Ateliers Design 2024

During the 2024 edition of the Design Workshops organized by the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, Matteo Migliari and Yan Ulanowski (Sense-City, Gustave Eiffel University) led the "Rue Canyon" workshop.

In this innovative educational format, designed by Matteo as part of his research activities at the agency in 2023, several teams with diverse backgrounds (engineers from ENPC, architects from ENSA Paris-Est, and designers from Penninghen) worked on the "shape" of a microclimatic atmosphere. They developed building façade prototypes aimed at modifying people's thermal perception on the street during heatwaves.

After an introduction to the properties of materials affecting urban heat islands and outdoor thermal comfort, students created static prototypes to maximize or minimize thermal sensations using the same amount of reflective and absorptive materials. Although each prototype had similar average properties (albedo, emissivity, etc.), the students' thermal sensations, assessed through blind evaluations, ranged from "comfortable" to "very hot" depending on the shape and placement of the reflective and absorptive components.

Inspired by the static prototypes, the students then developed dynamic solutions to adjust thermal sensations using movable elements, addressing both summer and winter comfort. This exercise emphasized the technical feasibility of dynamic morphologies for creating comfortable urban layouts.

The "Rue Canyon" workshop is part of the experimental framework of the MESH 2C project (APR Modeval Urba 2019 by ADEME), which aims to design innovative solutions to improve thermal comfort in urban spaces while training the engineers, architects, and designers who will shape tomorrow's adaptive and comfortable urban environments.

A big thank you to Cyril Douthe from the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées and the entire team for organizing the Design Workshop Week, to the jury members including Raphaël Ménard (President of AREP) and Tom Gray (Associate Director at TESS Engineering Workshop), and to the students for their ingenuity throughout the week.

And congratulations to Matteo, with whom we are proud to develop research on these themes and their application in the agency's operational projects.