Page 97 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

74 THE ECO-CHARRETTE

We then broke up into small groups and asked each group to write a draft of the mis-
sion statement. We asked them to think about, “What is this project all about, what
does it mean, and what should it do?” We’re not asking about the institution but about
the project, “What does the project do for the institution to help it accomplish its
mission?” We had each group report back and we took the best pieces that came out
of the different groups and pushed them together. By the middle of the afternoon we
had a mission statement that they had written themselves. That became the direction
for the project and we had agreement on that from the group. Before we ever start
drawing anything, we have to get agreement.
This process is the heart of the charrette. All of the stakeholders and people from the
various disciplines are involved in this process. If you don’t own the vision and if you
don’t feel like you helped shape it, you’re just a passenger, not a pilot.
We found that this gives the team a lot of open-field running to do. We spent the next
several days taking the information, working on the site analysis, and coming up with
the beginning of schemes. We had intermediate meetings with the critical staff mem-
bers; in them, we commented on what we were starting to find out, where we think
we were beginning to go, and shared some ideas. We got their reaction and then we
went back and worked some more, then stopped again and got their reaction and com-
mentary. While we’re doing this process, we document it in real time. We bring a
group of people to the meeting who are solely responsible for taking photographs,
scanning drawings, and putting them into slides as we’re going along.
During the concluding two-day workshop, there were several things going on at once.
For example, we had one team working on drawings and at the same time we had another
team meeting with staff, talking about interpretive aspects of the project. We asked ques-
tions such as, “What do you want people to learn here? How are we going to accomplish
that? How can we use the site assets? How can we use the building assets? How can we
use the artifacts that you have to teach people a larger lesson? Where do you see the
opportunities?” We were working on that while simultaneously another group was work-
ing on the schemes. All of that gets thrown into the PowerPoint slides.
The next night we have a concluding dinner. There is a presentation done by all mem-
bers of the team. For example, the landscape architect talked about how this fits into
the master plan, the site analysis, lessons learned from site, what the river is doing,
what geology and topography are doing together. We had both board members and
staff present the vision statement back to the larger board. We walked them through
how the site analysis would form the building, what some of the sustainable goals
were, how we were breaking down things like the envelope systems, the site and what
we were starting to do with the major components (Fig. 4.4).
We got a lot done in an incredibly short amount of time. If, at the beginning of this
process, if you asked the people at the Arboretum, they would have said they never
thought it would have been possible. We basically came up with the concept at that
point. We spent the rest of the time refining and improving the concept. There were
some changes made where necessary but the basic concept, the organization of it on
the site and the attitude of this very simple, but well-articulated building have stayed
very constant.