From a business story in Sunday’s Commercial Appeal: “The UrbanArt Commission, working with the Memphis Medical Center, has landed the 2006 Knight Foundation Charrette, a community-wide design process that will focus on Winchester Park, the area of town most commonly referred to as Intown.”
That area of town is called Intown? Commonly? And what exactly is a “charrette”? From the Architecture Archives site: “The term ‘charette’ (apparently, the French prefer one “r”) evolved from a pre-1900 exercise at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in France. Architectural students were given a design problem to solve within an allotted time. When that time was up, the students would rush their drawings from the studio to the Ecole in a cart called a charrette. Students often jumped in the cart to finish drawings on the way. The term evolved to refer to the intense design exercise itself. Today it refers to a creative process akin to visual brainstorming that is used by design professionals to develop solutions to a design problem within a limited timeframe.”
Well, that clears that up.
