Pioneer Information
While at Harvard, Webel interned with Warren H. Manning and Bremer Pond. Upon graduation he was awarded the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture and Harvard’s Sheldon Traveling Fellowship. Webel spent three years in Italy at the American Academy in Rome. Upon completing his fellowship, he apprenticed for the firm Vitale & Geiffert in New York City, leaving the firm in 1930 to open an office with his co-worker, Umberto Innocenti, on Long Island. During this same period he published two guidebooks on European gardens for the Garden Club of America.
Innocenti & Webel’s early work focused on the design of formal private gardens. Later work included a number of public landscapes. Significant projects include the American Cemetery in Ardennes, Belgium; the new campus of Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina; the headquarters for the Reader’s Digest Association in Pleasantville, New York; the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia and Keeneland in Lexington, Kentucky. Webel continued to work as a principal of the firm into his mid-nineties, long after Innocenti’s death in 1968.
