After being raised both in Paris and India, Olivier Philippe studied at the Special School of Architecture and Landscape of Paris, after which he joined the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He later graduated as a landscape architect from the National School of Landscape of Versailles. His professional career started with the crucial encounter with Alexandre Chemetoff, with whom he collaborated for five years. Afterwards, he became a consultant at the Parc de la Villette Public Establishment, involved in developing the park of Bernard Tschumi. During this period, he met Henri Bava and Michel Hössler, with whom he decided to create Agence Ter in 1986. One year later, and this for a period of seventeen years, he started teaching at the École Nationale Supérieure du Paysage, Versailles, in the framework of a project workshop, addressing all scales of the urban and territorial project, always with the landscape as driver for development.
From 1995 to 1998, he was State Consultant Landscape Designer for the Aisne County. From 1999 to 2006, as the only associate based in Paris, he was leading vast urban projects such as Euralille 2 (the Inhabited Wood), Portes d’Arcueil (La Vache Noire) or the North Bahrain New Town, whilst managing at the same time major public space and park projects (Cormailles Park in Ivry and, more recently, the Royal Canal Linear Park in Dublin and the Parc de Billancourt in Boulogne-Billancourt).
In 2008, Olivier Philippe chaired the NAJAP jury (new albums of young architects and landscape designers) and became member of the French Europan governing board. The projects he currently leads include the Metropolitan Park of Saint-Ouen, the Square of “Les Glories Catalanes” in Barcelona, the renovation of the Royal Air Force Museum in Hendon, London and the urban and landscape design for the Condorcet Campus in Aubervilliers, Paris. In 2011, he taught at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design along with his two associates in the frame of a landscape and urban design studio. Olivier Philippe has also been guest professor at other institutions, as for example landscape design studio teacher at the ETSAB in Barcelona in 2016.
