The 2007 Annual Design Charrette:
Life In The Trees

By Michael Bettencourt, Administrative Director • For a PDF version of this article, click here. • Posted June 22, 2007

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Coming Together

n Wednesday, June 13, 2007, 80 students and 21 volunteers, along with the staff of the Salvadori Center, came together in the glorious Great Hall at City College of New York for the Center's Annual Design Charrette for what turned out to be one of the most enjoyable charrettes in recent Salvadori history.

This was due to the challenge the Salvadori staff came up with, guaranteed to be a sure-fire hit with the students: treehouses. But not just run-of-the-mill treehouses, with a few boards nailed to a trunk and branches and covered with left-over shingles. Because this was partly a challenge about sustainability and "green" design, these treehouses were going to have to have something really special going for them.

And they did.

Setting The Scene

ere was our guiding premise. Al Gore has deeded 30 acres of forest land to the Salvadori Center, with the proviso that the Center has to build a community of ecologically friendly treehouses as a way to preserve and protect the land. (If we were going to dream up a situation, why not dream up something we'd love to have?)

Then we threw down gantlet to the students: Build those treehouses, and build them to scale (½"=1') and from appropriate materials. Furthermore, design them so that they interconnected into a community: no one left out, no one left behind.

And we didn't forget the teachers, either. They were charged with building the community center, a place to which all the other buildings would connect and which would provide the living heart of the village.

On Your Mark...Get Set...

he slide presentation "A Life In The Trees" laid out the challenge and gave them an idea of what a treehouse is (we assumed that many urban-raised kids might not know what a treehouse looked like).

The "eco-village" consisted of 21 "plots," each with a "tree" on it, sited on two joined 4' x 8' sheets of plywood. An individual plot was roughly 2½-square foot piece of plywood with a hole cut in it to "root" the tree, a 1½ dowel with five dowels radiating out as "branches."

We divided the students into teams of roughly 5 students each, then paired the teams and gave each pair adjacent plots so that they would work at the same assigned station. Why? Because we wanted to underscore the lesson of the Charrette: this was an effort to build a community — not separate house lots with separate dwellings with separated people in them, which is the American suburban norm, but a living situation in which people shared responsibility to keep the common spaces clean, open, and productive.

Go!

e assigned the volunteers to the groups -- one architect and one engineer -- and what a tremendous crew of volunteers we had. Stalwarts from the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey and New York City Transit showed up, as they do every year, and we also had people returning from the last Charrette, such as Megan Chusid and Dianne Conjeaud from Richter+Ratner, a company that has been very generous contributors of materials. But we had new volunteers as well from Cannon Design, Plaza Construction, and Michael Davis Architects, and we look forward to working with them in the coming years.

At their assigned tables, they found a box of materials, which included everything from glue guns and pipe cleaners to bags of sphagnum moss and wood chips. Extra materials, such as balsa wood, veneers, paper, and felt, were stored on a common table in the middle of the hall.

During the morning the teams brainstormed ideas and, with the help of the volunteers, drew out their treehouse designs so that they would be in scale with the tree itself (which was set at ½"=1').

Then, with the designs set, the teams began figuring out how to build their treehouses. The goal was, by mid-afternoon, to reassemble the individual "plots," like puzzle-pieces, back into a community.

The Art of Construction

very year at Charrette, as Alan Feigenberg (CCNY School of Architecture professor, Salvadori Center co-founder, and our resident sage) has said many times, there is that moment when fear strikes: the challenge is really boring, or all the volunteers suddenly call in sick, or not enough students show up, or too many students show up, or the food runs out, or the electricity shuts off -- and so on.

Yet every year, the disaster never hits, no matter how much sleep we lose the night before.

Instead, the staff and volunteers are amazed and delighted as the students tumble toward their work stations and plunge into the project at hand with a refreshing absence of conflict and ego. We purposefully mix up the teams so that every team has members from at least three or four different schools, and with remarkably little effort on their part, the students slide into coöperation as easily as they breathe. To us, this ability to share and collaborate is as crucial a lesson in the Charrette as anything they learn about architecture, engineering, and design: building community is just as important as building the project.

Taking Shape

rom about 10 AM to noon, fortified by bagels, juice, coffee, tea, and water, the teams worked hard to convert their brainstormed designs into actual structures. The volunteers, none of whom have "work with children" in their day-to-day job descriptions, skillfully guided them through this process of turning the two-dimensional into the three-dimensional, and all done to the proper scale.

And the students, borrowing from each other's knowledge and skills, not followed the volunteers' suggestions, they often led the effort, coming up with ideas as they built and amending those ideas on the fly as the structures took shape.

At noon arrived 25 boxes of pizza — what would a Salvadori Charrette be without its pizza? And an excellent pizza as well, from Vinegar Hill (a local eatery on Broadway, near the college campus). Locusts would be put to shame at the speed with which those 200 slices of pizza disappeared, but disappear they did, and back to work everyone went.

The goal was to stop work at 2:15 PM to do clean-up and, at 2:30, begin the 3-minute treehouse presentations by the teams and their volunteers. As each team pair finished its presentation, they would then move their "plots" into their proper places on the joined plywood sheets in order to assemble the eco-village and complete the community.

The Finale

t 2:30 PM (fortified with a post-lunch snack of cookies), the three-minute presentations began. (Click here for a gallery of the designs and other pictures from the Charrette, in PDF.) The designs were all respects ingenious, with elements ranging from practical solar-paneled walkways (Fig. 6) to a fantastical space-ship design (Fig. 10) and a clever water-catcher in the shape of a pineapple that mixed the organic with the functional (Fig. 8). And though we didn't require it, students came up with multiple ways to connect their "plots": bridges, rope ladders, swings, and even a catapult!

As a parting gesture, each student and teacher was gifted with a green backpack emblazoned with the Salvadori logo, while the volunteers and staff got to sport the latest in the line of Salvadori charrette caps, this one a rich forest-green (bags and hats, of course, in keeping with the theme of the challenge).

Final Words