Today’s words come from a television show.
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Part of Speech
- The intense final effort made by architectural students to complete their solutions to a given architectural problem in an allotted time or the period in which such an effort is made.
- A final, intensive effort to finish a project, especially an architectural design project, before a deadline.
French charrette cart (used to transport drawings), from Old French, cart, from char wheeled vehicle + -ette.
The word charrette is French for “cart” or “chariot.” Its use in the sense of design and planning arose in the 19th century at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where it was not unusual at the end of a term for teams of student architects to work right up until a deadline, when a charrette would be wheeled among them to collect up their scale models and other work for review. The furious continuation of their work to apply the finishing touches came to be referred to as working en charrette, “in the cart.” Émile Zola depicted such a scene of feverish activity, a nuit de charrette or “charrette night,” in L’Œuvre (serialized 1885, published 1886), his fictionalized account of his friendship with Paul Cézanne. The term evolved into the current design-related usage in conjunction with working right up until a deadline.~https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charrette#Origins_of_the_term_%22charrette%22
Usage and Examples
Here are a couple of examples:
- A charette drawn by two mules was outside the mayor’s home.
- The city held public workshops, called for ideas, and held a charrette to bring scrutiny to the project.