Charette

En Charrette: Etymology and Foundational Practices

The first use of the anglicized term charette comes from the French en charette, literally to be “on the pushcart.” In the 19th and early 20th centuries, senior students at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris would gather their plans and drawings for the term's design project and load them onto pushcarts, on which they were carried from the various ateliers in which students produced work to be judged by a jury at a predetermined deadline. The phrase en charrette came to signify not only the frantic time of loading final presentation works on to the pushcarts and their journey to the jury but also the final weeks of dogged preparation leading up to the last hectic days of production.

Contemporary charettes inherit both the theoretical framing of the Beaux Arts school and its practices of creative production. Beaux Arts architectural training focused on drawing as a means of visualizing architectural form, from production of conceptual sketches to detailed perspective drawings of the finished site; projects and their sites were predominantly urban. In addition to the critical review of the jury, iterative reviews happened throughout the process of design as peers critiqued each other's works. To be en charrette signified collaborative work in the studio with junior colleagues to solve a specific design problem in the face of a looming deadline, amid peers who were also producing their own solutions. Working through the night was typical, even for several nights, as designs were rethought and redone until the presentations were finally loaded on the carts. The pivotal period of gathering and reacting to critical judgment was not at the jury, which was a final evaluation, but, rather, the days of intense work in a shared studio space. At its heart, to be en charrette was to iteratively and collaboratively produce drawings as a means of visualizing the solution to an urban problem.

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