Associate Professor Georges Farhat was recently invited to give a series of talks at the Louvre Museum in Paris and at the Maison Française d’Oxford in England about the work of 17th century French landscape architect André Le Nôtre, and his legacy in the art, architecture, and landscape architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries.

 

The lecture delivered at the Louvre focused on the landscapes of Sceaux, Fontainebleau, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Vaux-le Vicomte and Versailles. It addressed the construction of movement and gaze in the gardens of Le Nôtre by means of anamorphosis and collimation.  

 

One of the talks presented in Oxford explored the invention of “topographic perspective” as it developed on terrain, in drawings, and treatises. It also addressed some of the issues arising from cultural transfers and the circulation of optical knowledge between 1650 and 1750. The other lecture analyzed the relevance of the work of Le Nôtre in modern garden design (from cubism to minimalism) and town planning (from City Beautiful to urban sprawl).

 

Georges Farhat is currently co-curating an exhibition on André Le Nôtre which will take place at the Chateau of Versailles from October 2013 to February 2014. Farhat recently co-edited André Le Notre in Perspective, which will be released in English (Yale U Press) and in French (Hazan, Chateau of Versailles) in 2013. His next book, The French formal garden (Birkhauser), will also be published in both English and French.