Views of and from Roads Where two roads bearing very different kinds of traffic must cross each other, - as for instance where, exceptionally, a service road crosses an approach road on a private estate, or where a cross line of commercial traffic must intersect a park road, -one road may be bridged over the other. Usually the less important road will go beneath, although the topography may determine without appeal which shall be the higher road. If the service road passes over the pleasure road, it should usually do so on a well-designed bridge. If the pleasure road passes above, perhaps a wider bridge may be used, with planting on its sides, or the service road may even go through a short tunnel, giving space for planting enough to make it quite invisible from the pleasure road. A road serves other purposes in landscape design than mere provision for ease of traffic. It is taken by the traveler as a guide: he assumes that a road will lead him to the places to which he is supposed to go. Roads can thus be used to display to those using them certain beauties of a park or of a private estate. If this enjoyment of views from the road is a matter of considerable importance in the whole design, pains should be taken that the spectators come to the various outlooks and objects of interest without retracing their course,* in pleasant sequence, and prepared by each one for the next to come, as where, after passing through a shady wood, a road comes to an outlook over a sunny landscape. Views taken up and down the road must be considered: they are inevitably seen by every one who travels upon it. Where a road changes direction, a view out at the point of change, continuing the line of the road which approaches it and centering on an interesting distant object suitably enframed by the planting about the road itself, is a desirable possibility which the designer should have in mind. (See Drawing XV, opp. p. 122.) Views to be enjoyed from a road, where the spectator looks sharply to the right or left, should of course be enframed by the planting along the road itself, but they should not be enframed with so small an opening that the traveler has been carried by before he has had time to enjoy the view. It is usually desirable also that interesting views should not be seen to right and left. of the road at the same time, if it can be arranged that they be seen alternately. * Cf. Chapter XI, p. 309. These last two considerations apply especially to roads designed for fast pleasure traffic. The planting along the roadside can be made a considerable factor Planting and in its beauty, indeed, where there are no particular distant views, Roads perhaps the greatest factor. The character of the planting will vary with the surroundings, from the succession of private properties of the suburbs and the trees and shrubs of the planting strip of a parkway to the hedgerows and flowers and shrub-grown walls of the countryside and the natural trees and undergrowth of the woods. In any case the best design will probably be to seize upon the particular character of each landscape unit through which the road passes, and develop it to its best expression, as far as this is possible in a narrow strip along the road, for itself alone or as a foreground to a more distant view. Thus a sequence of different effects will be presented to any one passing along the road. It should be remembered that the scenes presented should be such that they may be grasped and enjoyed by a spectator moving at some speed. Roads, if they are to be comfortable and pleasant to those who travel upon them, must be shaded. In formal designs and on our streets and ordinary country roads, a more or less consistent and equallyspaced line of trees serves this purpose best. In a naturalistic design, however, such a line of trees might well be an incongruous element in the landscape, and plainly betray the road which it was planted to conceal. In such cases, informal plantations of trees and shrubs may be used, and the whole so designed that the road shall seem to have been run through a fortunately preëxisting series of groups of foliage, rather than that the location of the foliage masses should seem to be dependent on the road. The side of the planting next the road must inevitably to some extent be parallel to the line of the road; but the sides of the planting masses away from the road should be related not to the road, but to whatever open area may lie beyond and be bounded by them. This necessary placing of planting near the road makes the road all the more a line of demarcation between area and area, between design unit and design unit in the composition. The location of the road must be studied from this point of view also, then, for on its posi Paths in Design Form of Paths tion may well depend the main organization of the whole design. (See Drawing XXXV, opp. p. 298.) Footpaths in naturalistic landscape are subject to most of the considerations which we have discussed in regard to roads, but being smaller, less important, and able to turn sharper angles and surmount steeper gradients, they may be and should be fitted more closely to the topography than are roads. Where they are used in conjunction with roads, as in park design, and even sometimes in land subdivision schemes of large lots in a varied landscape, the paths need not slavishly follow the road, but may depart from it to surmount a steep gradient in an easier way, to go around a ledge or a tree, even to seek some point from which a view may be obtained. In some designs, indeed, it is not desirable to parallel the road with the path, if the foot traffic may be carried to its destination in some other way as well, since the wheel traffic and its attendant noise and perhaps dust is not the most desirable adjunct to a pleasure path. As a general principle, a path, like a road, should go from one point of interest to another as directly as is reasonable under the circumstances. Even in a fairly open country, it is usually possible, by