Chapter 2: Leisure and The Built Environment
2.2 Leisure as Authentic Experience in Space
2.2.2 Festive Space and Temporality of Leisure
time to see both locations. 100,000 items were displayed over 10 kilometers by more than 15,000 contributors. The host country, the United Kingdom, took up more over half of the exhibition area with artifacts from the country and its empire.
It was Prince Albert's dream to showcase industrial wonders from throughout the world at the Great Exhibition housed in the 'Crystal Palace.' As a showcase for high-end goods, the enormous glass edifice featured a Roman villa and 50-foot-tall replicas of the statues of Ramesses II from the Temple of Karnak in Abu Simbel. Models of West Indians and Native Americans adorned the dioramas depicting plants and animals from all around the planet. Exotic and distant cultures were depicted in small form for the first time. Plays, operas, and pantomimes were performed in the gardens. The Great exhibition at the Crystal Palace not only just mark the point of departure for new world technology development not just for the industrial or working revolution, but also the great leap forward development of technology to create the activity to reflect on human pleasure on leisure activities.
interrupt and offer a brief respite from the constraints and norms of everyday life. At this point, ‘time out of time’2, a series of rituals are enacted through which the core values.
- Market Fair to Pleasure Park as First Festive Leisure Space.
Roman Park as the predecessor
The ancient Romans loved nature, and they brought as much of it into their city as they possibly could, wrote about the virtues of the country life and agriculture and painted their homes to look like they were outdoors while being indoors. As a result of Pompey the Great's presentation of a porticus in 55 BC, the city's residents imagined gardens when they heard the term "porticus" used in reference to subsequent imitations.
Porticus were central Rome's parks in the first century AD. A central porticus built a cohesive narrative out of juxtapositions of architectural and garden components that focused the visitor's eye on politically crucial juxtapositions. The results show that the complex was highly organized.
The Bartholomew Fair First Monthly market fair
Figure 30 The Bartholomew Fair in 1720 as describe in painting Retrieved from www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item105483.html
When it came to summer Charter markets in London, Bartholomew Fair was the best of the best. At that point, the fair had devolved into a carnival-style extravaganza rather than a business event. Wrestlers, fire-eaters, dwarfs, bears, monkeys, and tigers in
2 The leisure in form offestive time to escape from dull daily life time. (Falassi, 1987)
cages all competed for the audience's attention alongside tight-rope walkers and puppet displays. Astrologers provided horoscopes and hawked supposedly miraculous treatments.
As a stench of roast pork filled the air, beer and tobacco vendors pleaded for business.
Amidst the cacophony of yells and fiddles, drums and rattles, there were plenty of toys, gingerbread, puppies and mousetraps to go around.
After a former court entertainer was granted a license by Henry I in 1133, the fair began. Starting on the eve of St. Bartholomew's Day in August, it was held in the open space of Smithfield, just outside the city walls, and it grew into the largest garment market in the country and London's biggest annual jamboree. Until 1604 the Lord Mayor of London presided over the opening of the fair every year. At that point, the fair had devolved into a carnival-style extravaganza rather than a business event.
The date of the fair was moved to September because of the new calendar.
The eighteenth century saw it proceed at full speed. Foucault's idea of Heterotopias can be depicted by the wide range of fancy and exotic activities that are developed from time to time. Middle-class opposition of the fair's loutishness, drinking, and obscenity grew over time. There were too many muggers and thieves around, so the city established stricter regulations. It was a shell of its former self by the 1840s, and it took its final bow in 1855.
Vauxhall Gardens Park+food+facilities lots of people came to amuse and refresh
Figure 31 Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in 1751 Retrieved from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vauxhall_Gardens
For more than two centuries, the south bank of the Thames has been home to the Vauxhall pleasure gardens, a haven for locals and tourists alike. The birthplace of modern art, architecture, and music, starting in 1729. As a pioneer of mass entertainment,
mass catering, outdoor lighting, advertising, and all of the logistics needed in running one of Britain's most sophisticated and profitable businesses in the eighteenth century, Thomas Telford deserves special mention. For the past 150 years, references to Vauxhall have been as common as references to "Broadway" would be in the future. Polonized forms of Vauxhall can be seen, for example, in the Polish word for a pleasure garden (foksal) and the street name "Foksal" in Warsaw.
The Gardens consisted of several acres laid out with walks. Initially admission was free, the proprietors making money by selling food and drink. Both of the Vauxhall pleasure garden and the Bartholomew totally reflect the idea that that festive of leisure space possess a transformative quality from various activities that combine the mass leisure in as open space. A variety of activities represent different culture that are simultaneously represented the series of exotic experience that can define the authenticity experience that visitor cannot find in the daily life or working place that draw the attention from the public to define their own leisure experience in these space of festive heterotopias.
- Amusement Park to Circus Caravan
Bakken (The Hill) Copenhagen Denmark
After being used as a hunting ground by the Royal Family, World First Themepark is now open to visitors. This enormous wooded park north of Copenhagen, currently known as Jaegersborg Dyrehave or Dyrehaven, is where Kirsten Piil first discovered the natural spring that would become Dyrehavsbakken in 1583. Water quality in central Copenhagen was bad during this time, therefore residents sought out the spring.
