- Rendez-vous de l'Institut
- Conference
Liancourt “Les Belles Eaux” : promenade parmi les fontaines d’un jardin d’exception du XVIIe siècle by Christelle BRINDEL and Marie-Caroline TRANSY – Château de Bénouville
Liancourt ‘The Beautiful Waters’: a stroll through the fountains of an exceptional 17th century garden
Located in Oise, just 70km from Paris, the fabulous lost gardens of the Château de Liancourt were developed in the 1630s, under the direction of the Duchess Jeanne de Schomberg, the neglected wife of Roger du Plessis-Liancourt. Better known as Liancourt-les-Belles-Eaux, this first French example of a ‘fountain park’ is a major – yet little known – reference in the history of garden art. Myriads of fountains, water jets, ponds, canals, waterfalls and special effects once punctuated the gardens’ composition, inspiring, in particular, the plans for the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, some thirty years later. The exhibition will be in the form of a commented walking tour through the finest hydraulic works of this lost garden.
Chistelle Brindel
Christelle Brindel is an ENSP – National School of Landscape Architecture – Versailles graduate and also has a Master’s Degree in ‘Historic Gardens, Heritage and Landscape’. Over her nine years of experience as a landscaper of historic gardens, she encountered the great diversity of issues and challenges associated with these sites. Hence, she has collaborated with Marie-Caroline Transy on a number of landscaping projects, ranging from historic diagnoses to development work supervision. First and foremost, she strives to promote and to implement reasoned garden restoration. Her broad approach includes and affords space to usage, economic realism, maintenance, authenticity and emotion. In 2012, she worked on the elaboration of a plan to protect the vestiges of the Liancourt gardens.
Marie-Caroline Transy
With a double diploma in history and history of art (University of Paris Sorbonne I and IV), Marie-Caroline Transy is also qualified in ‘Historic Gardens, Heritage and Landscape’, specifically in conservation and restoration methods for heritage landscapes. She applies her sensitivity, her research and her skills in analysing the terrain, to serve a global operational process. The aim is for each project to revive the soul and the identity coherence inherent to each site, in order to better prepare them for the future. As such, she has formed a complementary two-woman team with Christelle Brindel since 2010, in the agency they created together: Jardins d’Histoire. They have already worked on a large number of reference projects, equally in the private and public sectors. In 2012, she worked on the elaboration of a plan to protect the vestiges of the Liancourt gardens.