SUPER SHADE STRUCTURES AND SYSTEMS:
Multi-Functional 'Community Shading' for the World's Sunbelt Cities, Towns, and Inhabited Spaces, with Additional Environmental and Quality-of-Life Functions
“A spacious pleasant shade, which neither heat can pierce nor cold invade.”
Ovid (43 B.C. – 17 A.D.)
Summary:
Super Shade Structures and Systems are modular, scalable, multi-functional, time of day-, weather- and seasons-responsive large-scale structures and systems are a prospective new form of built-environment infrastructure for deployment over towns, villages, public housing estates, campuses, malls, business parks, trailer parks and other inhabited spaces to provide large-area "district shading" that will lower the enclosed area's outdoor temperature during high-heat days. These structures and systems will also lower the air conditioning cooling loads of the sheltered buildings, significant as air cooling is the largest single and fastest growing use of electricity in our ever hotter cities and suburbs, providing climate mitigation as well as adaptation.
Super Shade Structures will be, variously, geodesic, tensile, or hybrid constructions; some will also generate considerable solar electricity with thin-film photovoltaic material on their expansive, mostly smooth and uniform sun-exposed surfaces, and harvest storm water, and exclude air pollution and wildfire smoke and embers. Some will be vegetated structures that provide aerial habitat for birds and pollinators. Mechanically operated louvered shade structures will open and close with the cycle of days and nights. Extendable/retractable and inflatable/deflatable forms of Super Shade Systems -- and even "Floating Shades" (suspended by coordinated drones) large shade blankets -- will be deployed in regions subject to high winds, tornadoes and hurricanes. Recreational, industrial, agricultural and other spaces, including zoos, theme parks, prisons and refugee camps, will also be cooled by the new Super Shade as the 21st century heats up.
This new feature of the built and inhabited environments of the world, in particular the global sunbelt, can play a significant role in both adapting to and mitigating climate change and global heating, and deserves considerable and widespread design and development, funding, and economy-of-scale deployment in the years and decades immediately ahead.
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The world is in a heat emergency and global climate crisis. With every decade, the only planet we have -- and will ever have -- is hotter, dryer, nastier, and brighter due to climate change and global warming, even as it gets steadily more crowded and emits ever more of the carbon and greenhouse gases that are driving the deterioration of the climate. And billions of people and animals are suffering from extreme heat's array of harmful physical and mental effects.
Fact: Air cooling is the largest single and fastest growing use of electricity in our ever hotter cities and suburbs.
Fact: Heat has become the greatest cause of physical distress, sickness, and death of all natural disasters.
A major architectural response to the climate crisis is the white roofing movement. Former Energy Secretary Steven Chu has stated that "cool roofs are one of the quickest and lowest-cost ways we can reduce our global carbon emissions and begin the hard work of slowing climate change."
Another architectural design concept is also slowly taking shape in response to the climate crisis, an approach that might be called "white roofing on steroids": Super Shade Structures. Large-scale Super Solar Shade Structures will perform precisely the same vital function -- but much more so -- along with, in some cases, solar electricity production and a range of other environmentally useful services.
The origin of this concept is the famous image created by visionary architect and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller in 1958 of an enormous geodesic dome over central Manhattan Island. Fuller suggested that this giant dome would protect Manhattan buildings and people from extreme weather and polluted air. The time has come to bring Fuller's vision into the 21st century, in an array of forms.
Hundreds and thousands of large, very large, and enormous Super Shade Structures of a variety of kinds -- providing large-area cooling as well as a smorgasbord of allied environmental functions -- need to be envisioned, designed, built, manufactured, assembled, and installed in the hot cities and suburbs of the Earth's sunbelt in the coming decades. Rigid or semi-flexible structures -- frequently geodesic or tensile structures -- will be the form most of these take. Some Super Shade Structures will be very large, even massive structures many stories or multiple tens of stories high, each operating as a huge white roof or cool roof over a cluster of smaller buildings, repelling heat and providing cooling for both the exterior and interior spaces beneath.
