French architect and urban planner Adrien Fainsilber, author of the Cité des sciences in Paris and the Geode, died on Saturday at the age of 91, his family announced to Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Monday February 13. .
Born in 1932 in Nouvion-en-Thiérache (Aisne) and graduated from the National School of Fine Arts in Paris in 1960, Adrien Fainsilber pursued training focused on urban planning and landscape art in Northern Europe and in the United States, two disciplines to which many of his achievements bear witness.
He became known to the general public in 1986 with the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie in the Parc de la Villette, in Paris, and its metallic sphere, the Geode, in which the sky is reflected and which houses a cinema. In the same year, he received the Grand Prix d’architecture.
Adrien Fainsilber is also the author of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg, inaugurated in 1998, and which testifies to the important place reserved for technology to ensure fluid circulation inside structures.
In 1970, he began the construction of the University of Paris-XIII, in Villetaneuse. The set will be completed by 500 social housing for students built from 1972 to 1974 and by other university and research premises, from 1974 to 1975.
He also designed, from 1972 to 1975, the first technological university in France, in Compiègne (Oise), and the courthouse in Avignon, created in 2000, the year he founded the architectural firm Adrien Fainsilber and associates. , which he left in 2007.
Adrien Fainsilber was a member of the Academy of Architecture. He has taught at the Paris Institute of Urban Planning and at the Paris-Tolbiac School of Architecture.
