Carlos Thays
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| Carlos (Charles) Thays | |
 landscape architect in France and Argentina
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| Born | August 20, 1849 Paris, France |
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| Died | January 31, 1934 (aged 84) Buenos Aires, Argentina |
Carlos Thays (August 20, 1849 – January 31, 1934) was a French-Argentine landscape architect.
[edit] Biography
Carlos Thays was born Charles Thays in Paris, France in 1849, and was a landscape architect, a disciple of the famous French landscape architect Édouard André. Carlos Thays arrived in Argentina in 1889, recommended by Jean Alphand to the Argentine pioneer Miguel Crisol, who contracted Thays for a year to design and carry out the Parque Sarmiento, Córdoba,. During that time Thays became so in love with the young country that he decided to spend the rest of his life there. Not long after moving to Argentina he began working as a landscape architect principally in Buenos Aires, and was named Director of Parks and Walkways for the city of Buenos Aires in 1891. This position gave him much power over the design of the city's open spaces, and his legacy is still strongly felt in the city's open spaces today.
Major projects included tree-planting along streets, remodeling and designing public plazas and walkways as well as designing completely new parks and expanding older ones. Major parks and plazas that particularly show Thays intervention in the city of Buenos Aires are the parks Centenario, Lezama, Patricios, Barrancas de Belgrano and the plazas Constitución, Congreso, and Mayo. Thays' French background is reflected in many of his designs--it is for good reason that Buenos Aires' parks and plazas are sometimes compared to similar designs in Paris.
In 1896 he designed the Parque San Martin. One of Thays' largest undertakings was the Bosques de Palermo, a sweeping area of open land covering several square kilometers filled with thousands of trees, flowers, many fountains, and monuments in the barrio of Palermo.
Another pet project of his was the Buenos Aires Botanical Garden, for which he petitioned the city government to set aside land (almost 8 hectares) which he designed in sections to display together the plants of each of the continents, with a large sedction devoted to the native plants of Argentina, which were ignored in garden-making at the time. The garden has the first Gingko biloba planted in Argentina. Completed in 1898, it bears his name, the Jardín Botánico Carlos Thays de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires. Its greenhouse, first erected at the Paris Exposition of 1900, was brought in sections from France to be reassembled here, one of five glasshouses in the garden. The brick house in English Regeny neo-Gothic style, in which he lived during construction and planting of the garden, now houses the herbarium and a small botanical library.
Thays worked most extensively in Buenos Aires precisely at a period in the city's history where it was growing extremely fast as a result of immigration, especially from Spain and Italy. It is often noted that had Thays not insisted on high standards of design and frequent open spaces, many of the city's current open spaces would probably not be so. While Thays worked primarily in Buenos Aires, through the years he also worked on many civic projects in other areas of Argentina, remodeling the Parque Sarmiento, Córdoba, creating the Parque 9 de Julio in San Miguel de Tucumán, the Parque Independencia in Rosario, the Parque General San Martín in Mendoza, as well as urban planning and park design in Uruguay. He was responsible for the design of the park which provided the setting for the luxurious Club Hotel de la Ventana, near Sierra de La Ventana in Buenos Aires Province, which opened in 1911.
Thays died in Buenos Aires in 1934.
