A design charrette is an intensive, multiday working session in which designers, decision makers and the people affected by a project sit in one studio and produce a plan together. Drawings are made, shown to stakeholders, criticised and redrawn within hours, so months of back and forth meetings collapse into a few days.
The word started as student slang in nineteenth century Paris and now names a structured planning method used by cities, campuses, developers and architecture offices. It now covers two different things: the late night push before a studio deadline, and the formal public process taught by the National Charrette Institute.
Where Does the Word Charrette Come From?
Charrette is French for a small cart. The term came out of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the school whose teaching shaped Beaux-Arts architecture across Europe and North America. Students there worked on timed design problems that ended with a hard submission, and the cart was the object that carried their drawings to the jury.
The American Planning Association's 2018 PAS Memo on crafting charrettes describes the process as beginning with an esquisse, the assigned design problem, and ending "en charrette" when proctors circulated a cart to collect final drawings while students were still adding finishing touches. Daniel Willis, writing in Harvard Design Magazine, gives the same image of students drawing even as their work was being taken away.
The French account adds detail. La Grande Masse des Beaux-Arts, the association of former students of the school, recalls that submission day was fixed at Friday noon. Students in the outside ateliers loaded their large framed drawings into small hand carts, rented that morning from the coal merchant nearest the studio, and pushed them through the streets to the school. Either way, the cart marked the deadline, and "being en charrette" came to mean working flat out to meet it.
📌 Did You Know?
The cart run became a sport. According to La Grande Masse des Beaux-Arts, students founded a "Charett Club" at the end of 1926 and raced loaded carts through Paris; the race was held only five times, in 1927, 1928, 1934, 1935 and 1936.
What Is a Design Charrette Today?
Today a design charrette is a collaborative design event, not a deadline panic. The APA memo, written by Holly Madill, Bill Lennertz and Wayne Beyea, defines it as a multiday community engagement event where stakeholders and decision makers work alongside experts to co-develop solutions to built environment problems using design. The key word is design: participants react to plans, sections and perspectives, not to bullet points.
That makes a charrette different from a consultation exercise. In a standard public meeting the design team presents something nearly finished and collects comments. In a charrette the drawing happens in the room, in front of the people who will live with it, and the plan changes visibly in response to what they say. The aim is a feasible plan with enough support behind it to survive approvals.
Inside offices the word has drifted further. Willis notes that many firms now use "charrette" for a short internal brainstorming session, which is closer to a design workshop than to the structured process below.
The National Charrette Institute and the NCI Charrette System
The reference point for the formal method is the National Charrette Institute. NCI was founded in 2001 as a nonprofit in Portland, Oregon, and in 2016 became a program within the School of Planning, Design and Construction at Michigan State University, as the APA memo records. Its mission statement describes the NCI Charrette System as an accelerated, collaborative, design-based process that harnesses the talents of all interested stakeholders to create and support a feasible plan.
🎓 Expert Insight
"Designing a shared solution in detail is the best tool for resolving conflict and achieving a shared vision." National Charrette Institute, Michigan State University
This is the core bet of the method. Abstract goals such as "more housing" or "keep the neighbourhood character" are easy to agree on and impossible to build; a detailed drawing forces the trade offs into the open, where people can actually settle them.
The Three Phases
NCI's process page describes a flexible three-phase framework built from more than 20 process tools. The charrette itself is only the middle phase, which is why so many one-off "charrettes" disappoint: the preparation and follow-through are missing.
- Preparation (1 to 6 months). The team gets people ready, data ready and place ready: stakeholder analysis, interviews, base mapping, a project roadmap, budget and schedule, and the charrette studio itself. The 2018 APA memo allows one to nine months for complex projects.
- Charrette (four days minimum). A multidisciplinary team works in a studio on or near the site and meets stakeholders in a series of short feedback loops.
- Implementation (2 to 4 months). The plan is tested further, refined, and presented for adoption, with a final stakeholder feedback loop ideally four to six weeks after the charrette.
How a Design Charrette Works, Day by Day
NCI lists the tools of the charrette phase in order: a public meeting and community vision, alternative concepts with feedback loop one, preferred plan synthesis with feedback loop two, plan development with feedback loop three, and finally production, public presentation and review. Spread over four or five days, a typical sequence looks like this.
Day One: Public Meeting and Vision
The charrette opens with a public meeting where participants describe what they value and what worries them. The design team listens, records, and often runs hands-on table exercises with base maps. That evening and the next morning, the team turns the input into several alternative concepts, usually as quick concept diagrams and massing studies.
Days Two and Three: Alternatives, Then a Preferred Plan
Stakeholders review the alternatives in the first feedback loop. The team then merges the strongest parts into one preferred plan and brings it back for the second loop. Small group meetings with specific stakeholders, such as a transit agency or a neighbourhood association, run in parallel.
Days Four and Five: Development and Presentation
The preferred plan is drawn in more detail, tested for cost and code issues, and shown again in the third loop. The charrette closes with a public presentation of the plan as a work in progress, along with the drawings, numbers and implementation steps produced in the studio.
