|
|
|
Design Charrette Members of the school of architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris coined the term charrette at the end of the nineteenth century. The faculty would assign design problems so difficult that only a few students could solve them in the allotted time. When the time was up, a cart, or charrette, was rolled past the drafting tables to collect the students' work, completed or not. In 1997, TreePeople brought together some of the nation's leading building and landscape architects, government officials, urban foresters, engineers and other experts, and gave them a difficult assignment indeed - draw up sustainable-landscape plans for a number of typical Los Angeles sites, plans that would begin to address the area's most pressing environmental problems. Five sites - a single-family home, a multi-family complex, a commercial/retail center, an industrial site, and a public high school - were selected as representing a cross section of the urban landscape, site types that would have to be dealt with by any program aimed at the implementation of progressive watershed management policies. Design features included concrete removal, strategic tree planting, installation of innovative water capture and retention technologies, green waste chipping and mulching, and other appropriate urban landscape techniques. Patrick Condon, the James Taylor Chair in Landscape and Livable Environments at the University of British Columbia, facilitated the charrette, and environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken was the keynote speaker at its opening reception. The charrette results and many of the drawings were published in 1999 in the planbook, Second Nature, much of which is available here.
|