The artistic and social role of public gardens: Béla Rerrich and the renewal of public park design in early twentieth-century Hungary

Abstract

As in many countries, the renewal of existing urban parks became a central topic in civic and urban design in Hungary at the beginning of the twentieth century. Political issues influenced public open space design and the meaning attributed to it, relating to questions about tradition and modernity and to the artistic and social role of gardens. After the First World War, a new political reality brought about the possibility of creating public parks able to break with the historicist tradition rooted in the English landscape garden and the work of Peter Joseph Lenné and Gustav Meyer. This article explains how English and German reform ideas influenced landscape design thinking in Hungary in the first decades of the twentieth century by discussing the writings, designs and legacy of the architect Béla Rerrich, whose reforms led to a new way of designing public green spaces. Keyword: Public park design; Hungary; Béla Rerrich; urban open space; park reform