💡 Pro Tip
Pin every superseded drawing to the studio wall instead of throwing it away. When a participant asks why their idea vanished on day three, being able to point at the sheet where it was tested, and the reason it failed, does more for trust than any explanation.
Why Does a Charrette Have to Last Several Days?
Because three feedback loops need time between them. NCI's own answer to why a charrette must last multiple days gives three reasons: the feedback loops, the unexpected, and feasible design.
On the first point, NCI states that three feedback loops are the minimum needed to change participants' perceptions and positions, and that four consecutive days are required to fit three loops scheduled at least a day apart. People rarely change their minds in one meeting. They change them after seeing their own comments turned into a drawing, overnight, and shown back to them.
The second reason is practical. Charrettes stir up conflicts and new information, and a multiday schedule leaves room to deal with them on the spot. The third is about quality: NCI says it takes at least four days for a multidisciplinary team to develop alternatives, merge them into a preferred plan, and then detail and test it. The APA memo puts NCI's recommended range at four to seven days, with a three-day "sprint" workshop reserved for smaller, simpler projects.
🏗️ Real-World Example
Norman Center City (Norman, Oklahoma, 2014): A proposed five-story apartment block in a one-story neighbourhood triggered the project. After preliminary interviews with more than 80 people, NCI ran a five-day charrette. According to the APA memo, 88 percent of participants then voted in favour of a five-story building design, and the new form-based code for the City Center area was adopted in 2016.
Design Charrette vs Workshop vs Public Hearing
The label gets applied loosely, so it helps to compare the charrette with the formats it is often confused with. The differences come down to who draws, when, and how many times the public sees the work.
Comparison of Common Engagement and Design Formats
| Feature | NCI-Style Charrette | Office Design Workshop | Public Hearing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Duration | Four to seven consecutive days | A few hours to one day | One evening session |
| Who takes part | Design team, sponsor, public, agencies | Design team, sometimes client | Officials and public speakers |
| When drawing happens | Live, in the studio, between loops | During the session | Before; design is already fixed |
| Feedback rounds | At least three | Informal, continuous | One, comments only |
| Typical output | Feasible plan with implementation steps | Concept options to develop later | Public record and a vote |
When a Charrette Is the Right Tool
Charrettes earn their cost on projects with real conflict and many decision makers: downtown plans, contested infill, campus master plans, corridor redesigns and code rewrites. They suit planning frameworks such as New Urbanism, where street sections, block patterns and building form are the tools being negotiated. They are less useful when one client makes every decision, or when the program is fixed and only detailing remains.
On a building project, a charrette fits best around the start of schematic design, once the design brief exists but before the massing is locked. Run it later and participants are only reacting to choices already made, which is exactly the hearing dynamic the method tries to avoid.
⚠️ Common Mistake to Avoid
Calling a single evening open house a charrette. With one meeting there is no chance for people to see their input redrawn and react again, so positions harden instead of shifting. If the budget only allows one day, call it a workshop and plan the follow-up rounds separately.
What Architecture Students Can Take From It
Studio culture kept the original meaning: the all-night push before a review. The more useful lesson from the formal method is the feedback loop. Pin up early, collect reactions from classmates and tutors, redraw overnight and pin up again. Three short rounds before the final review will improve a project more than one long night, and they also make the jury day far less of a gamble.
The other skill a charrette demands is fast, legible drawing that non-designers can read. Loose plans, simple axonometrics and annotated perspectives carry a public meeting better than polished renders. Practising quick hand drawing, with a set of sketching resources close by, pays off directly when you are drawing in front of a room.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Do You Pronounce Charrette?
Merriam-Webster gives the pronunciation as "shuh-RET", with the stress on the second syllable. It accepts both spellings, listing "charette" as the main entry and "charrette" as a variant.
How Long Is a Design Charrette?
The National Charrette Institute calls for a minimum of four consecutive days and advocates four to seven, enough for three feedback loops a day apart. Shorter sessions exist, but NCI treats a three-day sprint as suitable only for small, simple projects.
Who Should Attend a Charrette?
NCI defines stakeholders as anyone who can approve, inform, promote or block the project, plus anyone directly affected by its outcomes. In practice that means officials, agency staff, property owners, residents, businesses and the design team.
What Does a Charrette Produce?
A well-run charrette ends with a preferred plan drawn in enough detail to be tested, plus the supporting drawings and implementation steps. NCI treats this plan as a work in progress that is refined during the implementation phase before adoption.
Is a Charrette the Same as a Design Sprint?
They share the idea of compressed, time-boxed work, but a design sprint usually involves a small product team. A charrette is built around repeated public and stakeholder review of physical plans, which is why it needs more days and more preparation.
Charrettes reward fast, clear sketching; our Concept Sketching for Architecture and Design course helps you build that skill.
Wrapping Up
The odd thing about the charrette is that its name celebrates the moment feedback ends: the cart rolls in and the drawing is taken away. The modern method turns that around, keeping the drawing on the table for days so it can absorb everyone's input before anyone signs off. Seen that way, the cart is no longer the deadline but a reminder of how much better the work gets when it is shown before it is finished.
Comments (0)
Back to Architecture and Design Blog