全球最美城市公园
BBC乔纳森·格兰西（Jonathan Glancey）(2016年1月6日)
纽约中央公园。
在第30号街和第34号街之间铁路线边蜿蜒，从宾夕法尼亚车站（Penn Station）一直延伸到哈德逊河（Hudson River），这就是在2014年9月末开放的颇受欢迎的纽约高线公园的第三期，也是它的最后一期。这是一个极富想象力的城市公园，它的走向顺着1980年废弃的高架货运铁路的路线。自从五年前公园的第一期开放以来，数以百万计的纽约市民和来曼哈顿的游客到这里放松身心，享受闲趣。同时，高线公园还带动了周边房地产开发，让曼哈顿西部长约1.5英里的通道重新焕发活力。
明年，由伦佐·皮亚诺（Renzo Piano）设计的惠特尼博物馆（Whitney Museum）新馆将在高线公园旁边重新开放，而不久以后，哈德逊场（Hudson Yards）也将被掩盖：16座新的摩天大楼会遮蔽铁路轨道。五千个新住宅、学校、办公楼、娱乐场所、集市和咖啡馆将带来一个全新的城区。虽然高线公园并不是曼哈顿下西区（Lower West Side）复兴的唯一原因，但是富有创意的城市公园一直以来都是城市发展的催化剂，也是在高楼大厦和繁忙的街道之间让人得以自由呼吸的空间。
纽约人在高线公园享受休闲时光
于1842年开放的位于利物浦陶克思（Toxteth）的王子公园（Princes Park）属于首批现代城市公园， 它由水晶宫（Crystal Palace）的设计师约瑟夫·帕克斯顿（James Pennethorne）和建筑设计师詹姆士·佩恩斯隆（James Pennethorne）操刀设计，周边规划了中产阶层的优雅住所。正是这个公园的存在，吸引来了高端置业者。这一模式很快在英国传播开，并传遍欧洲和大西洋彼岸。1850年，美国景观设计师、社会评论家弗雷德里克·罗·奥姆斯特德（Frederick Law Olmstead）到访位于梅西河（Mersey）另一边的帕克斯顿（Paxton）的伯肯海德公园（Birkenhead Park）。这座公园建于弗雷德里克到访三年前开放，是英国首座公共筹资建成的公园。弗雷德里克在这座精心整饬的城市公园中漫步，之后他写道：“我承认在民主的美国，我想不出能与这座大众公园相提并论的事物。”
当然，此前也有皇室狩猎场转为向公众开放，比如都柏林宏伟的凤凰公园（Phoenix Park），还有辉煌的伦敦公园（London Parks）。但是，这种完全依靠公共筹资建成的公园是一种新现象。于是，生于伦敦的建筑设计师卡弗特·沃克斯（Calvert Vaux）和奥姆斯特德开始着手规划最著名的城市公园之一，位于曼哈顿网格状的19世纪道路核心的中央公园。虽然中央公园曾经历过衰败、犯罪和荒废，但是如今它又受到了欢迎，并蓬勃发展。中央公园长2.5英里，宽0.5英里，这片巨大的绿地一年接受大约3500万人到访。即使它的周围高楼林立——有好处，有坏处，也可以说没有关系——它仍然大到你可以让你摸不着方向，同时你还可能看到浣熊、红尾鹰、负鼠目和啄木鸟。
一年有大约3500万人造访中央公园这块巨大的绿地。（图片来源：Getty）
公园与休闲
与此同时，拿破仑三世则敕令乔治-欧仁·奥斯曼男爵（Baron George-Eugene Haussmann）重新规划巴黎的一大块楔形区域。奥斯曼最辉煌的成就就是布洛涅森林公园，它仿造了伦敦广阔的海德公园（Hyde Park），却又毫无疑问地超越了它。在巴黎的西边，奥斯曼设计了一块高低起伏的英式园地，其面积是中央公园的两倍半。布洛涅森林因为占地广大，所以在这里可以看见巴黎生活的许多不同方面，从太阳落山后常常在公园出没的妓女，到著名的跑道和郁郁葱葱的植物园，这里还是温莎公爵与温莎公爵夫人（Duke and Duchess of Windsor）的故居。公园里有一个驯化花园（Jardin d’Acclimatation），那里是小朋友的游乐场，有木偶剧院、旋转木马、青少年科技博物馆以及让人眼花缭乱的各种游乐设施。弗兰克·盖里（Frank Gehry）设计的令人震撼的路易威登基金会建筑（Fondation Louis Vuitton）也在园内，这个艺术中心大胆地堆叠弧形木材、钢材以及玻璃，看起来极似一场帆船比赛。这绝对是巴黎最主要的景点之一，而它既不在大街上，也不在建筑物里，而是在一个城市公园里。
路易威登基金会建筑注定成为巴黎的主要景点之一。
由于公园是逃离和放松的地方，在这里你可以做白日梦，悠闲地度过几个小时，所以早期的城市公园遍布富有激情的、神秘的甚或神话故事般的建筑。约翰·纳什（John Nash）在摄政公园（Regent’s Park）周围建造的有白色灰泥装饰的新古典并排建筑是具有魔力的梦幻之作。在我小时候，坎伯兰联排（Cumberland Terrace）就像魔咒一样，让我仿佛在浪漫的新古典主义中探险。透过直拉窗，穿过白色的罗马灰泥柱，你可以聆听摄政公园中异域动物的低吼、嚎叫和呼唤。
纳什在摄政公园旁边的层叠建筑是一场浪漫的新古典主义冒险。
在约翰·纳什受命摄政王子——后来的乔治四世——在庞大的皇宫周围设计摄政公园的几年前，瑞典的古斯塔夫三世（Gustav III）下令斯德哥尔摩歌剧院的建筑师和布景设计师路易·让·德普瑞（Louis Jean Desprez）为哈加公园（Haga Park）的皇家守卫建造土耳其式营帐。德普瑞没有让他的客户失望，满足了他对异域风情的爱好。在这个斯德哥尔摩皇家公园——在向公众开放后很久——他建了三个铜制“苏丹帐篷”，颜色采用了瑞典国旗上的三色。 这些帐篷让到访这个梦幻公园的游客感到惊喜，而且它们还饰以引人注目的其他建筑装饰，特别是到隆冬时，积雪下看更美。现在一个是博物馆，另一个是餐厅。
趣味花园
不过，可能最奇妙的城市公园是位于巴塞罗那由安东尼·高迪（Antoni Gaudí）设计的桂尔公园（Park Guell）。这个私人投资项目原本是要模仿摄政公园的发展模式，建起大量的高价别墅，吸引新兴的中产阶层。但后来没有这样做——可能我们都应该感激，因为长期以来，公园属于所有人，这里是尝试建筑幻象和结构创新的沃土。大多数访客会坐在马赛克蛇形长椅上，俯瞰市中心的景色。这种极为有机的、多彩的、不理性的建筑构思不太可能基于极其宏伟的多立克式回廊。长椅的设计一方面秩序井然且磅礴大气，另一方面其优美动人的曲线又不显得正式。
