RESTORATION OF HISTORIC GARDENS AND LANDSCAPES
Author: Fekete Albert
Academic reviser: Herczeg Ágnes, Anthony Gall
Publisher: Szent István Egyetem, Tájépítészeti és Településtervezési Kar
Year of publication: 2019
This book was prepared at the Department of Garden Art and Garden Technology, Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning, Szent István University.
This publication is a revised version of the author’s dissertation. The first part is a study of garden art, the main objective of which is to interpret the relationship between landscape and garden, to describe the visual value of landscape and to define the key concepts closely related to the subject of historic garden conservation. At the same time, it sheds light on the image and the spectacle of the composed garden, and on the conscious design of landscape as a process in the history of modern gardens. It shows, through examples from Europe and Hungary, that the artistic, emotional effects and symbolic messages of the designed landscape have been an essential element of garden design since the Renaissance.
The European overview provides a conceptual framework for the horticultural evaluation the author has carried out in the second chapter of the book and is based on research and analysis of the visual relationship of one hundred Transylvanian castle gardens. The comprehensive research, based on historical excavations and field studies, was aimed, among other things, at identifying the internal and external visual relationships of the castle gardens and their compositional role.
The case studies in the third and final part of the book illustrate the potential applications of the research findings in landscape architecture. The restoration of the visual relationships of several different sites (castle gardens of historical value) are presented in a didactic way. They give insights into the design process, the design thinking and approach, the background to regeneration strategies that are born out of historicity and contemporary needs. The examples presented are my own work and hopefully demonstrate that exploring the internal visual relationships of historic gardens, restoring the landscapes and axes that define landscape compositions, is a key tool for the renewal of historic garden and landscape structures. They illustrate and emphasise the importance and relevance of restoring the SIGN in historic gardens, and demonstrate that the results of a decade and a half of research on the subject can be applied to specific design situations in sites with different characteristics.