En Charrette
Comments: 3
How apt that today’s Word-a-Day is charrette:
charrette (shuh-RET) n. 1, A final intense effort to complete a design project. 2, A preliminary meeting involving stakeholders (citizens, planners, designers, etc.) to brainstorm or to elicit input on a project.
[From French charrette (cart), from Old French. How we get from a cart to the above mentioned senses is not clear. It’s perhaps from the idea of speed when referring to wheels. Also, according to a story, professors at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris collected students’s drawings in a cart and the latter would often jump on the charrette to complete last-minute details.]
Chosen by Mary Steer, a “freelance writer and artists’s model living in Kingston, Ontario,” the word comes with a nice anecdote and what looks like an excellent book recommendation which I hope to get to once I am no longer en charrette.
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Posted to The Good • 2003.07.14 (Mon) • 16:34
Comments
Posted by Miguel Arboleda 2003.07.15, 01:30
Ah, yes! “Charette”. Brings back fond memories of my days in graduate school studying architecture at the University of Oregon. Those frantic nights when our designs were coming down to the hour and we stayed up three or four nights straight just to get our drawings done. We would work in our studios, the corridor lit by the yellow glow of studio lamps and stick our tongues out the sides of our mouths as we leaned over the drawing boards drawing ruled lines and pulling x-acto knives through foamcore boards. Our fatigue would be so great at times, that occasionally the knife would slip and the blade would slice our finger. You could tell who was working on their building models by the succession of screams that emanated from down the hall, like a rehearsal for the Marquis de Sade.
And the next day, the day of the final review, when a hundred or more critics would descend upon your work haphazardly pinned to the corkboard in the review room… you would stand there in a daze of four days lack of sleep and not remember even the name of your project. While next to you would stand this Greek god of a designer who had just dominated the room with a drawing of a phallic skyscaper (complete with art-deco Hellenic satyrs standing at attention along the base) 5 meters tall. Of course EVERYONE gathered around him! Architecture is after all not really the expression of light in solid form, but a manifestation of your libido! Anyway, all that attention upon the Greek gods would inevitably allow me a little respite for taking much needed nap. Charettes Yes, yes… fond, fond memories!
Posted by Paul 2003.07.15, 22:08
I would just like to add that we say: “putain, je suis trop charrette!” as in “fuck, I am sooooo charrette!” and not “….. EN charrette!” ;-) But all that reminds me a post I made a few months ago about the fact that word-a-day seemed to be a French-word-a-day kind of word-a-day service… so for you: http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0314/p10s02-comv.html the English Sans French article one more time. p
Posted by David Kolb 2003.07.19, 02:27
I believe that the ‘cart’ in question was the cart the architectural teachers brought around for you to put your plans in; it was a way of saying “time’s up”!
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