The Gardens at Kykuit
In 1906, as the construction of Kykuit had reached the first floor, John D. Rockefeller Jr. hired William Welles Bosworth to plan the formal gardens. Bosworth, like JDR Jr. a native of Ohio , had received his degree in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1889 and had worked for the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. While traveling in Europe between 1899 and 1901, Bosworth attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and there met Chester Aldrich, later hired to design the first stage of the house at Kykuit.
Bosworth's Kykuit garden, including the entrance facade, is considered his best work in the United States , where he practiced until the end of World War I. In 1913, with Kykuit virtually completed, JDR Jr. hired Bosworth to design a substantial eight-story townhouse (now demolished) at 10 West 54th Street in New York City , next door to his parent's home. Beginning in 1926, as general secretary of the French-American Committee for the Restoration of Historic Monuments, Bosworth supervised the restoration of the palaces of Versailles and Fontainebleau and the cathedrals at Rheims and Chartres , projects all funded in large measure by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
In 1905, the year before Bosworth began to work at Kykuit, Edith Wharton published Italian Villas and Their Gardens , with illustrations by the well-known artist Maxfield Parrish. Like The Decoration of Houses , the book became a key source on contemporary high style and a significant statement of renewed interest in classical design. Just as Kykuit's interiors show this influence, the gardens too reflect this aesthetic.
American gardens of the early twentieth century were largely based on two principles in which Bosworth and other American architects had been schooled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. One principle dictated that outdoor spaces be arranged in clear, orderly ways, positioned either along a main sight line (usually a walking path) or so as to terminate at a focal point, such as a sculpture or a beautiful view. The second principle dictated the use of strong vertical planes, such as evergreen hedges, shrub borders, or stone walls, to give definition to the outdoors. The gardens closest to the house were to be geometric and rectilinear. The outer reaches of the property were to be parkland . Bosworth consciously took as his model for Kykuit Italian gardens, which he termed "the origin of all subsequent garden tradition." Terraces in particular, he noted, were "so preferred by Italians for gardens on a hilltop site with the ground falling steeply away towards the view." Kykuit's similar topography - which Bosworth said resembled "an inverted oyster shell, flat only at the top and hardly flat there"- recommended the Italian model even more strongly.
Except for the 1913 extension of the entrance forecourt, the gardens Bosworth planned in 1906 are essentially what exist today - the inner garden with the brook garden and Temple of Aphrodite beyond, the west terraces with the swimming pool, and the semicircular rose garden. Trees that have died have been carefully and appropriately replaced while others have matured, but the architectural framework of the gardens is still visible. Bosworth's use throughout the garden of roughly cut stones and boulders is consistent with the traditional rustic aesthetic of a country garden; a city garden would have demanded finely cut stonework. Bosworth's goal was both to maintain and enhance the river view and to create an accessible garden with many and varied walks on which visitors and family might enjoy nature transformed. In the overall plan, the river view from the west porch took prominence. Bosworth intended to transform this view into a panorama comparable to the paintings of Thomas Cole or Frederic Church.
Any intrusions into the composition, including some old roads, were moved or obliterated. The Kykuit gardens required a difficult fusion between the demands of conventional Beaux-Arts garden plan, with long vistas and paths leading away from the house often on all four points of the compass, and the English idea of a house surround ed by rolling landscape. To achieve this marriage, Bosworth broke one of the traditional axes of the Beaux-Arts or Italian garden, the one that usually ran from the formal approach to a house through the building and into the garden for a considerable distance. Bosworth's east entrance to the house is along an axis that continues due west through the hall, music room, and alcove room but is abruptly terminated by the west porch so that the Hudson River landscape can take over as the principal view.
The east/west axis is then shifted a hundred feet to the south to be on line with the Italianate tea house and the lower west terraces. The second or north/south axis runs unbroken through the house with long garden vistas but is designed off center so that it passes not through the middle of the building but through the west suite of family rooms, the library and dinning room. Thus from these rooms two impressive garden vistas present themselves - south to the Temple of Aphrodite and north to the semicircular rose garden with its maze (no longer extant) and loggia.
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