Young office Franklin Azzi Architecture, founded just 12 years ago by its charismatic principal, is hitting cruising speed this season with several major projects on its books. Last September, in partnership with Chartier Dalix and Hardel & Le Bihan, he won the international competition for the revamp of the prominent but rather unloved Tour Montparnasse in Paris. In November, he completed a major cultural project in Nantes, the new School of Fine Arts in the restored Alstom shipyards.

And this coming spring he’ll be completing a large, mixed-use redevelopment in the heart of Paris’ sought-after Rive Gauche. But if you look for a house style or a bankable personal signature in Franklin Azzi’s work, you won’t find one. Instead, this graduate of Paris’ École spéciale d’architecture, who also spent two years at the multidisciplinary Glasgow School of Art, champions lateral thinking. At Lille’s Gare Saint-Sauveur, which he converted into a cultural centre in 2008, the extremely tight calendar – just five months – prompted him to use all the product and furnishing contracts negotiated by the municipality for ongoing construction sites so as to meet the deadline.

For the first two rounds (of four) in the Tour Montparnasse competition, it was not a scheme that the team presented but rather an exhaustive analysis of the programmatic potential, evaluated with respect to the current building code. Meanwhile in Nantes, Azzi has supplied a no-frills, highperformance art-production machine – a large part of whose technical gadgetry is invisible to the casual eye – which shelters under the restored glass roofs of the former marine workshops. For this grandson of a painter, while architects are not artists, there is nevertheless artistry in what they do: “For me architecture is a mixture of demonstrative reasoning and manual action. I like the pertinence of philosophy, which is close to the idea of demonstration. And it’s precisely this pertinence that I seek in my projects – a pertinence which, moreover, is a form of poetry.”

Read this article of Andrew Ayers in the issue n°423 of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, still available in our online shop.