Page 96 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MORRIS ARBORETUM PROJECT 73

and what outcome we were hoping to achieve for each piece. We really like to do a
dinner before the brainstorming session because it brings a group of people together
who don’t know each other and just by the course of doing that little exercise together
and eating together, they gain an understanding of what they’re going to be doing over
the next several days, and they come in the next day with their feet on the ground.
They know what they’re doing, where they’re going, why it’s important and with
some excitement. It helps reduce a lot of the fear and trepidation.
I think this whole aspect is usually overlooked in the integrated process. People for-
get that people are people and they’re highly relational. The first job that you have to
do is build the armature of relationship and the armature of trust. So the first thing we
did is focus on using that time to begin to build relationships, trust, and an under-
standing of what we’re doing.
In this case, we started the next day with two exercises. The first exercise that we did
was an image exercise. We had a huge pile of images taken from all kinds of refer-
ences out on a table. We asked people to go through and pick three sets of images,
they could pick as many as they wanted in three different categories: who you are,
who you are not, and who you want to become as an institution. We had people who
selected the images talk about them. A lot of times they will pick really odd images.
For example, they might pick a little kid sitting on a stump or a picture of the sky in
a certain way. In this meeting someone picked an image of an Amish buggy going
down the road and said, “This is who we’re not. We’re not old fashioned. We’re not
stuck in the past.” You get some very interesting responses out of it. All of that is
designed to give us clues as to what they’re thinking. We have a saying, “The minute
the architect picks up a pencil a whole bunch of people are cut out of the conversa-
tion.” People are intimidated by those who can draw. But ideas and words are com-
mon currency.

We follow that up with a card session. We lay out a series of areas such as budget,
schedule, image, environment, and any category that we think is important for that
project. We hand out index cards for each category. We ask the group to write down
their thoughts associated with the category listed on each card. We do this exercise
because we found that if it’s done verbally then the people who speak loudly and like
to speak in groups rule the roost. The ideas of people who are a little more unsure,
shy, or quiet don’t get heard. We go through all of the cards and let people comment
on what they were thinking and why.
An example might be the project’s image. One response was, “Not ostentatious.”
Somebody else wrote, “Forward looking.” Another response was a Quaker quote
(they’re in Quaker country up there), “Plain but of the best sort,” which has actually
become a very important part of the project. The idea is that it’s simple and made out
of good materials, but it’s not about decoration. It’s really about the function and qual-
ity of the materials and the way those things come together to make something that is
not only useful but really beautiful. That idea has become a cornerstone of the project.
The ultimate goal of that exercise is to write a mission statement using the words that
came out of the cards. We say that is the “constitution” for the project. In other words,
we define in words what we’re trying to accomplish before we ever start drawing.