Adrien Rigobello

This research explores how the relationships between materials, environment, and community shape design. By examining how traditional craftspersons and researchers interact in design and making through fungi-based materials and veneer weaving in the Alps, the project uncovers new ways to think about architecture and furniture design as an active expression of bioregional cultural identity.

Sustainability needs more than new materials, it needs understanding how ‘making together' shapes knowledge and society. This project links craft and bio-based materials to explore how traditions evolve through innovation. It supports cultural heritage, local ecosystems, and deepens our understanding of how relationships influence design, fostering new ways of thinking and creating.

Yearly workshops with artisans, researchers, and the public will involve fungi-based materials and wood weaving in participative design and making, showing how unspoken knowledge and relationships give form. Tacit knowledge will be analysed through iterative crafting and negotiation of form and assembly. A complementary workshop will be organised in Kyoto in collaboration with the Kyoto Institute of Technology and the office Perspective, as an iteration of the format developed for the Alps context, by adapting the bioregional materials use, and extending the epistemological analysis to an environment inheriting a long tradition of relationality. A final exhibition will share findings, advancing research in architecture, design and crafts.

This work is supported by The Carlsberg Foundation under the Internationalisation Fellowship program (CF25-0205) and the Sasakawa Foundation (GA26-DK-0155), and is hosted by the Methods and History of Architecture Laboratory, ENSA Grenoble (FR).

Please meet the Relational Tectonics + multidisciplinary research group! This group is interested in the documentation of peasant furniture design in the Haut-Bréda alpine valley, that which is traditionally not archived. We aim to provide an epistemological, political and aesthetic understanding of this heritage.

Our group is composed of:

• Giulia Piccioni, Ph.D. candidate in Design & Architecture (Sapienza University, Rome, Italy), and expert in art history.
• Cansu Pelin İşbilen, Ph.D. candidate in Regenerative Design (The Open University, London, United-Kingdom).
• Washington Morales Maciel, Associate Professor in the Department of Aesthetics, Institute of Philosophy (Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay), and Visiting Researcher (Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland).
• Adrien Rigobello, Postdoc researcher (Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen, Denmark; ENSA, Grenoble, France).

This research group's activities are happening as part of and as an extension of the Relational Tectonics project.

Giulia Piccioni benefits from an EU COST Action Network Designae funding for an STSM.

⛰️ Welcome to the research workshop series l'atelier de l'Epinay, held in summer in le Haut-Bréda, France! 🌱

We often talk and write about bioregionality, locality and enticing ways to live more fairly and sustainably. Kilometers of pages are inked, terabytes of social media posts published, but good intentions need engaging on the field, outside of protected experimentation spaces to try and learn, adapt and develop together, if they are to be relevant and impactful. This is what this research workshop series will try to offer: a yearly participatory meeting for everyone to contribute the discussion in practice.

With a strong emphasis on furniture prototyping using willow weaving 🧺 and mycobosci 🍄 (mycelium materials), we explore together the Haut-Bréda valley as a superb watershed nested in the Alps, and reflect on the possibility of bioregional design and its meaning. Local craftspersons and experts join us to accompany collective reflections; we craft, hike, explore freely and with intent, forage, and make stories 🥾✨

During the inaugural August 2026 edition of the workshop, participants were introduced to weaving methods and mycoboscus craft, met with a cheese maker and basket weaver, hiked, and worked in groups on bioregional stool prototyping. Six prototypes emerged out of this work, reflecting a diversity of approaches relating to local Alpine legacy furniture design. Participants also reflected collectively on the bioregionality of their designs, their limits, potentials and lifecycles. Anchoring in making wasn’t an easy feat, yet collectively approached and with an intercultural group, we made it happen! 

See you next year for an even more ambitious edition, with a few novelties in the pipeline.

→ Register your interest for the 2027 edition!

This work is part of the Relational Tectonics of Alpine Design Terroir research project led by Adrien Rigobello (Chair for Biohybrid Arhcitecture, Royal Danish Academy; Methods and History of Architecture Laboratory, ENSA Grenoble), supported by The Carlsberg Foundation under the Internationalisation Fellowship program (CF25-0205). The 2026 edition of l’atelier de l’Epinay has been co-funded by the Designae COST Action Network (CA24126).