Daniels Associate Professor Georges Farhat and writer and historian Patricia Bouchenot, have recently been appointed co-curators of the 2013 exhibition that the Château of Versailles will dedicate to the fourth centennial of André Le Nôtre (1613-1700), Louis XIV's garden designer. 

This exhibition will focus on Le Nôtre's landscape architecture around Versailles, including his work prior to being appointed there. The exhibit will also feature the subsequent critical success of the French formal garden model, from the mid-17th century to the present.

In relation to that exhibition, Georges Farhat will be co-editing a book in French and English dedicated to bringing the scholarship developed in the field over the past 30 years to a larger audience.

Georges Farhat has also been engaged to study the topographical and optical structures of the Grand Canal at Versailles. This project builds on research for his paper entitled "Optical intrumenta[liza]tion at Versailles: From Measuring the Earth to Leveling in Seventeenth-century French Gardens" (presented at the Dumbarton Oaks International Symposium in Washington DC, May 06-07, 2011), Technology and the Garden (to be published in 2013), and the publication of his article "Les mesures topographiques pour le Grand Canal de Versailles" (co-authored with Bouchenot) in Sciences et Curiosités à la cour de Versailles (Exhibition catalogue, Oct. 2010-Feb. 2011, Château of Versailles, Paris, Réunion des musées nationaux, 2010).