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Vigeland Sculpture Park

© Kirk Johnson

I have just finished a series of articles about nude statues in the formal gardens of Europe. I ended that series with the gardens at the Château of Versailles because no new style of formal garden has been developed since the late seventeenth century. A reader requested that I continue the series by writing about modern sculpture gardens, but I decided against doing that because most modern sculpture gardens aren't really descended from the formal tradition.

Most modern sculpture gardens are either paved courtyards or they are naturalistic parks in the English landscape style. From a design point of view, the main flaw with both the courtyards and the naturalistic parks is that they tend to be collections of sculpture rather than gardens which are ornamented with sculpture. This could almost be said of Versailles, but what keeps the gardens of Versailles from just being collections of sculpture is the strong design of the gardens and the fact that all of the sculptures are in a similar style.

The gardens of Versailles are dominated by axial planning; the individual sculptures are displayed along straight walks at regular intervals. All of the sculptures, however beautiful, play a supporting role in the garden's grand design.

To really be successful as gardens, sculpture gardens need to follow the example set by Versailles, or the sculptures need to be isolated focal points, like the classical temples which ornamented eighteenth century English landscape gardens.

Most naturalistic sculpture gardens are cluttered with far too many sculptures, and the Vigeland Sculpture Park, in Oslo, Norway, which was created by Gustav Vigeland (1869 - 1943), is one of the few to follow the example set by Versailles.

I doubt that most garden lovers would consider the Vigeland Sculpture Park to be a garden, since plants play an even less important role in this park than they do in the gardens of Versailles, but the Vigeland Sculpture Park is a great work of landscape architecture.

The graphic below is from the official website for the Vigeland Sculpture Garden, it shows how the entire park is dominated by a single 850 meters long axis. 212 sculptures in stone and bronze are distributed along this axis, but instead of seeming cluttered, the entire axis functions as a single work of art.

On the far right of the graphic is the park's entry gate. The axis begins at the gate and continues along a bridge which is 100 meters long and 15 meters wide. This bridge is adorned with 58 bronze sculptures on granite bases. The photograph below will give you an idea of the scale of Vigeland Sculpture Park, it shows people on the bridge leading to the main part of the sculpture park.

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