Franklin Azzi
Hall
Description
Designer of the Year — Sept. 2020 & Jan.2021
With every new edition, Maison&Objet Paris elects a Designer of the Year to honour one of the most outstanding names in industrial and interior design worldwide.
Participants
Franklin AzziArchitect & Founder - Franklin Azzi Design
Franklin Azzi
Architect & Founder - Franklin Azzi Design
Within his Parisian agency founded in 2006, Franklin Azzi uses a cross-category approach that is nourished by intersecting views and disciplines. By constantly bringing architecture, interior design, design and contemporary art into dialogue, with the support of the particular endowment fund, he practices a certain art of designing and building that is open to all scales and types of spaces. Franklin Azzi infuses his commitment as a designer/builder into every aspect of his designs, from large-scale to the smallest detail of manufacturing, whether it’s a public or private commission, in France or abroad. In doing this, he infuses heritage buildings with fresh energy, invents the living and working spaces of tomorrow (The Bureau, Be In for LVMH), rethinks urban planning with total respect for existing structures (Beaupassage for Emmerige), and develops removable and detachable structures (the pavilion on the rooftop of Galeries Lafayette). Such are the many spaces that are defining a new horizon of possibilities, with a contemporary, sustainable approach that serves its users.
«His projects encompass everything from urban planning to interior design»
In his own work, he resolutely avoids conjuring up an immediate "wow" effect. Instead, he aims to contruct buildings that are ageless and will stand the test of time. Many of his projects to date have involved rehabilitating existing structures.They have included the transformation of a postal sorting office in Lille into a cultural venue, the creation of the Nantes Fine Arts School in a former storehouse, and the crafting of the Beaupassage-Grenelle lifestyle and housing complex in Paris' 7th arrondissement. With each, his approach was the same: "to respect the past while celebrating the future".
Among Azzi's other commissions have been fashion boutiques for Christophe Lemaire, Isabel Marant, Lacoste and the LVMH group; a door handle for the Italian hardware manufacturer PBA; and the Holiday Café in Paris. Currently on the drawing board are a Mama Shelter hotel in Dubai, a multipurpose building on the Champs-Elysées, a temporary structure that will house a restaurant and bar on the roof of the Galeries Lafayette department store on Boulevard Haussmann; and boutiques in New York and Shanghai for the Chinese fashion brand EP Yaying.
He also regularly undertakes assignments related to the world of work, whether they be the Workstation and Dock en Seine office buildings in the Paris suburbs or the Deskopolitan Voltaire co-working project in the east of the city, which incorporates among other things a gym, kindergarten, restaurant, barber's shop, rooftop vegetable garden, and nine room hotel over 6,000m2. "We live in a time where things need to be more versatile and adaptable", he asserts.