Gardens and Landscape Design

(b Kirkcaldy, Fife, Oct 30, 1689; d Edinburgh, June 24, 1748).

Scottish architect and landscape designer. He was the leading architect in Scotland during the second quarter of the 18th century and had an extensive practice. An important contractor for the Government, serving from 1730 to his death as Master Mason to the Board of Ordnance for North Britain, he also pursued various business enterprises, including ownership of a brickworks. Apparently self-taught as an architect, he was involved with building country houses from the early 1720s. His early patron, SirJohn Clerk, 2nd Baronet of Penicuik, made his own library available to Adam, and in 1727 they made a joint trip to England. Adam developed a style that was influenced by Sir John Vanbrugh, James Gibbs and the English Palladianism of Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington and 4th Earl of Cork, and his circle. Thus, Baroque and Palladian forms co-existed in his work, although he handled them in a very personal and inventive way....

[James]

(b Caracas, Sept 14, 1932).

Venezuelan architect. After finishing elementary and middle school in Caracas, where he was born, Alcock attended St. Edmund’s College High School (1946–1949) and University of Cambridge School of Chemistry (1949–1952), both in England. Back in Caracas, he enrolled in the School of Architecture of Central University, graduating in 1959. While a student, he worked for Venezuelan architect Alejandro Pietri and Brazilian landscapist Roberto Burle-Marx on various landscape architecture projects.

With José Miguel Galia (1919–2009), who had been his tutor at School, Alcock founded Galia & Alcock, Arquitectos Asociados (1959–1962). For Galia, a respected Uruguayan architect who had been working in Venezuela since 1948, architecture should at once respond to a building’s function climate, and incorporate technological innovations and operate as an assemblage of materiality and location that celebrates and intensifies both. Among the projects Galia and Alcock designed together, those for public spaces in both urban and natural environments were the most celebrated, particularly the Macuto Beachfront (...

(b Grenoble, Oct 26, 1817; d Paris, Dec 6, 1891).

French landscape architect and civil engineer. A graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique (1835) and Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (1838), Paris, he was sent to Bordeaux to reorganize the harbour’s access and the forest of the Landes. In 1851 Georges Eugène Haussmann, the newly appointed Préfet de la Gironde, asked Alphand to prepare the festivities in honour of the official visit of the French President, Prince Louis Napoleon. After the Prince became emperor, as Napoleon III, in 1852, he ordered Haussmann to transform Paris into a modern metropolis. In 1854 Haussmann summoned Alphand to redesign the Bois de Boulogne. Alphand arrived from Bordeaux with the horticulturist and landscape architect Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps (1824–75), and together they carried out a vast number of projects, cutting straight avenues through historic, often picturesque, districts. Alphand also designed airy public gardens and parks, in accord with Haussmann’s overall scheme. He laid out the Bois de Vincennes (...

English house and garden in Staffordshire. The garden was first laid out between 1814 and 1827 by the owner, Charles Talbot, 15th Earl of Shrewsbury, with assistance from the landscape gardener John Buonarotti Papworth and the architect Robert Abraham (1774–1850); it was further improved by John Talbot, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury (see Talbot, John, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury). The major landscape feature at Alton Towers is the valley in the grounds, which Shrewsbury, Papworth and Abraham filled with an astonishing ‘labyrinth of terraces, curious architectural walls, trellis-work arbours, vases, statues, stairs, pavements … ornamental buildings, bridges, porticoes, temples, pagodas, gates, iron railings, parterres, jets, ponds, streams, seats, fountains, caves, flower baskets, waterfalls, rocks, cottages … rock-work, shell-work, root-work, moss houses, old trunks of trees [and] entire dead trees’ (Gdnrs Magazine, vii, 1831); in addition a fashionable Swiss-style cottage was built. Some of these works, in particular ...

(b London, Jan 29, 1772; d Bromley Hill, Kent, Jan 15, 1837).

English watercolourist and garden designer, wife of Charles Long. The daughter of Sir Abraham Hume, she completed her formal classical education with a visit to Italy, before marrying in 1793. The couple acquired Bromley Hill Place in Kent, and Amelia designed the celebrated Italianate grounds that subsequently became the main source for her sketches in watercolour, pencil, charcoal with chalk and soft-ground etching of Views of Bromley Hill (1805; London, BM). She was reputed to be the favourite pupil of Thomas Girtin, and her early work is distinguished by a broad topographical style. Her View of St Paul’s from the Thames (1805; Edinburgh, N.G.) is one of several accomplished copies after Girtin. In her later work she concentrated on the picturesque elements of architecture, natural foliage and country scenery under the influence of Henry Edridge and Dr Thomas Monro. Apart from three trips to France and Holland between ...

