On the landing, a model of the Cité des électriciens indicates that we are in the right place. We enter a workshop bathed in light where, on the shelves, the models of past achievements and future projects sit next to raw materials and colorful tiles heralding the future. It is in this setting conducive to creation that Philippe Prost installed the agency which he created with his partner Catherine Seyler. In 2019, two other partners – Gaël Lesterlin and Lucas Monsaingeon – joined them to structure the team, which now has about 30 employees. « Architecture is a collective sport, we do not mark the goal alone, it is not a solitary work », says the architect, stressing the place of the various partners, « design offices, contractors or companies ».
In fact, the work of Philippe Prost is entirely guided by the idea of the collective and it is this sense of joint work and inclusion that the jury of the Grand Prix national de l'architecture wished to reward last October. This distinction, the most prestigious in France in the discipline, rewards the entire work of an architect. “ It’s a once-in-a-lifetime award, a recognition of the work done, a dedicationA way of also crowning two inherent qualities, according to him, in every architect: the ambition » to imagine projects that will last over time, and « humility » to do nothing alone.
From music to architecture
However, its beginnings in architecture are somewhat the result of chance. In 1983, it was rather an artistic tropism – he began his musical studies in parallel – that pushed him towards the organ, his favorite instrument, which fascinated him. « I was in S-12 and I didn’t want to go to engineering school but to music. » His parents were reluctant to see him embark on an artistic career, so he joined an architecture school on the advice of his piano teacher. « He told me his brother was doing Archi and it looked really cool », he confides in a smile. Conducting his studies and his instrumental practice together, it is a click, sparked by one of his teachers, that decides his career. « When architecture catches you, it doesn’t let go. It is something that is quite difficult to define: you can do everything with almost nothing. This passion has never left me.”
After his studies, Philippe Prost became interested in research: he immersed himself in books on the history of architecture and archives and prepared a thesis on military engineering as well as an exhibition at the Invalides on reliefs. All these projects are the starting point of a meeting that will change his career: the one with Anna and André Larquetoux, owners of the Vauban Citadel in Belle-Île-en-mer. The couple is looking for an architect capable of tackling this pharaonic project to rehabilitate the building. “ I get a letter from them asking for my services, but I tell them I have no experience. They say: This 15-year project will put Philippe Prost, who set up his own agency in 1993, on the spot.
A work on site memory
From his studies and experience, Philippe Prost keeps a passion for Vauban, to whom he dedicated a book in 2007 and whose concerns, according to him, are in line with the aspirations to energy sobriety of today. « He is a pioneer of architecture since his first obsession was to collect rainwater and today everyone realizes that it is necessary to consume less resources. He was obsessed with the economy of means and the sustainability of his works. » More than three hundred years after the death of the genius engineer, architect and urban planner, Philippe Prost is trying to take up in his own way these great precepts more than ever. The Ring of Memory, a large international memorial dedicated to the 580,000 victims of the First World War who fell in the North and the Pas-de-Calais, is built in durable materials allowing it to last another hundred years.
The North of France and in particular the mining basin has particularly inspired the architect who also rehabilitated in 2017 the City of Electricians, in Bruay-la-Bussière, one of the oldest in the region. On the plot, the agency has imagined a complex of housing, schools but also artists' workshops and an interpretation center intended to tell the industrial past of the region. On this project, the workshop worked with historians as well as engineers on new techniques for storing energy and then releasing it if necessary. Next to a renovated old building, another with a similar volume was built with materials such as wood or recycled materials. A way to explore the notion of memory and to innovate without distorting sites often forgotten by history. « It is a way to write a new page, to give a contemporary dimension without breaking with the past, to evolve without becoming amnesic. »
“No blank page”
Philippe Prost’s architectural workshop has specialized in the creation and contemporary intervention of the historic building, as recently with the redevelopment of the Monnaie de Paris, another big project in his workshop. “ When you shave, you feel that nothing is possible anymore. That is very rare. » Before each project, the architect asks himself the question of the site and its history. This is how he transforms the former national cartridge factory in a cluster of animation drawings in Bourg-les-Valence (Drôme), the former brickyard of Gournay (Val-de-Marne) as a centre for national choreographic development or is preparing to transform the Grand Stables of the Palace of Versailles into campus of excellence dedicated to arts and heritage. " There is no blank page! The ground always has a trace, an old piece of building. Architecture is born from the confrontation with these constraints. » For the Ring of Memory, it was the terrain’s own relief that inspired the architect to place part of the 345-metre-long oval structure overhanging the void to express the fragility of peace.
Philippe Prost, who likes nothing so much as to cross disciplines and dialogue with ancient masters – he quotes Umberto Eco and Baudelaire in his lectures and draws inspiration from Mozart for the First World War Memorial – is also distinguished by his commitment to the transfer of knowledge to future architects. « Teaching is about passing on things that I believe in while receiving a lot in return. Some of my students' questions question me. It’s enriching on both sides. » He is also working on the frontier of science and architecture with a laboratory located in Paris-Belleville National School of Architecture working on materials and new construction methods. “ It is a way to go further, to accumulate knowledge and make it known. » And – above all – to prepare the future with the architects of tomorrow.
Missing Renée Gailhoustet, National Grand Prix d'architecture 2022 Honorary Award
Last October, at the same time as Philippe Prost, she was awarded the Grand Prix National d'Architecture Award of Honor for her entire career. Renée Gailhoustet, 93 years old, died in early January in Ivry-sur-Seine, where she lived. This city was one of the playgrounds of this architect, one of the first women to practice this profession in her own name. She was in fact the chief architect of the renovation of the city center where she imagines a more open, freer, more creative living space and her first construction was that of the Raspail Tower, listed in 2022 as a Historic Monument. She also worked on outdoor spaces and housing in the Maladrerie district of Aubervilliers.
Faced with the standardized and productivist construction of the time of the Glorious Thirty in the social housing, Renée Gailhoustet led a reflection on the individualization of these dwellings with buildings marked by the figure of the triangle that favor exchanges between the inhabitants, the relationship to the outer space and the fluidity of circulation.
Until the end of her career, her work and her research were recognized and praised by the world of architecture, both in France and abroad, and many of the ensembles she built benefit from the label Architecture Contemporaine Remarquable.
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