Leading an Effective Eco-Charrette
Author
Juliette Grummon-Beale
Eco-charrettes, also called sustainability workshops, are an invaluable tool for our clients when considering opportunities to integrate sustainable architecture into their projects. An eco-charrette is a dedicated working meeting held early in the design process that brings together designers and project stakeholders to ask, and begin to answer, important questions. Discussions center on performance goals, low-carbon best practices, and ensuring a building will be healthy for its occupants, ultimately establishing the sustainability framework that will guide decisions.
In this piece, we outline Scott Edwards Architecture’s approach to leading an effective eco-charrette, illustrating what clients can expect and what projects gain from performing one. We’ll cover:
Building excitement, identifying shared values and desired outcomes early, and why it matters.
Envisioning what success looks like—how do we want to feel when the building opens?
Exploring opportunities and challenges related to site constraints, climate, context, and more, and the studies and resources available to inform solutions.
Focus areas for break-out groups: energy, resilience, water, health and wellbeing.
Categorizing and prioritizing sustainability strategies.
Eco-charrette deliverables and remaining accountable.
Benefits beyond the project at hand.
The Value of an Eco-Charrette
The goal of an eco-charrette is to identify project values and desired outcomes, set goals, and brainstorm means for their achievement. Eco-charrettes are key to building collective excitement and initiating collaboration that fosters creative problem-solving. Healthy, resilient, and high-performing strategies need not be additive measures that cost your project more. When the team considers these early by using a workshop to discuss opportunities, challenges, and synergies, these strategies can be integrated in the most impactful ways at no or low cost, examined in-depth in SEA’s blog post, 10 High-Impact, Cost-Efficient Sustainable Design Strategies.
At SEA, we’ve also found eco-charrettes to be a fundamental means for building our firm’s sustainability culture and integrating sustainability on our projects. While no two projects are the same, workshops often have the owner, building user, maintenance staff, multi-disciplinary design team, and others in attendance, lending numerous perspectives to envisioned outcomes. These conversations help us be more thoughtful and responsible designers, a benefit to all our projects, and allow us to bring awareness to our clients of more sustainable materials, sourcing methods, resiliency strategies, and more.
Visioning Activity Sets a Dynamic Tone
Eco-charrettes are dynamic, fun, and tailored to the specific needs of our clients’ projects. They can range from one hour to all day, depending on the project, but a typical workshop is two hours. We like to begin workshops with a big-picture visioning activity where attendees consider what success looks and feels like on opening day. As an icebreaker, this activity builds attendee excitement about the sustainable design potential. It also forecasts the desired outcome(s) as an important starting point. This vision can—and will—be reviewed later to inform the design process.
Examining Opportunities, Challenges, and Available Resources
Next, we share the project context, research, and opportunities we’ve found. Our team highlights the major opportunities and challenges we see related to site, climate, and energy and water benchmarks we’ve researched. We will discuss potential studies we’d recommend performing, like solar feasibility or energy modeling, and how and when they may benefit the design. This portion of the eco-charrette is also a good opportunity to dive deeper into questions related to incentives or grants. Often, we have experts from Energy Trust of Oregon, local grant providers, or solar installers join to share specifics about their programs.
Break-Out Groups to Focus Efforts
Depending on the number of attendees and the allotted time available for the eco-charrette, we’ll then break into smaller groups to workshop around a few focus areas such as energy, resilience, water, and/or health and wellbeing. These groups will consider setting project goals and then brainstorm best strategies for their achievement. For example, an energy break-out group may set the goal to “create a path to Net Zero Energy by 2030.” With the goal in mind, the group considers what strategies will help the project achieve that goal. SEA provides a list of strategies to get brainstorming going, but in our experience, teams often develop their own strategies that are more specific to the project. A group with the goal of Net Zero Energy may consider passive design solutions, energy efficiency measures, and maximizing on-site renewable energy.
Before the session concludes, we ask teams to categorize and prioritize their brainstormed strategies. Depending on the workshop, breakouts may organize strategies into categories like core versus aspirational, good/better/best, or chart them by positive impact versus cost. This exercise frames and contextualizes the strategies. Each breakout then shares their discussion and results with the larger meeting group, and before concluding, attendees are asked to vote on their top priorities. These priorities chart our path forward.
Deliverables, Accountability, and Beyond
Our eco-charrettes are designed to establish a clear list of goals, strategies for their achievement, a framework for understanding project baselines versus stretch goals, and an understanding of major priorities.
Following each eco-charrette, SEA compiles a report that clearly documents the background research, discussions, major goals, and strategies prioritized during the break-out group sessions. This document serves as a tool used by the design team to review at each project milestone to remain accountable to the goals.
From this process, we’ve seen the benefit eco-charrettes bring to project designs and our firm’s design culture. Clients have used workshop discussion points when crafting language for grants. Public projects often use workshops as brainstorming forums for meeting State and/or local sustainability requirements. Our AE team members have shared insights that spur cross-disciplinary innovation. Each workshop sparks ideas, and we’ve seen how these ideas evolve in positive ways, both for the project at hand and for the future of sustainable architecture and our practice.
About the Author
Juliette Grummon-Beale is Sustainability Director at Scott Edwards Architecture and leads the firm’s holistic integration of sustainability into all projects. She was drawn to architecture for its balance of art, problem-solving, and environmental stewardship, and is passionate about contributing spaces to the built environment that create more resilient communities. In her role, Juliette provides sustainability-focused leadership and technical assistance to design teams, identifying objectives and developing solutions that align with project goals. She developed and leads SEA’s sustainability charrettes, educating clients on how best to incorporate sustainable features at little or no additional cost and in keeping with their project vision.
