Review: Alexandra Lange on Shade
An urgent civic need, too long in the shadows
Three Julys ago I was in Rome with my family. Late afternoon, exiting the Forum, trying to cross the street, I felt like I had been struck blind. Some combination of the strength of the summer sun, its low angle, and the stone surfaces around us meant that, despite my sunglasses, it felt as if my eyes were being pierced by hundreds of daggers. I stumbled over to a wall and tried to explain to my family members that I could not see. They would either have to guide me or leave me there until the sun went down. We waited until the earth rotated just a few more degrees, but I remembered that moment reading Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource. “In ancient Rome,” writes environmental journalist Sam Bloch, “the porticoes formed a shadow network that stretched for two miles, and a fully covered walk to the Roman Forum struck visitors with wonder. One could effectively stroll from one side of the ancient city to the other in shade.” As the world warms, many have no choice but to work or commute in the heat of the day. The ancients had us (literally) covered.
Bloch’s book, which moves through the past, present, and future of shade from a variety of angles, is filled with such invitations to see the built environment afresh. It’s a bit like a figure-ground puzzle: Are you looking at the black or the white? Shadow or sun? Like Henry Grabar’s recent book on parking, Paved Paradise, Bloch offers the opportunity to analyze city design through choices we usually overlook. For too long, Bloch argues, planners, architects, and landscape architects have been focused on maximizing light. But the attendant heat is often more than the body can bear. UCLA’s V. Kelly Turner, who has become the go-to expert on hot cities, tells him, “In the future, that’s something that cities are going to need to do, is intentionally think about, what does shade infrastructure look like?”
Read David Alff on Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise in Book Post
Bloch provides multiple answers to that question, starting with the great city of Ur, a Mesopotamian construction that, archaeologists say, would welcome travelers from the unshaded flats “with a whoosh of damp and cool air” from close-built houses and narrow alleys. Walls protected residents from enemies that included the sun, with designs regularized and Westernized first by the Greeks and then by the Romans, suchas the stoa, the portico, and the arcade. A second, lighter-weight architecture of shade arrives by way of the Castillians, who began stringing fabric covers between the buildings of Andalusia in the 1400s. This history has inspired some of the best new urban canopies, including Seville’s billowing wooden Metropol Parasol.