French 16th-century château and garden near Tonnerre, in Burgundy. Antoine de Clermont, brother-in-law of Duchesse de Valentinois Diane de Poitiers commissioned Sebastiano Serlio, who was employed at the court of Francis I, to design the château and garden; construction on a large level site began c. 1546. The house is built around a large rectangular courtyard of majestic proportions. The twelve principal rooms on the ground floor, notably the Chambre des Nudités and the Chambre de Diane, are adorned with tapestries and frescoes. On the first floor, the apartments and galleries were sumptuously decorated by Francesco Primaticcio.

A drawing by Jacques Du Cerceau shows that the original gardens echoed the rectangular shape of the house. A huge rectangular raised terrace was constructed around the house and garden, and this terrace was used as a promenade from which house and gardens could be viewed.

French 16th-century château c. 75 km west of Paris, in the département of Eure-et-Loire. In 1546 Duchesse de Valentinois Diane de Poitiers, widow of Louis de Brézé (d 1531), began to build a modest house in the village of Anet; it underwent considerable and magnificent enlargement (after 1547, until 1553) when her lover Henry II became King of France and placed Philibert de L’Orme and virtually unlimited resources at her disposal. The château is built on a moated site around three courtyards with gardens to the north. Around the middle court, the Cour du Seigneur, were three residential wings and the entrance gate set in a screen wall. To the east lay the estate farm buildings around the Basse Cour, while to the west was the Cour de la Fontaine and beyond it the tennis-court, the stables and Diane de Poitiers’ burial chapel. Largely demolished (1798–1811...

[Anhalt, Duke of]

(b Dessau, Aug 10, 1740; reg 1756–1817; d Dessau, Aug 9, 1817).

German ruler and garden designer. After leaving the Prussian Army in 1757, he devoted himself to governing Dessau, instituting provision for the poor, public health and education. He made four journeys to England (1763–85) with Friedrich Wilhelm Erdmannsdorff, with whom he also travelled through Italy (1765–6). He studied for six months with Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose ‘mimetic theory of the Ancients’ he realized in his garden designs. With Erdmannsdorff and his planters, he created gardens at Luisium (1774) and Sieglitzer Berg (1777) and most notably at Wörlitz (1764–1810), based on such English models as The Leasowes (Worcs), Stowe (Bucks), Kew Gardens (London) and Stourhead (Wilts). He was acquainted with William Chambers, Henry Holland, Sir William Hamilton (i) and possibly also Henry Flitcroft and ‘Capability’ Brown. As well as introducing the English landscape garden and Palladian country house to the Continent, the Prince also transplanted the Gothic Revival. The ‘Country House’ and ‘Gothic House’ at ...

(b Tel Aviv, 1951).

Israeli designer, active in Britain. In 1981 Arad founded, with Caroline Thorman, One Off Ltd, a design studio, workshops and showroom in Covent Garden, London. In 1989, again with Caroline Thorman, he founded Ron Arad Associates, an architecture and design practice in Chalk Farm. In 1994 he established the Ron Arad Studio in Como (Italy). His most famous design is the Rover Chair, which recycled used Rover car seats. He has long had an interest in the use of steel, and the Bookwork bookshelves (...

Spanish palace that stands beside the rivers Tagus and Jarama in the province of Madrid, 47 km south of the capital. It was intended as a spring and summer residence for the royal family and is renowned for its gardens and fountains. The summer residence built at Aranjuez in 1387 by Lorenzo Suárez de Figueroa, Grand Master of the Order of Santiago, became royal property under Ferdinand II, King of Aragon, and Isabella, Queen of Castile and León. In the reign of Charles V improvements were carried out by Luis de Vega (from c. 1537) and the palace was extensively enlarged by Philip II. The chapel was designed by Juan Bautista de Toledo and completed by Jerónimo Gili and Juan de Herrera. It was built in a combination of white stone from Colmenar de Oreja and brick, giving a two-toned effect that was adopted for the rest of the palace. In ...

(b Hamburg, Oct 2, 1757; d Pisa, Aug 18, 1806).

