2002 - Philippe aux pieds du futur WTC

Avec Tom Leader Studio, Philippe  participe à de nombreux concours internationaux à New York, Santa Fe et Los Angeles.  Avec le cabinet, il fait notamment partie d'une équipe finaliste (les architectes S.O.M) au concours du World Trade Center à New York en 2002.

(Photos : Tom Leader Studio, Wikipedia)

Tom Leader explique le projet :

“On the WTC, I (along with Philippe Coignet who works with me) have been contributing ideas about the ground. Not so much about where the vegetation is or isn’t but more to do with the 8 story, 16 acre hole in the city. That’s Ground Zero now. And the ground is really all that’s left. So how that gets filled seems extremely important - how you build into the ground as well as into the air, maybe even more important. We didn’t feel we could just start layering in retail and transit concourses in the standard, sort of “pancake method” with huge floor after floor covering the site and blot out this tremendous void. I felt we should try to maintain it as a space by making what I’ve been calling “transparent ground”, as opposed to the “solid ground” surrounding it. But rather than have a sad, empty void, it should be filled with a complex network of transit and public activity, with retail being a large but not exclusive component. There is a huge amount of transit activity below grade, two subway lines, and the PATH train that connects all of New Jersey and getting all those people up 8 stories to street level. And they want to get 1 million SF of retail in there. At an early point I wrote this to an artist friend here who I was exchanging ideas with by e-mail-.” “I have a vague intuitive idea about the ground, where people move, but also about how the 8 story, 16 acre hole gets filled - maybe with ‘transparent ground’ that fills the void with glass levels like water, but usable and full of the mass movements of people to all the trains and subways, open markets, huge amounts of watery, mysterious space devoted to daily life.”

Project Interview / San Francisco Magazine / 2002 December 5