MArch/Architecte dplg, Paris-Belleville
M.S. Architectural History, Paris-Sorbonne
Ph.D. Art History, Paris-Sorbonne

Georges Farhat is a licensed architect and landscape historian. His research explores the interfaces between territorial structures and design techniques, optics and the historiography of perspective, epistemologies of landscape and urbanism. His scholarship on the practice of perspective in French 16th-18th-century landscape designs correlates manorial archives, technical literatures, and site topographies.

At U of T, Professor Farhat teaches landscape history and theory at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Prior to joining the Daniels Faculty, he was an Associate Professor at the National School of Architecture (énsa) at Versailles, France, where he co-directed the Master of advanced studies in landscape architecture, “Jardins Historiques, Patrimoine et Paysage,” a program jointly organized with the University of Paris-Sorbonne. He remains a founding member of the Laboratoire de l’école d’architecture de Versailles (LéaV). In this capacity, he conducted more than 20 funded research projects. 

Farhat is the editor of the volume Landscapes of Preindustrial Urbanism (Harvard University Press, 2020), an outcome of the 2017 International Symposium he co-organized with John Beardsley at Dumbarton Oaks—a Harvard University research institute, library, museum, and garden located in Washington, DC.

André Le Nôtre in Perspective (Hazan/Yale University Press, 2013) is the widely acclaimed reference book that Farhat co-edited as a companion to the 2013-2014 exhibition he co-curated at the National Museum of the Chateau of Versailles, along with didactic videos based on his reconstruction of design procedures.

The book received the 2015 Philip Johnson Exhibition Catalogue Award (Society of Architectural Historians), the J. B. Jackson Book Prize (Foundation for Landscape Studies), the Prix René Pechère (René Pechère Library), and Prix Redouté. Part of this project was developed within the Working Group “Perspective as Practice”/ Artists’ Optical Knowledge, based at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.

Other books include  André Le Nôtre. Fragments d’un paysage culturel: Institutions, arts, sciences et techniques (Musée de l'Ile-de-France, 2006) and Les années 1960 hic et nunc: architecture, urbanisme, paysage (Editions Recherches, 2010). 

Farhat is the author of numerous articles and reviews that appeared in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Annals of Science, Landscape Research, Journal of Landscape Architecture (ECLAS), Colonnes-Archives d’architecture du XXe siècle, Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Pages Paysages, Revue de l'art (CNRS), Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale et urbaine, and Les Cahiers du musée national d’art moderne, along with several book chapters in French, English, and Spanish. 

Farhat’s research has been supported, among others, by the Ministry of Culture and Communication of France, the Centre des Monuments Nationaux, the Académie d’Architecture de Paris, the Centre de recherche du château de Versailles, the Foundation for Landscape Studies, and Agence Française de Développement.  

Georges Farhat was a Senior Fellow (2014-2020) in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington D.C. He was also a Senior Fellow at the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities at Utrecht University (2017). In 2023 he held a Visiting Fellowship from the British Academy at the British Museum where he worked on the practice of perspective in the drawings of Jacques Androuet du Cerceau (1511-1585). 

Curriculum Vitae [PDF]