32N Urban Shade explores the urban value of shade, focusing on the role it can play in the circulation, experience, and habitation of the city, as a public and civic ‘climate-frustructure’ at the Bat Yam Landscape Urbanism Biennale 2010.
Bat Yam is overexposed, glaring, and scorching. From May through October, sun exposure plays a pivotal role in the city’s daily experience and use cycles. What if shade and well-tempered environments were to inform uses of outdoor spaces and future architectural developments across Bat Yam? Can form follow shade?
32N Urban Shade introduces a new temporal map of Bat Yam’s shade. Nine lenticular shade maps showing shifting shade footprints were distributed along designated walking routes, enabling pedestrians to plan their path based on shade availability by the hour of the day. In addition, vertical green wall shade installations cast shade based on their orientation, offering cool stops along the way. Together, the urban shade map and shade installations served to raise awareness of shade as a temporal, public, and spatial amenity.
The 32N Urban Shade map renders shade as a visible urban commodity, offering performative insights into the relationship between built fabric, cast shade, and overexposure in the outdoor spaces of Bat Yam.
The vertical green shade walls, positioned in relation to the sun’s path, cast shade across different times of day and offer double-sided seating for solar relief, shifting orientation to follow the sun.
