Born in 1932 in Nouvion-en-Thiérache (Aisne) and graduated from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1960, Adrien Fainsilber pursued training focused on urban planning and landscape art in Northern Europe and the United States, two disciplines to which many of his achievements bear witness.
He made himself 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 perfect metallic sphere, the Geode, in which the sky is reflected and which houses a cinema. He had received the same year the Grand Prix d'architecture.
He 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.
He had founded his first agency in 1970, the year in which the construction of the University of Paris-XIII in Villetaneuse began. The complex will be completed by 500 social housing units 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 in which 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 Urbanism and at the Paris-Tolbiac School of Architecture.