“形同儿戏”对雅克·西蒙(Jacques Simon)即时即地风景实验方法的反思

"Like a Game": Rethinking Jacques Simon's hic et nuncLandscape Experience

关键词:  风景园林  雅克·西蒙  即时即地风景经验  游戏  身体/精神环  自反和前自反过程

Key words:  landscape architecture  Jacques Simon  hic et nunc landscape experience  game  flesh-mind loops (french: boucles chair/esprit)  reflexive and pre-reflexive processes

摘要:

雅克·西蒙(Jacques Simon)作为法国当代风景园林的先驱，其实践思想长期以来因拒绝理论化及强调感性经验而被视为谜团。基于笔者2005— 2010年与西蒙合作的十余次“风景短暂介入”实践经验，结合参与式观察与现象学反思，旨在破译其“形同儿戏”的实验方法背后深层的运行机制及其对风景 认知与创作的普遍意义。首先梳理了以“经济”与“简单”为宗旨的法国风景设计脉络，继而通过“田野绘画”“修道院场景构建”及“贝洛赫公园干预”等具 体案例，论证了“游戏性”与“在场性”如何作为一种有效的风景认知工具。研究表明，西蒙的方法论核心在于建立了一种“身体/精神环”(boucles chair/ esprit)的迭代过程。在此过程中，设计者通过“前自反”的即兴行动与“自反过程”的循环反馈，实现了从被动观察者到主动的空间使用者和创造者的角色嬗 变。研究结果不仅还原了西蒙独特的教学与实践模式，更为当代风景园林学科如何处理人与自然的关系提供了重要的认识论与方法论启示

Abstract:

Jacques Simon (1929-2015) was one of the most original figures in modern French landscape architecture. Known for his precise control of large-scale topography, his practical knowledge of plants, and his broad experience across different territories, Simon left a body of work that remains an important reference for later landscape architects. Yet his design thinking is still difficult to define. In particular, his numerous ephemeral landscape interventions-temporary, improvised, and site-specific actions carried out in fields, construction sites, villages, and open landscapes-have often been regarded as playful or even disorderly activities. Their apparent lack of fixed rules and explicit goals raises an essential question: how did these seemingly game-like practices participate in Simon's understanding and creation of landscape? This paper reconsiders Simon's hic et nunc, or "here-andnow", landscape experiments from the perspective of embodied experience. Rather than treating them as marginal artistic gestures, it argues that these ephemeral interventions constituted a specific method of perception, inquiry, and design. Based on the author's firsthand participation in more than ten interventions with Simon between 2005 and 2010, the study reconstructs the process of these actions and reflects on their methodological significance. The research combines participant observation, narrative description, and phenomenological reflection. Through the dual position of observer and actor, the author examines not only Simon's way of acting in the landscape but also the transformation of her own perception, bodily orientation, imagination, and capacity for action. The paper first situates Simon's practice within the context of contemporary French landscape architecture. Unlike approaches that begin with abstract programs, formal composition, or representation on paper, Simon emphasized direct contact with the site. For him, landscape was not a passive object to be designed from outside, but a living field composed of forces, materials, constraints, opportunities, and temporal events. His pursuit of "economy" and "simplicity" did not mean simplification in a superficial sense. Rather, it referred to the ability to identify the right moment and the minimum necessary gesture through which the latent potential of a place could be activated. Several experiences are then analyzed. In the 2007 field-drawing experiment near Chaumont-sur-Loire, geometric figures were created at the scale of agricultural land with the help of a tractor, sunlight, grass, bodily movement, and aerial photography. This action revealed that landscape perception is not limited to vision: scale, direction, proportion, rhythm, and material resistance were gradually understood through the moving body. In Saint-Sever-de-Rustan, improvised interventions with local inhabitants and children showed how play could transform landscape into a shared medium of participation. In the nursery construction site of Belloch Park near Barcelona, temporary actions using found materials such as pipes, tarpaulins, tapes, poles, branches, and landform demonstrated how a sequence of small trials could disclose both the physical and social organization of a site. Based on these cases, the paper argues that "play" should not be understood as the opposite of serious work. In Simon's practice, play created a state of openness and heightened attention. It freed the actor from rigid preconceptions while requiring an intense response to the present situation. Each intervention became a small experiment, a provisional hypothesis tested at a real scale. Through the feedback produced by the site, the actor constantly adjusted intention, gesture, and interpretation. This process can be described as a series of "flesh-mind loops", in which sensory perception and conceptual thinking, bodily action and reflection, continually transform one another. At the level of a single instant, the intervention operates in a pre-reflexive mode; across a chain of experiences, it becomes a reflexive process through which the landscape is progressively understood. The paper concludes that Simon's ephemeral interventions were neither mere games nor anecdotal artistic acts detached from design practice. They formed a corporeal and operational method for approaching landscape as a dynamic situation. By acting with the site rather than imposing form upon it, the landscape architect becomes a learner of the earth, discovering how perception, imagination, and intervention may emerge together.