PARK AND CEMETERY. 
616 
HISTORY and GROWTH of LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE 
A Definition and a Brief Resume oj Its Past and Present; Presented Before the Congress of Technology, 
by Stephen Child, Landscape Architect and Consulting Engineer, of Boston and Santa Barbara, Calif 
111. — English, French and American Design 
As we go forward with the years we 
may follow the development in the 
landscape design of France and Eng- 
land, both countries feeling to a more 
or less degree the influence of the Ital- 
ian renaissance, France even more than 
England. In the latter country more 
evidence of mediaeval influence and 
motives are to be noted. In the Italian 
villa and its grounds we have a single 
and very highly developed unit of rather 
limited size larger than the mediaeval 
unit to be sure, but still domestic in its 
scale. In France, while this Italian in- 
fluence is noted at first, it soon spread 
to a much more vast conception. The 
motives of the great French landscape 
designers were the wealth and power of 
their nobility and their desire to ex- 
press these two things in the surround- 
ings of their palaces and chateaux by 
the extent of their finished grounds. 
They deviated from the Mediaeval and 
Italian designs by adding unit after 
unit. 
The topography being quite generally 
nearly level, all things were adapted to 
this. Terraces became broader, greater 
areas of water were employed and the 
development of the chateau appeared. 
Here we have the mediaeval idea of the 
moat seized upon formalized and elab- 
orated to a great e.xtent as at Fontain- 
bleau and Chantilly. The highly organ- 
ized axial arrangement of the Italian 
school was retained in the French de- 
signs but the scale of everything was 
immensely enhanced. It became no 
longer domestic or human but super- 
human, especially in the time of Louis 
XIV, the self-styled Grand Monarch 
who firmly believed he was something 
more than human. 
He had LeNotre and Mansard design 
Versailles and Chantilly with these mo- 
tives in mind. In these estates there 
was a greatness and a strong and simple 
relation of parts one to another. The 
scale is always colossal and the empha- 
sis is rightly enough under the circum- 
stances placed not upon convenience but 
almost wholly upon appearance. The 
purpose was to express magnificance and 
was for effect wholly, and the results, 
while grand and impressive, are not as 
exquisitely interesting as in some of the 
Italian work. 
Relatively little of this grand but su- 
perhuman style spread elsewhere, al- 
though it is somewhat in evidence at 
Hampton Court in England and Schoen- 
brunn near Vienna, and Wilhelmshohe 
are respectively Austrian and German 
e.xamples of this influence. This influ- 
ence of LeNotre’s style is evident not 
only in the later work of Haussman and 
Alphand and Andre at Paris, but to a 
certain degree of L’Enfant in his plans 
for the city of Washington. 
English landscape design was as a 
rule more human, more influenced by 
mediaeval motives, and there was less 
emphasis placed upon the strictest axidl 
GROUNDS OF HAMPTON COURT IN ENGLAND. 
