoration with broken ceramics.
Summer Palace
Beijing, mid-18th century
The 7th Earl of Elgin’s contribution to world culture (Parthenon marbles) is well known. His son the 8th earl went further, ordering the destruction of much of the Summer Palace (as well as the Old Summer Palace) during the second opium war. Fortunately, the palace, an ensemble of lakes, gardens and buildings created for the Imperial family, was so vast that, with the help of restoration, it is still magnificent. Designed as a refuge from the city’s oppressive heat, some of its best features are devices for creating cooling breezes and shade. An almost inexhaustible series of spaces formed from buildings and nature together.
Olmsted Parks
Buffalo, NY, 1868-96
Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux are best known as the creators of Central Park in New York City, but their greatest work is the co-ordinated system of parks and parkways, the first of its kind in the United States, in what was then the boom town of Buffalo. The idea was to integrate the network of green space with the fabric of the city, so that you were never far from it. Buffalo fell on hard times in the last century, but the parks still fulfil Olmsted’s idea that nature could “refresh and delight the eye and through the eye, mind and spirit”.
Birkenhead Park
Merseyside, 1847
As the first publicly funded park in Britain, Birkenhead pioneered one of the country’s gifts to urban civilisation. It impressed Olmsted, too, and so can take some credit for inspiring Central Park and the Buffalo network. It was created by Joseph Paxton, the gardener who went on to design the giant greenhouse known as the Crystal Palace. Paxton also worked on the Duke of Devonshire’s gardens at Chatsworth, and Birkenhead can be seen as the democratisation of the aristocratic landscape, with striking buildings such as an Italianate boat house and a “Swiss bridge” artfully distributed among winding paths and curving lakes.
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