Ateliers Design 2023

We were delighted to take part in the Ateliers Design 2023, which brought together 350 students from three different schools: École des Ponts ParisTech, École d’architecture de la ville & des territoires Paris-Est, and École Penninghen, with the aim of imagining and building high-performance structures using compulsory materials.

The studio’s research activities intersect with the education and awareness of future actors in the construction of the city. We had the pleasure of creating and running our own workshop during the week-long event: the “Rue Canyon” workshop, with the following objectives:

• Get students thinking about the implications of solar radiation reflection on urban heat islands and on outdoor thermal comfort.
• Maximize and/or minimize the intensity of thermal sensations at pedestrian level with static and dynamic morphologies.
• Show students the performance of their prototypes using several blind tests and black globe temperature sensors.

Over the course of a week, the students had to build a system on Rue Canyon enabling them to personally experiment with these phenomena, as well as find a solution to an optimization objective based on contrasting criteria by designing facade prototypes that balance the use of reflective and absorbent surfaces in equal quantities.

Thanks to Cyril Douthe and Olivier Baverel for their help and support, to the engineers at Sense-City, Université Gustave Eiffel (Yan Ulanowski, Stéphane Laporte) for the in-situ microclimatic measurements, and to ADEME for helping us fund the research activities.

Well done to our doctoral student Matteo Migliari and Philippe Hannequart for producing this workshop, and to Franck Boutté who was a member of the jury.

→ Stéphanie Frank’s article available here