The charrette will be an overnight session focused on creating ideas for improving sustainability on campus. According to Anasha Cummings ’12, who helped plan the event, those participating will have the opportunity to sleep, but are encouraged to stay up and work.

The event will start with an introduction and presentation of background information, and then the participants will be divided randomly into teams and given raw data about RPI’s current sustainability status.

The teams will participate in brainstorming and presentation sessions before honing in on their best ideas. Work will continue through the night and culminate in poster and PowerPoint presentations on Saturday.

The ideas will be ranked by the teams’ peers on a number of variables, including feasibility and cost-effectiveness. All the ideas resulting from the event will be reviewed and ranked by an Institute-wide task force and presented in a portfolio to President Shirley Ann Jackson.

There will be more to the charrette than work, however. Those planning the event have collaborated with Relay For Life, allowing a break from 10–11 pm so that students have the opportunity to participate in both Relay and the charrette. In addition, there will be midnight bowling.

“I think it’ll be an exciting, fun experience,” said graduate student Sarah Parks, a member of the planning group. Parks also cited the interdisciplinary nature of the event, which allows collaboration between members from several different community groups. Already, 120 people from a variety of majors have signed up for the charrette, for which registration has been extended to today.

Cummings also commented on the diversity, calling sustainability an “issue that’s going to define our generation—no matter what discipline you are, you’re going to have to be concerned with it somehow.”

Aside from the range of ideas this event will produce, one result will be the creation of an Institute-wide sustainability task force composed of students, faculty, and staff. This group, which is not yet named, will serve as a forum for ideas and a voice to the administration. It will likely include the members of the group that planned the charrette, such as Cummings and Parks, and will participate in preparing the portfolio to present to Jackson. According to Chief of Staff and Associate Vice President for Policy and Planning Laban Coblentz, this group has no structure yet, and might even be an unstructured, non-hierarchical task force.

The sustainability charrette is modeled after architecture charrettes—brief periods of intense activity—but rather than designing buildings, the goal is instead to create ideas. Acting Dean of Architecture Mark Mistur organized the planning process, and describes a charrette as “compressed time and space … what emerges is very exciting, not the kind of ideas that can be developed independently or with an excess of time.”

He cites the origin of the word, which is French for “cart,” to help explain a charrette’s purpose. At the École des Beaux-Arts, known for having strict deadlines for architecture students, a cart was pushed around the hallways at deadline. Mistur cited “epic stories” of students that had been working through the night jumping onto the cart with their project in hand, adding the finishing touches.

The sustainability charrette was initially proposed by Jackson, and, according to Mistur, “her enthusiasm has energized us all.” Her interest was piqued by members of the Student Sustainability Task Force who asked questions at the Spring 2008 Pizza with the President, and the Office of the President then sponsored a report on sustainability. All of this activity coincided with the opening of two new centers devoted to sustainability, one of which was the Center for Architecture, Science, and Ecology in New York City.

On a tour of this new facility, Jackson spoke with Coblentz about architecture charrettes and wondered if the same model could be applied to sustainability. This was the start of a 4–5 month planning process involving students, faculty, and staff. A group of 10–12 people met in weekly meetings hosted by Coblentz in what Mistur called “a very impressive collaborative effort.”