judicious disposition of trees and shrub masses and minor accidents of ground, to make the separate open stretches of path from curve to curve short enough to be fairly direct and still not uninteresting. Where a path continues, however, for a considerable distance over an undulating open country, something more is likely to be necessary for its pleasant appearance than merely a succession of these minor unified stretches from interest to interest. In places at least, it may be well to have a certain correspondence of the curving of the path to the undulation of the ground, - not running in the straightest way over the knolls, not running on a level line around them, but making a sort of compromise between the directness of the path and the suggested more than real difficulties of the topography, - which taken as a whole will make the path more a part of the landscape. This subtle play of curve of surface on plan and profile is an extremely difficult thing to study, except in its larger aspects, on the drafting-board in the office. It must be staked out upon the ground, studied, re-staked, changed in plan and profile perhaps only by inches, but in this way delicately fitted to its particular situation before the designer can properly feel that he has done his best.* In designs of a generally loose texture, where beauty of definiteness of form is not insisted on, and especially in rough and broken country, and in wooded country where only a small portion of the path may be seen at any one time, continuity of curve in a path usually becomes of no value whatever (see Drawing II, opp. p. 30), and adaptation to the topography and direction towards points of larger view and to little minor interests of fallen log and outcropping rock are the results to be sought. Such paths, if there is any considerable traffic, particularly in places open to the public where the danger of destruction is greater, should be definite enough and convenient enough to lead the traffic along them and not to tempt people to short cuts and wanderings destructive of the scenery. The path surface, too, should offer reasonably good footing, but beyond this point the less definite, the less conspicuous, the less exactly parallel-sided the paths are, the better. Where a path which carries but little traffic must cross a lawn and cannot on account of the scale of the design or for some other reason be concealed by the modeling of the ground, it may be constructed of stepping stones set in the turf, slightly sunken so that the grass beside and between the stones conceals them in any distant view. Where the traffic is very light it may go directly over the turf, and if it be possible by the erection of temporary barriers to direct the traffic over one turf area while another is recovering, very considerable traffic may be handled with no particular detriment to the landscape appear ance. In formal landscape design, the roads and paths take their share Roads in with the turf areas, the parterres, the curbs, the low shrub masses, and Formal Design the flower beds, as parts of the pattern with which the ground is decorated. The roads and paths, however, can never escape from the * Cf. Pückler-Muskau's account of his care in staking out a path up a hill, in his Andeutungen über Landschafts-gärtnerei, 1834, p. 114-116, and Atlas, plate V e. Also quoted in Parsons' Art of Landscape Architecture, 1915, p. 134-135. (See ReferENCES.) See also the French so-called informal designs as illustrated, for instance, in André's L'Art des Jardins, 1879, p. 787. Q Paths in fact that they were first made to be used. They must be and appear to be suited to the traffic which passes over them, and they must lead with reasonable directness along the lines over which this traffic might be expected to pass. In a "greeting" in a park, in a tree-colonnaded vista of broad parkway, in a straight stretch of driveway commanding a view from a river bluff, the designer may express the uses of his road in an effective formal composition. Similarly, a drive may approach a building axially, terminating in an axial circle or a forecourt, or perhaps there may be two drives defining a central grass panel, or a semicircular drive swinging in from the street, passing the door, and swinging out again on the same curve. In any of these cases the road is forming or defining a definite and balanced composition. In the larger formal schemes, such as a great formal park like the Mariannenpark at Leipzig, or in this country in connection with building groups, like college buildings, the roads may be used as part of the formal pattern of the ground. At a smaller scale this is difficult if the roads are to remain otherwise useful, since the necessary width of the roads and the necessary radius for the turning of vehicles tend to make the roads out of scale with the other units of surface decoration. Since foot traffic can turn at a sharp angle and can occupy more or less width of path according to circumstances, paths are much more easily handled as formal ground-surface decoration than roads are. How far they may be subjected entirely to the decorative needs of the scheme will be determined largely by the amount and kind of traffic which they are to bear. In the Harvard College "Yard," for instance, though the roads bear some slight formal relation to the buildings, most of the paths are purely utilitarian, laid out where the traffic tensions require them, and made inconspicuous simply by being no wider than necessary to accommodate those who walk upon them. This is an extreme case, of course, because the student going to a recitation is probably the man of all men the most impatient of circuities. In a garden † on the other hand, which is or ought to be a place of leisure, *Illustrated with other modern German parks in an article in Gartenkunst, June 1914, vol. 16, p. 181-195. † For an example of how paths may be used as surface decoration in formal design, see discussion under the Garden, Chapter XI, p. 243. |