Royal Gardener Planted The Seed Of Urban Planning At Versailles
France's Chateau of Versailles has pulled out all the stops for one of its favorite sons, gardener Andr Le Ntre, who designed the palace's famous gardens. This year, to mark the 400th anniversary of Le Ntre's birth, several of the garden's fountains are being restored and the chateau is hosting an exhibit on his life through February 2014.
Experts say Le Ntre's work was so groundbreaking, it continues to influence contemporary urban architecture.
'The Interlocutor Of Kings'
Andre Le Ntre was born in 1613 into a family of royal gardeners, but he would take the profession way beyond a trade. That's according to Jacques Moulin, Versailles' current gardener — or architect — the 30th since Le Ntre.
"Le Ntre transformed the profession of gardener into a high-level royal service and turned his trade into a grand art," Moulin says. "He became the interlocutor of kings and princes across Europe and built a huge art collection."
Le Ntre was 25 years old when Louis XIV was born. Despite the generation gap, the two men worked together to transform Versailles and Paris, where Le Ntre designed the Champs-lyses and the Tuileries Garden. Architect Georges Farhat helped put together Versailles' Le Ntre exhibit.
"This was the time when, at an unprecedented scale, planning was addressed in royal and manorial domains," Farhat says. "People were trying to address issues such as how to cope with long distances and extensive surfaces when you want to deliver a coherent spatial composition."
To do that, Le Ntre developed new solutions, such as anamorphosis and collimation, an optical principal that plays on relationships between levels, heights and distances.
"On a very flat terrain, such as what we have at Versailles, if you want to show something along a 3-km-long axis, you have to find optical solutions in order to compensate for the shortening of all the different elements in the sequence," Farhat says. "So the farther they will be, the larger and longer you will have to make them. But you need a rule for this. Anamorphosis and collimation is a very good device for this."
From Marshland To 'Disneyland'
Fahrat says the roots of modern urban planning can be found in the gardens of Versailles, with its avenues and allies radiating to infinity.
To see Le Ntre's genius for yourself, you can board a small train at the palace. It makes stops deep within the grounds at the two mini palaces where French kings kept their mistresses. Versailles guide Pamela Grant says this was all marshland until Le Ntre got hold of it.
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