German architect, draughtsman, landscape designer and painter. He studied from 1778 to 1783 at the University of Göttingen and the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen, where he was awarded four prizes. His early designs included drawings for the hothouse of the botanic gardens in Copenhagen and a lecture room at Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin. While visiting Paris in 1784–5 he devoted himself to the study of Revolutionary architecture, and in England and Italy (1786) he studied landscape design and ancient sites. In Rome in 1787 he met Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who later summoned him to Weimar to rebuild the prince’s Schloss. In addition to a number of designs for the palace at Weimar he produced drawings for various summer-houses. In 1790 he moved to Hamburg, his plans for the Schloss at Weimar still largely unexecuted. By the end of his life he had designed numerous public buildings and private houses in Hamburg, including the house for Bürgermeister ...

Park near Łowicz, Poland. The best-preserved 18th-century Romantic landscape park in Poland, it was founded in 1778 by the patron and collector Princess Helena Radziwiłł (1749–1821). She competed as a patron with Princess Izabela Czartoryska, and Arkadia was a response to the latter’s park (destr.), also called Arkadia, at Powązki, outside Warsaw. Princess Helena Radziwiłł conceived the literary and philosophical idea of the park, and in order to realize her project she employed Simon Bogumił Zug as designer.

The park covers c. 30 ha on the banks of an artificially formed lake, with the Isle of Sacrifices and the River Łupia. An area of wild, unimproved nature, the Elysian Fields, is laid out on the west bank. An English-style park, complete with pavilions, classical ruins, tombs, altars and grottoes, is situated on the east bank. The park is so designed and landscaped that the footpaths, lined with trees and shrubs, lead the visitor to its main feature, the Neo-classical Temple of Diana, from where there is a panoramic view of the lake and the park. The temple, designed by ...

Estate situated 20 km west of Moscow. It was first recorded in 1537 as the village of Upolzy, and renamed Arkhangel’skoye after a brick church dedicated to the Archangel Michael was built in 1667 to replace a wooden one. From 1703 to 1810 the estate belonged to the princes Golitsyn and from 1810 to 1917 to the princes Yusupov, notably Yusupov, Prince Nikolay (Borisovich). In 1919 it became a museum-estate.

One of the finest Russian palace and park ensembles, Arkhangel’skoye has as its nucleus a Neo-classical palace, connected to the two wings set in front of the main façade by powerful Tuscan colonnades. It was built by local serf craftsmen between 1780 and 1790 to a plan by the French architect Charles de Guerney. The strict symmetry of the palace’s architecture is underscored by the severe belvedere and central portico with four Ionic columns; on the opposite side, overlooking the park, the projection of an oval room, decorated with a pair of Ionic columns, echoes the portico. In ...

(b Berlin, April 29, 1931).

British painter and printmaker of German birth. He was sent to England in 1939 and moved from school in Kent to London in 1947, where he began attending art classes at Hampstead Garden Suburb Institute and acting in fringe theatre. From 1947 to 1948 he studied at Borough Polytechnic under David Bomberg, whose teaching was especially valuable in its emphasis on risk and on seeking an organic, unified form. Auerbach continued in Bomberg’s evening life classes while at St Martin’s School of Art (1948–52). He considered his first original achievement to have been Summer Building Site (1952; Mrs P. Hill priv. col., see 1986 exh. cat., p. 8), of a scene at Earls Court; this was rather geometric and painted in formal, prismatic colour, but much of his early work was thickly and laboriously impastoed in earth colours, as in Head of E. O. W. (1955...

Italian estate near Viterbo, c. 65 km north-east of Rome. It was built for Cardinal Gianfrancesco Gambara, Bishop of Viterbo, from c. 1568, and the design of the whole estate, comprising small twin palaces (palazzine, called casinos in the 17th century), a formal garden and a park, is attributed to Jacopo Vignola. The garden and the first palazzina were mostly completed by 1578 under the direction of the local architect and hydraulic engineer Tommaso Ghinucci. Carlo Maderno built the second palazzina for Cardinal Alessandro Peretti Montalto between 1611 and 1613. The two buildings were planned from the start and have identical exteriors. Their cubical form, with hipped roof and central belvedere, resembles those of the Villa Vecchia at Frascati and the hunting-lodge at Caprarola, both designed by Vignola. Rural and urban architectural traditions were united in the design of the buildings. The simple block with central projection recalls the towers and dovecotes typical of the countryside, while the exterior stone revetment and classical articulation is reminiscent of urban palaces. The floor plan is a variation on a common tripartite plan with a long central space. In the second ...

(b Ramsgate, Oct 23, 1865; d Brighton, Feb 10, 1945).

