As a launching event for the academic year at Newcastle University, the entire Architecture school participates in ‘Charrette Week’, a short but fast-paced workshop week that aims to encourage creative thinking and introduce new ideas to students of all years. Going into the final year of my Architecture studies, I took part in the ‘Spectacular…
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Our group aimed to explore a creative way of thinking and working by building an audio-visual installation during the charrette week. We were divided into small groups to create animations and sound productions. After that, various elements were combined to create something spectacular. According to a randomly selected set of rules, animations were made by…
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Charrette week was a week of innovation by art major and architecture major. During this week, all students from stage 1 to master were randomly assigned to different groups for different innovative projects. Group 7 was a “Spectacular Strategy”. Themes were film, audio and creativity. Simply speaking, it was separated into two products, a sound…
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The charrette group I was part of was the “People Watching” one, where we were assigned an area of Newcastle city to observe and to film, in order to identify and understand how people use space, their behavior using it, and their perception of it. The area assigned to my team was Byker. We did…
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Charrette week annually offers students from Newcastle’s university of Architecture, Planning and Landscape a platform to devise a combination of creative outputs. This year, the theme of the project that I participated in called “Making Spectacular”. The aim of it was to abstractly establish a pleasing community with some objects. Preparation period   Our group…
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Charrette Week is an annual one-week intensive design project held in the Architecture School at Newcastle University. A collective design process that merges first year students through to final year masters students, not to mention participation from urban design and fine art. The start of this academic year afforded a wide range of design studios…
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Arriving in Newcastle as a foreign exchange student I was not entirely sure what to expect. Over the past four years, I have studied Urban Planning and Design in Canada; where I grew up and hope to someday make a difference as an urban designer. Would urban design be similar to what I had learnt…
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An aspect of urban design that I want to share is the use of colour in the public space. I wonder why colour is not often used in the public arena. The use of colour can be defined as colourscape it can be used to activate spaces, providing character to an area but also linking…
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  “Charrette Week is beyond my imagination.” I said to a partner in my charrette group at the exhibition party. It’s a pity that only when it was going to be ending was I really involved in the atmosphere. As far as i’m concerned, charrette is more than design. You learn to know the material…
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‘Charrette Week’ of Newcastle University is an activity which brings a host of artists, architects, engineers, designers, and thinkers to the university to run a series of week-long projects. Students from different backgrounds taught design and art courses join to devise a combination of creative outputs related to three common themes – Spectacular, Failure, Help….
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