Jacques Simon: Articulture (English, French, Hardcover)

The French landscape architect Jacques Simon's love for nature first developed on his father's tree farm and then deepened when he traveled as a young man to Sweden and then Canada, where he attended art school in Montreal while working as a lumberjack. Between 1957 and 1959, Simon studied at the Ecole Nationale de Horticulture. He has since become an important link in the renewal of French landscape architecture, combining the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian garden cultures he absorbed in his travels with classic Latin structures. He works as often as possible in situ, and does not shy away from driving the tractor himself. Since the 1980s, Simon has also been creating transitory landscapes--patterns in cultivated fields and on snowy grounds. His projects range from the design of a 15,000-acre park in Normandy to a giant Eiffel Tower built from bales of hay.