Historic Public Park Design – A Case Study On Complex Landscape History Education

Südpark Kleinburg Breslau

Abstract

The second half of the 19th century was extremely rich in establishing new public parks all over Europe. The urban renewal of Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, the new Gardenesque style of J. Paxton, H. Repton, W. Nesfield, Ch. Barry, C. Loudon, the functional approach of A. Alphand and F.L. Olmsted, and the the eclectic forms of the two great German designers P. J. Lenné and G. Meyer1 all influenced the ways cities looked at their unbuilt suburbs as new potentials for future urban development. There was a successful design competition in 1892 for a new public park, ‘Südpark’ of Breslau, Kingdom of Prussia (now Poland / Wrocław). The contest was unique in the sense that a part of the competitors’ documents were published on the columns of Möller’s Deutsches Gärtner Zeitung. The park was realised around 1900, and rich historical sources are still available (plans, maps, postcards) on its later phases, too. The park exists today, so one can follow the 120 years of historical development very clearly. This paper has two goals, the first one is educational – to explain complex sequence of interactive activity for garden-history classes with landscape architecture students (part I). The second goal is analytic: to get deeper understanding of the style and taste (composition, function, form, fabric, planting, details) of the turn of the century park design and the typical planning solutions of the time.