Super Shade Systems also will be needed: for example, various inflatable/deflatable and extendable/retractable kinds of Super Shade Structures, and even drones-suspended PV-powered "Floating Shade" sheets or blankets will also be designed and deployed for housing estates, villages, campuses, and malls in regions subject to frequent high winds and tornadoes and hurricanes; more on this later.
These modular, scalable, multi-functional, ambient conditions-responsive large-scale structures and systems will evolve as they are constructed over various communities, towns, campuses, malls, business parks, trailer parks, and sports and recreation sites -- and farms, prisons, and refugee camps -- to provide large-area "district shading" that will lower the enclosed area's ambient outdoor temperature and thereby lower the mechanical air conditioning "cooling loads" of groups of buildings. A variety of recreational, industrial, agricultural and other spaces, including zoos, theme parks, and refugee camps, will also be cooled by various forms of "Super Shade" as the 21st century heats up.
In many cases the Super Shade Structures will also generate considerable solar electricity with thin-film photovoltaic material on their expansive, mostly smooth and uniform sun-exposed surfaces (Super Solar Shade Structures) with building-integrated PV on fabric or metallic sheets residing on tensile structures of metal or wood. PV-coated aluminized metal fabrics are particularly robust radiant barriers.
The Super Shade Structures in many cases will also perform other useful functions in the built environment -- especially the rigid and semi-rigid shade structures -- including, variously:
stormwater harvesting,
ambient air funneling for large-area natural ventilation or, alternately, local clean air --
and in various cases other potential beneficial environmental and human effects, such as nighttime light pollution containment,
high wind deflection and protection,
protection from air pollution, and the embers and smoke of nearby fires,
aerial habitat for birds and pollinators,
reduction of bird strikes with the enclosed buildings, and
large-scale emergency public cooling during heat waves.
Even atmospheric carbon capture and atmospheric water precipitation are possible co-functions.
These large semi-enclosed spaces could usefully enclose certain positive societal activities -- for example urban vertical farms (perhaps receiving solar exposure with direct fiber-optic light conduits) and large-scale human-and-animal co-habitation (for example, a Cats and Cats Caretakers Cohousing Community!).
The Super Solar Shade Structures' large-scale space cooling effect and solar electricity generation might make them particularly useful enclosures for energy-intensive heat-producing large data processing centers.
Shade Structure sections can be louvred to allow more daylight and heat into the interior during the (unfortunately diminishing) winter months.
Some of the structures can take the form of "green roofs on steroids" -- enormous vegetation- and greenery-covered domes and undulating overarching super-roofs that provide habitat and food for birds, bees, and other pollinators, and take on the appearance of urban forests and flower gardens in the air, and whose "outdoor interiors" have the feel of a temperate rainforest of dappled light and nature's murmurs.
A chain of these Green Super Shade Structures might constitute de facto ecological corridors across metropolitan areas for migrating birds and butterflies and other flying wildlife.
The shade- and cooling-providing, energy-conserving, frequently energy-generating, and various environmental services-supporting Super Shade Structures will succeed if they are modular, scalable, economical, versatile, multi-functional, resilient, comfortable -- and beautiful.
Many or most Super Shade Structures and Super Shade Systems will be constructed of manufactured modular components that are brought to the sites of the structures and assembled, variously, by cranes or helicopters (as Fuller proposed for his mega-dome) or even coordinated fleets of drones. Modularity will enable the economic construction of numerous Super Solar Shade Structures in every foreseeable future year.
The other main category of Super Shade Systems will take a variety of possible forms. For example, clusters of various kinds of inflatable/deflatable and extendable/retractable modules for deployment in regions subject to frequent high winds and tornadoes, typhoons and hurricanes. Think of pods, bladders, balloons, and bubbles on tall semi-flexible 'stalks' that from a distance might resemble, when inflated/expanded, a bouquet of flowers. Perhaps a multitude of hundreds of manufactured inflatable 'leaves' on numerous 'twigs' on many 'branches' or 'stalks' could provide greater or lesser shading, as needed. The mottled light that frequently bathes the spaces and buildings beneath will resemble the filtered light of alpine and tropical forests.
