Tom
Leader Studio (USA)
Tom Leader (1956), Philippe Coignet (1973)
Tom Leader (1956), Philippe Coignet (1973)
In
2001, after spending some 20 years as a practising landscape gardener (16
of them as an associate with Peter Walker & Partners), Tom Leader set
up his own agency in his Californian birthplace, Berkeley. The self-appointed
programme of the Tom Leader Studio is made up of two interdependent areas
of activity: "Landscape Architecture", referring to operational
activities, and "Site Work", which points to a more experimental
aim involving investigation and research into the at once spatial and time-related
processes which are forever deconstructing and reconstructing territories.
In contemporary digital tools, Tom Leader sees a fruitful analogy of these
processes, and a way of approaching an understanding of them. Every site,
which is invariably one-off and specific, must be very closely analysed
with regard to the particular forces fashioning it: the dialectic between
natural elements (wind, sun, etc) and urban public place in Demonstration
Forest (1996); the morpho-geology of Californian "space" in Coastlines
(2001); the accumulation of waste as potential landscape-in-motion in Fresh
Kills Landfill (2001), etc.www.coignet.com
www.tomleader.com
www.junctus.com
(Tom Leader et Philippe Coignet font partie des fondateurs de ce site
consacré aux débats sur l'architecture et le paysage)