On Wednesday, January 20, 2016, Georges Farhat invites you at the Alliance française for a lecture dedicated to the French Garden to its most eminent master: André Le Nôtre.

The lecture will begin with an introduction to the main features of the work of André Le Nôtre (1613-1700), garden designer of the King Louis XIV and the most famous proponent of the French formal garden. Then, the talk will measure the extent to which, since the beginning of the 20th century, Versailles and Le Nôtre have come to inspire practice and theory in garden design, urbanism, and planning. We will consider an extremely fertile cultural exchange among different disciplines and fields across national boundaries and historical times. We will see how, moving beyond absolutism, the model of the French formal garden, construed as an open-ended spatial type, has been going through a mutation–conceptual and technological–in contrasting, if not contradictory, political regimes and esthetic orientations.

Projects, realizations, and texts will illustrate such exchanges: from gardens to urban landscapes, from Cubism to minimalism and from the Mall in Washington (1901-1902) to Axe Majeur, west of Paris (1980-2006).

Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, Georges Farhat is a garden and landscape historian. He has edited “André Le Nôtre. Fragments d’un paysage culturel: Institutions, arts, sciences et techniques” (Musée de l’Île-de-France, 2006) and curated « André Le Nôtre en Perspective, 1613-2013 », the exhibition that marked the 4th centennial of Le Notre’s birth (Château de Versailles, Oct. 2013-Feb. 2014). His co-edited book, “André Le Nôtre in Perspective” (English and French editions, Hazan/Yale University Press) has been awarded the 2015 Philip Johnson Prize by the Society of Architectural Historians. His forthcoming book is entitled “The French Formal Garden/Le jardin régulier français”.

More information on: yalepress.yale.edu

The lecture will take place in French.