Page 95 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

72 THE ECO-CHARRETTE

Figure 4.3 An exercise during the Morris Arboretum charrette invited partici-
pants to select photos to visually express “what we are,”“what we are not,” and
“where we want to go.” Photography by Paul W. Meyer of the Morris Arboretum, University of
Pennsylvania.

Then we went behind the curtain while people were having some food and assembled
the two drawings. The first one was made up of all the squares the people colored
independently and the second one was all of the squares that people colored with
instruction. At the end of dinner, during desert, we brought those out and when we
held up the first one and said, “With everybody doing their own thing, this is what it
looks like.” Then we held up the second one and said, “With everybody moving under
some direction, this is what it looks like.” It took the same five minutes to do each
exercise but here you have a beautiful picture of the barn. In this case we used the old
Amish barn at the arboretum.

The first drawing was a surreal image with colors going everywhere that you could
sort of see might be a barn. Then the other one was actually a pretty good rendering
of the barn. We used that as an object lesson just to talk about process. In other words,
if we all pull together and work toward a common goal, in a relatively short time, we
can pull together something that begins to create a vision that you can understand and
is attractive. We used an object [the barn] that they have a great deal of affection for
to really get everybody thinking about the fact that this is all about working together.

We followed that up by walking the group through what we would be doing over the
next several days. We let people know what was coming, what was expected, when
they needed need to be there, what times were optional, why they needed to be there