Storm Advisory: How Blue-Sky Design Charettes Quickly Turn to Cloudy Days
Imagine you're on a sunny beach, ready to build the most magnificent sandcastle with your grandchildren. The sky is clear, the kids are excited, and the ideas are flowing. Your grandchildren start stacking wet sand molded by their plastic buckets while you’re digging moats, not worrying about the incoming tide, the strength of your sand, or if there’s even enough time to finish the job before naps. It’s fun, it’s freeing, and everyone’s got a vision. But then, the clouds roll in, the waves start lapping at the base, and you realize you’re out of time, out of sand, and out of luck. This, my friends, is the story of so many Blue-Sky Design Charette.
Through my years of playing a role in planning, conceptualizing, designing, developing, and marketing over 200 unique commercial real estate projects, I've seen countless Blue-Sky workshops begin with all the excitement of a child building that perfect sandcastle.
“These early-stage design charettes—where everyone from landowners to architects and developers gathers to dream big—are supposed to be about brainstorming without limits, thinking outside the box, and unleashing creativity. They’re fun, they’re hopeful, and they often set projects on a course for disaster.”
Here’s the rub of the sand: in all this creative excitement, we often forget the fundamentals—the gritty, less glamorous details like topography, utility access, building codes, functionality, constructability, and, oh yes, whether the concept can actually be supported by revenue.
The Blue-Sky approach is like choosing a point on a map without checking if there’s even a manageable trail ahead. You may sense there is a beautiful view on that point, but you’re just as likely to meet unexpected perils, and lose the trust of your fellow travelers. That’s not a journey anyone wants to be on, especially when your family has trusted you to get them home safely.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been at the front row of innovative and creative workshops — I thrive on it. But I’ve also learned the hard way that setting out on a grand adventure without proper preparation is a recipe for disaster. That’s why, before anyone rolls out the big blue-sky tracing paper (if they still do that), I believe we must roll up our sleeves and do the hard work first.
How?
To keep those Blue Skies truly sunny, it’s essential to start with solid groundwork. Begin by thoroughly understanding the site’s constraints—topography, utility access, building codes, and environmental factors. Develop fit and massing models to assess what will realistically fit on the site. Prototype building types to explore cost implications. And replace round-the-table opinions on the target market with deep market research. Do the analytics and collect the hard data on potential consumers, their spending power, lifestyle, and life stage, shopping behavior, and travel choices. Understand what they truly want and not just what we think. This data is essential.
With these foundational elements in place, true creativity can flourish within the boundaries of a pre-design project framework and certainly they can be and should be challenged but clearly understood.
