Landscapes Under the Sun
[this piece was additionally published on CommonEdge and ArchDaily]
Where the sun's rays touch down on the public realm, the resulting temperature and light levels can be as important as the design of the landscape itself. In climates both warm and cool, the correlations between sun exposure and human comfort are undeniable and inescapable. A trip to the sun-baked plazas and streets of Cuba evidenced that sun exposure can all but entirely dictate patterns of use and must be carefully considered in the creation of lively, successful public open-space.
A SEED PLANTED
Years ago, when I was a landscape architect not too far beyond graduation, I was finally beginning to manage real projects for the first time, taking concepts into construction in the urban environment. So, admittedly, it seemed like somewhat of a diversion to be rummaging through the contents of a dead man's filing cabinet. At the end of Kevin Lynch's life, his various manuscripts, papers, and sketches were bequeathed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and are now housed there in archive. The principal of my office, interested in Lynch's theories of landscape perception, tasked me with flipping through nearly every page of the collection, taking good notes, and filling out a daunting amount of reproduction-request forms.
One loose photograph in Box #8 stood out. The location or photographer is not documented, but the significance of the image leaps from the print. Two human forms -- perhaps day laborers, college students, drunks -- lay prostrate in the small island of shade cast by a young tree in an otherwise open lawn. Reading as clearly as a diagram, the photograph documents landscape inhabitants seeking refuge from the beating sun, and the clarity of this snapshot lodged itself in my mind.
photograph of two men lying on the ground, undated. Kevin Lynch papers, MC-0208, series 2, box 8. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institute Archives and Special Collections, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
ARRIVING IN CUBA
Five years later, I deplaned in Havana, Cuba. Land of Russian missiles and American classic cars. Cold wars and cold shoulders. An embargo of goods and a people, consequently, frozen in time. For an estadounidense entering Cuba for the first time, overcoming this thick-laid propaganda was like escaping the gravitational influence of planet Earth. Encountering not even a trace of this forewarned coldness, I instead found warmth, both in sincerity of smiles and height of mercury; it was August.
Traveling by foot, bus, modern taxi, and, of course, almendrone, my trip plotted a ten-day loop through some of the island nation's countryside villages before returning to Havana. The trip was by no means long enough, but across the provinces of Matanzas, Villa Clara, Sancti Spiritus, Cienfuegos, and La Habana I was able to see urban and rural; beaches, farm fields, and mountains; and streets lined with both modern buildings and Cuba's famed colonial architecture.
At the time I traveled, United States citizens were enjoying a brief window in which we were permitted to conduct self-guided research trips to Cuba, but certain bureaucratic paperwork was technically required. If you looked to the documents I carried with me at all times, I was in the country to "research, on a full time basis, unique Cuban approaches to landscape architectural design of parks and public squares." As I sweat through my newly purchased guayabera, this notarized statement was not far from the truth. I spent hours observing the many ways in which Cuba's streets, squares, and promenades were being used. Around noon one day, a sneaking suspicion baked into an embarrassingly-late epiphany under the blazing sun.
activities in shade and sun, Paseo El Prado, Cienfuegos
PLAZAS & OPEN SPACES
Urban theorist Jan Gehl, in his first chapter of Life between Buildings, streamlines all human outdoor activity into three categories: "necessary activities, optional activities, and social activities." Necessary activities, he describes, include pedestrians' requisite commutes to work and school, delivering mail and packages, and point-to-point errands. Optional activities, which include walking or jogging for exercise, "standing around enjoying life, or sitting and sunbathing," only occur when "weather and place invite" people to perform them. Social activities, which build upon the presence of other people partaking in the necessary and the optional, include "children at play, greetings and conversations, communal activities...and...the most widespread social activity...simply seeing and hearing other people."
Gehl observed that optional activities occur more frequently in higher quality outdoor spaces; as levels of optional activity rise, social activities increase substantially (graphic adapted from Gehl’s Life between Buildings, p11)
With a hard sun overhead, the open spaces of Cuba sort out Gehl's activities like a sieve. At midday in the town of Trinidad, visitors lounge together on the edges of Plaza Mayor, participating in a mixture of optional and social activities on a tall curb shaded by a single-story colonial building. Hours later, the same view, but the sun has swung a bit to the west: the sliver of shade has disappeared and the same piece of plaza has become inhospitable. The only people that can be seen now are in the distance, bunched beneath the shady sanctuary of trees.
outdoor activities shifting with sun exposure, Plaza Mayor, Trinidad
If Plaza Mayor was starting to read like a diagram of comfort versus discomfort based on solar exposure, things got even more interesting in the northeast corner. The surface of the plaza turns uphill, reminiscent of Rome's Spanish Steps, and a half-dozen trees sprawl generously over the cobbled terraces. Here, people hunker over their phones in something of a Venn diagram, drawn by the visible outline of the trees' shadow overlapping with the invisible radius of a public wi-fi hub.
where wi-fi signal and shady refuge overlap, Plaza Mayor, Trinidad
STREETS & SIDEWALKS
The orientation may be mirrored from Manhattan to Melbourne, but in most cities there are assumed rules of the road. These unwritten -- and often unconscious -- regulations enable the masses of human strangers to move in (relatively) smooth patterns, and as an urbanist I have been cognizant of them for a decade.
And yet, there I was bumping into the pedestrians of Havana and feeling like a fish out of water. It was a subtle unease, but a deep-seated one. I learned my lesson soon enough in Havana and then found myself applying it in the towns of Trinidad and Cienfuegos: extreme sun exposure calls for an improvisation of pedestrian flows. To put it more bluntly, Cuba's unwritten sidewalk rules could be written as "keep to your right, unless if the sun is too hot."
all activities (necessary, optional, and social) occurring on the shady side of the street, Calle Cristo, Trinidad and Calle San Fernando, Cienfuegos
While Gehl makes clear the correlation between environmental quality and optional/social activities, it is worth observing that extreme heat and glare can divert the necessary pedestrian travel into the shade, even if it will require a longer route with extraneous street crossings.
BRINGING SOMETHING BACK
Growing up in Georgia, I half-recall an idiom about even dogs being smart enough to sit in the shade. On a similar note, all of the observations I have shared here could be filed under simple common sense. However, despite the clear impact that sun exposure has on human activity in the public realm, sun-exposure analysis all too often becomes an afterthought to grand pattern-making, bold architectural expression, and rich materiality.
Despite the totalitarian government the world has heard so much about, Cuba's public spaces appear less prescriptive, more flexible, and -- unless it was all a complex ruse -- more democratic than the majority of parks and streetscapes in the United States. The imperceptible blending of public open spaces to semi-private stoops, coupled with low-speed pedestrian-prioritized roadways in the urban centers, make for broad, flexible public-realm open spaces.
As the sun cycles across the sky, the ability of pedestrians to informally drift and seek shade (or sun, in winter months) is critical to the comfort of users and the success of an open space. Like the simple photo from Kevin Lynch's archives, the lessons I learned in Cuba have burned into my memory and come through in my professional practice. When urban planners, architects, and landscape architects ignore the sun and its influence, they do so at their own peril.
lounging in small islands of shade, Fan Pier Public Green, Boston, Massachusetts
