Jacques Henri Auguste Gréber

French architect. Working extensively in North America, Gréber specialised in landscape architecture and urban planning, collaborating with the City Beautiful movement. Son of sculptor Henri-Léon Gréber, he attended the École des Beaux-Arts before moving to the United States, where he partnered with architects McKim, Mead and White. In the garden of Whitemarsh Sala (1916-1921) in Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania he provided an emblematic example of classic Le Nôtre-style French garden. One of his better-known projects is the Benjamin Franklin Parkway “masterplan” in Philadelphia (1917). His work gained greater recognition in the States than in France, where between the two World Wars he worked at a number of city plans. In Italy, in the Garden of Marlia, he established a dialogue between historical and contemporary gardening: on the one hand the restoration of a Baroque garden, on the other a new project inspired by a revisitation of this historical style through the lens of artistic avant-gardes reinterpreting geometries of form and a contemporary restyling of the bosquiets. The Baroque garden transitions into a new garden, while modernist research is reflected in the vibrant settings of the Baroque garden.

Look at the card of Villa Reale di Marlia