巴塞罗那的桂尔公园原本是私人投资项目，后来成为建筑师发挥奇思妙想的乐土。（图片来源：Getty）
你可以在全世界的大多数城市公园里发现这种戏谑感。我惊讶于日本人在东京的代代木公园（Yoyogi Park）的樱花大道旁尽情玩乐——从模仿猫王，到“街头时尚”着装。公园旁边有静谧的明治神宫，供奉着1912年去世的明治天皇的灵魂。而就在附近，造型诡异的猫王模仿者正在以一种明治天皇绝对无法理解的方式扭动着身体。
高线公园的最后一期以及巴黎的路易威登基金会建筑都表明城市公园越来越有特色。不论它们是否有助于城市经济的发展——通常来说是有促进作用的——城市公园让我们能够与动植物一起共享快乐。城市公园本质上是民主场所，不看人的收入或背景。在这里，我们可以做白日梦，玩游戏，健身，躺在折椅里，遛狗，赏花，在办公室外面吃午餐三明治。公园让我们觉得自己所生活的城市是个不错的地方：与最新的摩天大楼和公寓楼不同，城市公园是真正的无价之宝。
（责编：友义）
The world’s most beautiful parks
By Jonathan Glancey,6 January 2024
Looping between 30th and 34th streets around railway yards that stretch unceremoniously from Penn Station to the Hudson River, the third and final section of New York’s popular High Line opened in late September. This imaginative city park, following the route of an elevated freight railroad abandoned in 1980, has given a great deal of relaxed pleasure to millions of New Yorkers and visitors to Manhattan since the first section opened five years ago, while prompting a spate of property development revitalising a one-and-a-half mile corridor of Manhattan’s West side.
Next year, the Whitney Museum will reopen in a new building designed by Renzo Piano right by the High Line, while soon enough the Hudson Yards will be covered over as 16 new skyscrapers conceal the railway tracks and a whole new city quarter complete with five thousand new homes, schools, places of work and entertainment, markets and cafes comes to life. While the High Line cannot be given the entire credit for revitalising Manhattan’s Lower West Side, inspired city parks have long been agents for urban development as well as welcome breathing spaces between buildings and crowded streets.
In fact one of the very first modern city parks – Princes Park in Toxteth, Liverpool opened in 1842 to designs by Joseph Paxton of Crystal Palace fame and the architect James Pennethorne – was planned with elegant middle-class homes around it. It was the presence of the park that attracted upmarket homebuyers, and the pattern was soon repeated not just in England, but throughout Europe and across the Atlantic, too. In 1850, Frederick Law Olmstead, the American landscape architect and social critic, paid a visit to Paxton’s Birkenhead Park, on the other side of the Mersey. Opened three years earlier, this was the first publicly funded park in Britain. After a stroll through this well tended city park, Olmstead wrote, “I was ready to admit that in democratic America there was nothing to be thought of as comparable with this People’s Garden.”
