Du 30.03.2026
au 03.04.2026
workshop
sur les sites de l'Ensa Paris-Est et de l'école des Ponts

For the past 25 years, the school has partnered with École des Ponts and École Penninghen to organise Les Ateliers Design.
An intensive week of workshops bringing together engineering, architecture and design students around a shared ambition to design and build an object with a mechanical function.

Divided into multidisciplinary design and creation teams, the 350 students spend a week designing a variety of objects – bicycles, gliders, boats, bridges, towers, shelters, hulls, fans – with the sole constraint being their feasibility using the schools’ resources. All objects must be resource-efficient, which will often lead to pushing the limits of the materials.

These design and creation workshops therefore aim, on the one hand, to bridge the gap between mathematical knowledge and its physical manifestation, by giving students the means to estimate the orders of magnitude of the physical phenomena involved; and, on the other hand, to gain an understanding of the material and realise that one does not manufacture in the same way at all scales and with all materials.

The Design Workshops comprise 14 intensive one-week workshops shared by three schools.

Theme A: Echo of the Cabins

Supervised by Vincent Baumann, Herminie Metzger, Jérôme Santel
To design a kinetic sculpture that is slender, aesthetic and poetic, whose oscillations are anticipated during the design process.

Theme B: Mixed wood-wicker structure

Supervised by Quentin Chef, Marc Hymans, Marc Leyral, Héloïse Douin
Design and construct hybrid wood–wicker structures.

Theme C: Aeroderms.

Supervised by Camille Boutemy, Fanny Benguigui, Félix Chameroy
To create inflatable structures using ropes and fabric. From concept to the construction of structures measuring approximately 30m², students will take on the role of designer/builder.

Theme D: Cardboard footbridges

Supervised by Arthur Lebée, Christelle Chalumeaux, Nicolas Leduc
Design and construct a 6-metre-long footbridge on a 1:1 scale, made entirely of cardboard.

Theme E: Canyon Street

Supervised by Matteo Migliari, Yan Ulanowski
Design thermal structures within a model street lined with building façades.

Theme F: Oculi Shade Structures

Supervised by Julien Tanant, Mathieu Thésé, Elisabeth Mouillat-Sirvin
Design and construct a sheltered area on a disc 3 m in diameter, leaving a central void in the form of a disc 0.75 m in diameter.

Theme G: Ski bridges

Supervised by Nicolas Montagne, Yann Fraysse
Design and assemble a stock of used skis into an effective configuration to enable crossing an obstacle.

Theme H: Tenon and Mortise

Supervised by Julien Glath, Valentin Batlle, Emmeline Treuil
Design a wooden gantry constructed solely using wood-to-wood joints and without the use of metal fittings.

Theme I: Titanic Pylons

Supervised by Thibaut Etchevery, Emilien Pont, Quentin Bellancourt
Design, through calculation, drawing and modelling, then through full-scale construction, six wooden pylons at least 4m high and load them until they collapse.

Theme J: Soapbox cars

Supervised by Thomas Gandolfe, Rémi Vriet, Hocine Delmi
Build a ‘soapbox’ vehicle and test it on a race track.

Theme K: Wooden bridges

Supervised by Sonia Zerhouni, Lucas Grisoni, Claire Evenot
Design and build a wooden bridge, approached from the perspective of material transposition, approximately 7m long, spanning the gap between two raised supports.

Theme L: Paper Arches

Supervised by Laurie Rowenczyn, Aurélien Beck, Jean-François Blassel
Design, develop and construct a load-bearing structure using poor-quality and unlikely materials – 5kg of paper and string – with the greatest possible span.

Theme M: Bamboo-flow

Supervised by Giovanna Togo, Ulysse Vizzardi, Francesca Contrada, Jean-Marc Weil
Explore bamboo as an engineering material for the design of deployable and transformable structures, capable of transitioning from a compact state to an active spatial state.

Theme N: Build a Wall – Introduction to Rammed Earth

Supervised by Margaux Gillet, Philippe Hannequart
Design and construct a ‘wall’-type structure using rammed earth.