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. He works on the interfaces between territorial structures and design techniques, optics and the historiography of perspective, and epistemologies of landscape and urbanism. His scholarship on perspective in French 16th-18th-c. landscape designs correlates manorial economy, technical literatures, and site topography.

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 he edited 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 currently editing the volume Landscapes of Pre-Industrial Urbanism, an outcome of the 2017 Dumbarton Oaks Symposium he co-organized with John Beardsley.

Farhat is the author of numerous articles and reviews that appeared in 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, Centre des Monuments Nationaux, Académie d’Architecture de Paris, Centre de recherche du château de Versailles, Foundation for Landscape Studies, Agence Française de Développement, and the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities (Utrecht University) where he was a 2017 Senior Fellow. He remains a founding member of the Léav, research laboratory of the school of architecture of Versailles where he previously taught. He currently serves on the Board of Senior Fellows in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington D.C.

Curriculum Vitae [PDF]