Extraordinary Charrette

A chain of events that could not just be explained away as coincidence:

Saturday
11:00am Gareth, Barbora and I meet at the Second Cup coffeeshop to start brainstorming design ideas for the charette (student design competition). We only meet for an hour, but we were playing around with the idea of situations that influence architecture. For example, the increase in live load as more people arrive at a particular place.

8:30pm We meet again at Barbora's house for another design meeting. Barbora comes up with a brilliant idea of a sinking ground plane that forms an amphitheatre when enough people stand on the site.

9:00pm Gareth comes and is excited about the idea. We chew on it for a bit, and another idea comes: perhaps we can use folding plexiglass and three-dimensionally express our idea. We thought this would be an unbeatable project.

11:30pm We leave, and Gareth goes to the school to check to see if the hot-air blower is available.

12:30pm I get back home and Barbora phones. Says that it's an emergency. Apparently, Gareth had gone back to school and heard the blower being used. He goes to the room and sees a team folding a plexiglass panel with almost a splitting image of our idea. We are devastated, but are too tired to think.

Sunday
9:30am We meet at Place Milton, and guess who we see there too: the team that Gareth saw last night. We are in complete shock. We decide to change our idea, but we couldn't come up with anything.

11:00am We go to Home Depot, and finally, an idea pops up. We get excited, and drive to the library to scan images.

1:00pm Back at Barbora's place, we start working on the presentation when we realize the printing deadline is 2pm. We only have an hour to make the panel.

2:00pm We aren't done yet.

2:15pm We decide to quit. The printing deadline is passed, and we conclude that our panel is too much of a hack job to submit.

2:30pm I propose to go back to the original idea. The deadline is 6pm anyways, and we could get some foamcore and hand draw the panel. Barbora laughs, and asks Gareth if he heard what I just suggested.

3:00pm We decide to give it one last shot, and Barbora goes and gets foamcore.

3:45pm We start drawing on the foamcore.

5:45pm We finish drawing on the panel, and drive to the exhibition room to hand in our project.

6:00pm People look at the panel, intrigued by the low-tech treatment of the project. However, the other team who had the same idea kept their idea. We overheard one professor remark that he has never in his career seen two projects so similar.

9:00pm Gareth, Barbora, and I sit in a Greek restaurant contemplating what has happened in the past 24 hours.

(to be continued)