English architect, interior designer, garden designer and writer . He was articled to Charles Davis (1827–1902), City Architect of Bath, from 1886 until 1889 but learnt little and was largely self-taught. In 1889 he started his own practice on the Isle of Man, where he built a number of buildings, including his own Red House, Douglas (1893). He was a leading member of the second-generation Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and was among the first to build on the simpler, more abstract and stylized designs of C. F. A. Voysey, a refinement of the ideas of William Morris, Philip Webb, R. Norman Shaw and others from the period 1860–90. From about 1890 until World War I, the Arts and Crafts Movement, as represented by Baillie Scott, Voysey, C. R. Ashbee, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Parker & Unwin and others, became the most important international force in architecture, interior design, landscape and urban planning. The work of these architects influenced Adolf Loos and Josef Hoffmann in Austria, Joseph Maria Olbrich and Peter Behrens in Germany, Eliel Saarinen and others in Scandinavia, and Frank Lloyd Wright, Irving Gill, Greene & Greene in the USA....

[Turk. Baghče sarǎy: ‘Garden palace’]

Ukrainian city in the Crimea, 35 km north-east of Sevastopol, which was the capital of the Tatar in the Crimea throughout the rule of the Giray dynasty (c. 1423–1783). It developed from an important burial ground of the Giray khans, but the Garden Palace (1503–19), founded by Khan Mengli Giray I (reg 1466–1514 with interruptions) and covering over 4 ha in the valley of the River Churuk-Su, represents the historical core of the city. The earliest structure is the Demirkap (‘Iron gate’) with an inscription referring to Mengli Giray and the date 1503. It is thought to be by the Italian architect Aleviz Novy or Aloisio (fl early 16th century), builder of the cathedral of the Archangel Michael (wooden church, 1333; rebuilt 1505–8) in the Moscow Kremlin. Little is known of the layout of the palace in the 16th and 17th centuries as it was badly damaged by fire in ...

[BālchandBālacanda]

(fl c. 1596–1640).

Indian miniature painter, brother of Payag. Balchand began his long career in the imperial Mughal atelier with figural illuminations on at least three pages (fols 17r, 33v, 60v) of the Bāharistān (‘Spring garden’) of Jamiz of 1595 (Oxford, Bodleian Lib., MS. Elliot 254). The small, repetitive figures in two lightly coloured illustrations in the Akbarnāma (‘History of Akbar’) of 1596–7 (Dublin, Chester Beatty Lib., MS. 3, fols 152v–153r; alternatively dated c. 1604) also bear the mark of youthful apprenticeship. Among the few works known from the next two decades are a single illustration ascribed to him from a dispersed Shāhnāma (‘Book of Kings’) of c. 1610 (ex-Colnaghi’s, London, 1976, no. 88ii), a border decoration in an album prepared for Jahangir between 1609 and 1618 (Berlin, Staatsbib. Preuss. Kultbes., Libr. pict. A117, fol. 13v), a portrait of the Dying ‛Inayat Khan...

(b Vichy, April 1, 1907; d Vichy, May 30, 1989).

French architect, urban planner and writer . Immediately after his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he presented designs for a ‘garden city for intellectuals’ at the Salon d’Automne of 1934. He then entered the Institut d’Urbanisme of the University of Paris, where he was much taken with the teaching of the architectural historian Marcel Poëte (1866–1951). He established a reputation in 1937 with La Rome de Mussolini, in which he unreservedly celebrated il Duce’s urban development policy. He worked with Jacques Gréber, the chief architect of the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne of 1937, and in 1941 he published Problèmes d’urbanisme, in which he set out for the first time a global manifesto linking both spatial and social factors. He was particularly opposed to the planning principles on which Le Corbusier based the sunburst layout of his Ville radieuse, but he commended the functionalist designs of Alexander Klein to a French audience in ...

(b Château-Renault, Indre-et-Loire, April 24, 1873; d Montoire-sur-le-Loir, nr Vendôme, Aug 12, 1958).

French painter. Like many naive artists, he discovered his vocation for drawing and painting late in life. His work as a gardener in Touraine awakened his love of nature, and he educated himself by reading history and mythology and by travelling in central and western France. He was mobilized in World War I and was sent to Greece to take part in the Dardanelles campaign; on his return to France his drawing skills were recognized by the Army and he was put in charge of charting and rangefinding. It was this experience that encouraged him to become a painter in 1919.

Bauchant exhibited his work for the first time at the Salon d’Automne in 1921. His flower pictures were soon succeeded by subjects from history, such as Louis XI Having Mulberry Bushes Planted near Tours (1943; Paris, Pompidou), from mythology, as in Cleopatra, on her Way to Anthony (...