Large numbers flocked to the spring in the spring because many believed it had healing abilities. As a result of the influx of performers and vendors catering to the big audiences, the modern-day amusement park was born.
Because the region where the spring was located was part of royal hunting grounds, it was closed to the public for some time. As early as 1669, King Frederick III intended to build an animal park, triple its original size, and restrict entry to the royal family and the upper crust to the newly created enclosure. Dyrehavsbakken didn't really take off until it was reopened to the public in 1756. Attracting other artists and
entertainers, such as the clown Pjerrot, who remains a fixture in the park to this day, Bakken's rising renown throughout Europe brought them back.
Figure 32 Bakken in 1825 and still operate until today.
Retrieved from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyrehavsbakken
Even during the Napoleonic Wars, Bakken continued to thrive. The construction of steamships and railroads in the 19th century, as well as good exposure from poets and novelists, contributed to its rise in popularity. It's also worth noting that there have been advancements in terms of entertainment. When Sansouci and Bakkens Hvile first opened in the 1870s, they quickly became popular. The Circus Revue and mechanized moving rides were popular in the twentieth century. More up-to-date rides and amusements have been added throughout time.
Circus to theme park as the first mankind pure leisure life
Theme parks are carnivals that have been frozen in space and time. Fairs, vaudeville theater, band pavilions, festivals, and other time-based fantasies have been popular forms of entertainment for the general public since medieval times. Carnivals have always acted as a social safety valve, a chance for the general public to convert the sacred into the profane through the use of humor and satire. Amphitheatre Anglais in Paris was inaugurated by Philip Astley as the first purpose-built circus in France in 1782, which led to 18 subsequent permanent circuses in towns around Europe. (Botterill, 1997)
In 1793, Antonio Franconi, an Italian, took over Astley's Parisian circus on a lease. The first circus was held in a canvas huge tent in 1826. The first modern circus was brought to the United States in 1793 by an Englishman named John Bill Ricketts. In the 1780s, he joined the Hughes Royal Circus in London, and in 1792, he emigrated from
England to Philadelphia to open his first circus. The first comprehensive circus performance in the United States was given by Ricketts in Philadelphia in 1793.
Equestrian Thomas Taplin Cooke brought his circus tent back to England from the United States in 1838. An increase in the popularity of easily transportable itinerant circuses occurred about this time in the United Kingdom. They chose to exclusively perform at huge locations and to travel by train in 1872 since the circus had grown so large. Several circus owners devised a method for loading the carts onto railroad flat carriages. Runs and crossover plates between cars were used to design a system of ropes and pulleys, coupled with the first sort of movable leisure experience that can deliver festive space to any location.
For centuries in Europe and the United States, traveling circuses provided an opportunity for spectators to watch acts from throughout the world that they wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to see. Crowds gathered to watch the "herds and droves"
of camels, zebras, and other exotic animals—the treasures of European colonialism—
arrive before sunrise on "Circus Day." Children and adults alike were enchanted by the construction of a nine-acre tented city and a morning procession along Main Street that advertised the circus as home to an amazing collection of performers and animals from all over the world.
For isolated audiences, the vast circus condensed the entire world into a pungent, exciting, and informative sensoryium of sound, smell, and color, right outside their front doors. What the locals did not realize was that their adored exotic performance was also rapidly becoming a projection of American culture and power. The American circus came of age at the same same historical era when the United States changed from a fledgling new republic into a contemporary industrial nation and rising global power. The tremendous success of American circus spawned other exportable manifestations of American giantism, like amusement parks, department stores, and shopping malls.(Janet M.
Davis, 2017)
In the midst of the evangelical Second Great Awakening (1790-1840), an era of religious revivalism and social change, Wilmington, Delaware city leaders prohibited public amusements. The circus owner created a canvas "pavilion circus" just outside the city borders in order to evade local authorities after discovering the prohibition during a tour.
The introduction of the canvas tent transformed the American circus, solidifying its status as a nomadic form of entertainment. Capital expenditures for tenting equipment and
personnel costs necessitated constant relocation, giving rise to the distinctly American one- day stand. On the frontier fringes of society, entertainment-starved inhabitants flocked to the tent circus, which traveled by horse, wagon, and boat as the nation's borders grew westward and southern. (Janet M. Davis, 2017)
The railroad was the single most important catalyst for making the circus truly American. Traveling seamlessly on newly standardized track and gauge, make mobility and traveling circus was immensely profitable. Railroad showmen embraced popular Horatio Alger “rags-to-riches” mythologies of American upward mobility. They used their own spectacular ascent to advertise the moral character of their shows. The development of the festive space together with the transportation technology made the festive heterotopia accessible for the public without any limitation in classes like before. With the economic factor that this type of leisure business generated a rapidly growth for both American and Europe and is really arouse the leisure pleasure development to the public.