Relevant to mechanical/changeable/conditions-responsive Super Shade Structures is the work of the SL Rasch GmbH Special and Lightweight Structures, based in Stuttgart, Germany, which "specializes in special and lightweight structures integrating architecture and engineering. The company was founded by Mahmoud Bodo Rasch. The company has branches in Leinfelden-Echterdingen, Jeddah, Mecca and Medina. Among the most famous projects are the large retractable umbrellas in front of the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina and the Makkah Clock Tower, the tallest clock tower in the world." (From the Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL_Rasch_GmbH_Special_and_Lightweight_Structures.)
Even "Floating" Super Shade is envisioned, in the form of large flexible metallic or carbon-fiber fabric sun-shading sheets or blankets suspended by small squadrons of movement-coordinated drones during days of high solar intensity. The upper sides of the suspended shade sheets might be coated with thin-film photovoltaic material on their upper sun-exposed sides that powers the drones, which would lift the blankets in the mornings of hot, low-wind days from troughs or high vertical cavities, unfold the blankets for their daytime shade provision, and re-fold and return them to their storage as the day wanes and during high winds.
Humanity is in a race against time to lower our emissions of carbon and greenhouse gases by rapidly reducing our overall use of energy with efficiency, while rapidly switching to renewable energy in every feasible form. The rapid design and construction of many multiple forms of Super Shade Structures, including Super Solar Shade Structures, and Super Shade Systems could be one of the important ways we accomplish this.
The Super Shade Structures and Systems concept has the potential in time to change the sense, appearance, feel, and scale of cities and the built landscape, dramatically and beautifully, transforming the built world with geometric extravaganzas of color and form, dramatic fractal forms, sinuous and mysterious biomimetic growths, giant bouquets and bowers of flowers, and classical architectural forms remixed and rescaled.
The design of a wide range and scale of Super Shade Structures, Super Solar Shade Structures, and Super Shade Systems should become the creative objective of global teams of green architects and solar designers and engineers! Super Solar Shade Structures, in many forms and at many scales, will become essential major structures and features in the world's sunbelt cities and metropolitan regions, in both developed and developing nations in the world's hot climates during the climate-challenged decades ahead.
A vast online database of existing large-scale covered and shaded spaces that point the way with examples from throughout history, from bazaars to malls, and various vivid modern projects will help us visualize the possible forms of Super Shade in the built environment and to create the visualizations, designs, studies, and other relevant content. Let's concentrate the creative energy of sustainable architects, solar designers, and visionary technologists to create compelling designs of various versions and scales of tomorrow's Super Shade Structures and Systems, and share these on a website devoted to sharing and promoting a huge range of Super Solar Shade Structures and Systems designs and concepts.
This might take the form of a Super Shade design competition or open-source design project among architects, solar experts, green designers, and relevant technology developers. The Land Art Generator Initiative that issues a biannual call for public art designs that combine beauty with significant energy generation is a wonderful model: www.landartgenerator.org ("renewable energy can be beautiful"). Another example is the recent Global Cooling Prize -- "an innovation competition to develop a climate-friendly residential cooling solution that can provide access to cooling to people around the world without warming the planet": https://globalcoolingprize.org/. The 10X Prize - Clean Cooling Student Competition in 2023-2024 seeks "alternative, affordable, and scalable solutions...to meet the needs of a hotter planet" with "creative thinking and adaptive problem solving" and "innovative and viable solutions": https://10across.com/10xprize/.
The overarching (as it were!) concept of community-, town-, and large-area-scale Super Shade Structures and Super Shade Systems hopefully will be rolled out to the world quickly and well enough to make a difference in this time of rapidly-worsening climate change and global heating (sadly, we're past 'warming'). Let's make these new architectural features as good, various, numerous, and useful as we can, as carbon and methane pollution heat up our world -- and make life even more challenging for people, animals, and the entire biosphere. The structures and cities we build next must make our world, and life itself, better, happier, and more sustainable. An ever-growing number and variety of Super Shade Structures and Super Shade Systems across the world must be an important part of humanity’s response to its primary 21st-century challenge.
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