Yes, there had been royal hunting grounds, like Dublin’s magnificent Phoenix Park, given over to the public and the glorious London Parks came about this way too, yet this new form of truly public park was something new. With Calvert Vaux, a London born architect, Olmstead went on to plan one of the most famous urban parks of all, Central Park at the heart of Manhattan’s defining grid of 19th-Century streets and avenues. Today, despite a chequered history of decay, crime and torpor, Central Park is very much loved and thriving. At two-and-a-half miles long and half-a-mile wide, it is an enormous green space visited by some 35 million people a year. And, even if it is overlooked by a plethora of skyscrapers – good, bad and indifferent – it is big enough to feel happily lost in while spotting raccoons, red-tail hawks, opossums and woodchucks.
Parks and recreation
At much the same time, Emperor Napoleon III commissioned Baron George-Eugene Haussmann to re-plan a great wedge of Paris. One of Haussmann’s finest achievements was the Bois de Boulogne, designed to emulate and doubtless to better London’s spacious Hyde Park. On the western edge of Paris, Haussmann formed a rolling, English-style parkland, two and half times the size of Central Park. The Bois de Boulogne is so very big that it has absorbed many different aspects of Parisian life, from the prostitutes who haunt it after sunset through famous racetracks and lush botanical gardens to the one-time home of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. One section of the park, the Jardin d’Acclimatation, is given over to a children’s amusement park, complete with a puppet theatre, carousel, junior science museum, a kaleidoscope of rides and entertainments and, from 27 October to Frank Gehry’s sensational Fondation Louis Vuitton, an art centre looking for all the world like a regatta of sails formed in daring, overlapping curved sections of timber, steel and, mostly, glass. This is guaranteed to become one of Paris’s major attractions, centred not in a grand rue, boulevard or place, but in a city park.
Because they are places of escape and relaxation, places to daydream and idle hours away, from early on city parks have been showcases of exuberant, mystical and even fairy tale architecture. The white stucco terraces John Nash built around Regent’s Park in the 1820s are magical, dream-like creations. From childhood, I fell under the spell of Cumberland Terrace, a thrilling adventure in romantic Neo-Classicism. From the big sash windows of the flats it houses today between white stucco Roman columns, you can listen to the grunts, howls and calls of exotic animals in Regent’s Park Zoo.
A few years before John Nash was commissioned by the Prince Regent – later George IV – to design Regent’s Park around what was to be an enormous royal palace – Gustav III of Sweden called on Louis Jean Desprez, architect and set designer for the Stockholm Opera, to create Turkish military tents for the Royal Guard in Haga Park. Desprez did not disappoint his patron’s passion for the exotic. Here in this royal Stockholm park – long since open to the public – he built three “Sultan’s Tents”, fashioned in copper and painted in stripes the colours of the Swedish flag. These remain a lovely surprise for visitors to this dreamy park, adorned with other architectural eye-catchers, especially when seen in the depths of winter covered in snow. One is a now a museum; another, a restaurant.
Pleasure gardens
Perhaps, though, the most fantastic city park of all is Barcelona’s Park Guell, designed by Antoni Gaudí. Originally, this private venture was meant to have been developed along the lines of Nash’s Regent’s Park, with a number of expensive villas for the city’s newly affluent bourgeoisie. It was not to be – and perhaps we should all be grateful, for the park has long been for everyone, a playground of rich architectural fantasy and structural daring. The highlight for most visitors is the long serpentine, mosaic-covered bench with its views out across the city centre below. Improbably, this most organic, colourful and apparently irrational of all architectural conceits is supported by a singularly imposing Doric colonnade, as orderly and grand as the bench is sinuous and enticingly informal.
You can find this sense of playfulness and order in generous city parks worldwide. I was startled by the informality of Japanese people out to enjoy themselves with gusto – from Elvis impersonators to walking ‘fashion statements’ – along the cherry-blossom lined avenues of Yoyogi Park in Tokyo. Here is the serene Himeji Shrine, devoted to the spirit of the Emperor Meiji who died – a god presumably – in 1912, and, alongside him, those all-shook-up Elvis impersonators sporting outlandish quiffs and writhing in a manner that would have been wholly incomprehensible to Emperor Meiji.
With the latest section of High Line, and with Gehry in Paris, city parks are evidently as special as they ever have been. Whether or not they are good for the economic life of cities – and they usually are – urban parks make us and the flora and fauna we share them with happy. They are inherently democratic places, for everyone regardless of income or background. They are spaces where we can all daydream, play games, keep fit, slump in deckchairs, walk the dog, peep at flowers, munch sandwiches at lunchtime away from offices and, generally, feel that the city – our own particular city – is a benign place after all: unlike the latest skyscraper or apartment block, they are truly priceless.