Published in Scientific Papers. Series B, Horticulture, Volume LXI
Written by Ileana Maria PANŢU
This paper aims to analyze the planting composition of the Carol I park in Bucharest at the beginning of the 20th century. The Carol I park is important for the history of Romanian landscape architecture and stands also as an example for the design of parks nowadays. Conceived in 1906 as a national park to host an international event, the “General Romanian Exhibition”, The Carol I park was transformed throughout the 20th century to represent symbolically different political powers. A royal showcase at first, it then became a tool of communist propaganda in the ’60s. The park’s compositional style also changed with its ideological mutations and its planting design followed. It is essential to analyze and understand the evolution of parks and especially the evolution of their planting design in order to valorize and preserve and/or restore national landscape heritage. The first stage of the history of the Carol I park demonstrated an elegant Belle Époque style with both Romantic and geometric areas designed by the French landscape architect Édouard Redont, specially invited for the abilities he had already demonstrated in Romania. The composition of the park was centred on a generous circulation space with lots of pavilions, interspersed with water elements. Elegantly planted in a geometric style with a lot of attention to detail, this axis has continued visually towards a hill over a sinuous lake. On this hill, the eye is drawn to the Palace of the Arts. Below it, an elegant coniferous composition engulfed a graceful Romantic grotto with a high cascade guarded by a sculptural ensemble. The alleys and the vegetation near the lake and on the hill were designed in the French landscape style, in contrast with the geometry of the axis zone and its side alleys, with alignments of trees, pruned shrubs and flower platbands.
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