Private Parks

PRIVATE PARKS

Yesterday we visited the private parks known as the round gardens. This was a beautiful place and on the ride back to Copenhagen Toby offered my some wonderful extra knowledge on some places that as an architect I had to visit. Here's the question:

 Based on your experiences, describe the different identities of Copenhagen’s public and private greenspaces.

The first greenspace we visited yesterday were the Round Gardens. These gardens were quite beautiful, and had an amazing design intent behind them. They were designed using the concept of cells, so each is a stretched circle. Each plot is oriented differently, and each has slight variations of design inside. Certain rules had to be followed, such as the size of the house could not be extravagant. The rules for the buildings were that the houses could be no larger than one sixth the ground area, one story tall, and one meter on the inside of the hedge. The other gardens we visited were the purely vegetable garden plots where people focus on vegetables and do not particularly have a place to sit and relax.

These private spaces seemed like the country club version of the public parks we visited inside and around the city. I enjoyed the quality of relaxation and privacy the private round gardens had. The hedges were not too high to be completely sealing in nature, and allowed some views around to give just enough openness to the space. Many of the public parks had problems balancing private and public spaces. Obviously the public parks had more to offer in terms of recreation, but the private gardens offer a truly beautiful getaway from the city, which is exactly what they were designed for. The success of the design baffled me, as many of the public parks, especially Superkilen, did not achieve all the goals they sought after to complete. Often times this is broadly due to the scale difference between the private and public space, but at the same time Ostre Anlaeg offered everything that it originally set out to do. So in conclusion the private gardens were both successful in their design intent as well as offering some added beauty, where the public parks (meant for larger more public use) were mediocre at being successful and some even deteriorated beauty instead of adding it.

These are just the gardens, so no captions