Led by Paul Azzopardi and Étienne Feher, ABF-LAB was founded after winning an international architecture and urban planning competition in Seattle, USA, in 2012. The Paris-based studio brings together architects, engineers, and designers who are influenced by environmental, energy, and climate issues. Their practice seeks to create a dialogue between environmental innovation and land-use changes through bioclimatic scenarios, resulting in architectural and urban planning projects with a strong forward-looking vision across all areas of sustainable development.
Paul Azzopardi, an urban planning engineer, graduated in Urban Systems Engineering from the University of Technology of Compiègne and holds a master's degree in Physics of Architectural Environments from the National School of Architecture and Landscape Design of Bordeaux. In 2007, he joined the engineering firm Elioth/Egis as an environmental engineer, where he later headed the urban modeling and research and development departments. Later, he was appointed deputy director of foresight at the Egis Group. His research focuses on architectural and urban environments, as well as building resilience and adaptation to climate change. He is also responsible for the building energy efficiency program at Paris Diderot University (Paris 7), within the Master's program in Interdisciplinary Approaches to Future Energies (AIED).
Étienne Feher is a DPLG-qualified architect. He graduated from the Malaquais School of Architecture in Paris in 2002. He has worked as an architect in prestigious firms such as Ateliers Jean Nouvel, Patrick Berger, Claude Vasconi, and Nicolas Michelin. He received a Franco-American scholarship from the French Academy of Architecture and was awarded the Grand Prize for Architecture by the French Academy of Fine Arts in 2006. Between 2008 and 2011, he worked in engineering studios (Elioth/Egis, Bollinger+Grohmann and VP-Green), where he designed facades for architectural projects that required environmental criteria.
