Globalization and digitization are making physical location less and less significant to human existence. Are we building a world where there is no “there” there? How will we know what we have lost?

Insight Labs is partnering with Phoenix architect Mike Davis to assess the components that make a place distinctive. We will also consider together how these elements of place can be treated responsibly by architects, planners, designers, and others who shape the spaces where we spend our lives.

Click here to see an index of all of the pieces in the “Elements of Place” series. The discussions will also inform a Lab on the future of community development in May 2012.

Andrew Benedict-Nelson: So I thought a logical starting point for our exploration of the elements of place would be climate. I’ve chosen what seem like some pretty fundamental components of climate. I’d like to hear your thoughts on each of them, and as I hear what you’re saying I’ll try to extract some contributions to the idea of place. But first I’d like to hear your gut responses to each of these, not as an architect, but simply as a human being.

So the first element is the sun.

Mike Davis: I think about life. Heat. Warmth. Shadow. Burns. Brilliance. Color. Then I think about that funny little guy out there on the Discovery Channel, that star where we all came from, somehow or another. I think that with the exception of atoms splitting, every little bit of heat we get on this Earth comes from the sun – we’re either retaining or dispersing it. I think of the sun as the engine, the thing that makes all of this tick and keeps it going.

Then I think about the four and half billion years we’re supposed to have before we burn this thing out – the demise of mankind.

ABN: I am interested that the sun makes you think on that scale of time.

MD: I’m kind of fascinated by the distance. We have a perfectly concocted little spot. It’s that Goldilocks stuff – not too far, not too close. So the sun has this friendliness. It feels like it’s something of a protector as well, even though it’s scorching out here in the desert.

ABN: Those seem to me to be the aspects that made people think of the sun as a god.

MD: It doesn’t strike me as being entirely illogical – you have the warm, life-giving part on the one hand and the destroying part on the other. The other fascinating aspect of that is the fact that it’s roughly the same size in the sky as the Moon. When you have an eclipse you could ask, “Where’d the god go?”

I also think of all the things that we perceive as beauty, none of which can be perceived without light. We have certain artificial ways to make light, but for the most part it comes from the sun. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to see cities or buildings or other human faces, as well as shade, shadow, contrast, the context and scale the sun gives to so many things. It is the progenitor of beauty in a lot of ways.

ABN: I think that’s a pretty fundamental theme – the sun as the progenitor of beauty – but it’s interesting that you can’t look at it directly.

MD: Absolutely. You can get close, but that level of brightness will burn your retinas. Still, 93 million miles feels like a long way away.

ABN: Okay, I’d like to throw in an element for contrast. What do you think about “shadow”? 

MD: My first instinct is one of comfort. I do believe that’s largely geographic. I know that when you get up in the mountains, the shade and the wind are not your friends. But in Phoenix, shade is virtually always a benevolent thing that you welcome, even in the winter. Even on a December or January day, you would not stay out of the shadow cast by a tree or a building.

In a place like Telluride, Colorado where the ambient air temperature is 20 degrees, it can actually be quite warm in the sun, but the instant the wind blows, you can feel it. When the cloud covers the sun you can tell that it’s 20 degrees. In a place like Chicago you want the sun most of the time – not necessarily in July, but most of the time it is welcome when it comes out. Phoenix, by contrast, is a place where shadows are welcomed.

Though the sun is that which creates the shadow, the shadow is that which gives depth of detail and study, whether it is the beauty of a face or a place or a building or an object or a tree. They’re paired. They’re symbiotic.

I’ve been learning a lot lately about painting. Most of the work I have done up until now has been in water-based media where you start from light and go dark, but recently I have been learning about oils, where you tend to start dark and go lighter. And what I’ve been learning is that light, in art, is actually considered to be a cooling element. We don’t think of it that way because we think of its temperature. But you’ll notice that because of the atmosphere and the sky being blue, as things get more and more distant from you, they become bluer. Shadow, in comparison, while we think of it as cool, is actually warm in tone. So you see a lot of amateurish art with a lot of orange light and purple shadows.

It goes back to what you were saying about the sun being something we can’t look at, and it reminds us of infrared and all the kinds of light we can’t see. It makes you wonder what the hell is really going on out there.

But anyway, another one of the first things you learn when you are learning to draw is how to shade spaces. Shadow is very often that which provides a further level of interest and detail and desire to explore. When a space is all well-lit, it looks sterile. There is a mystery to shadow.

ABN: Let’s say you were sitting with an Egyptian sun-worshiper and he says, “My point of view is that the sun and light are always good, and shade and darkness represent evil.” Your job is to explain the virtue of shadow to this person. How would you explain it?

MD: An Egyptian would live in a fairly arid desert climate like Phoenix. I think you could demonstrate that the effects the sun can have on the human body there are pretty violent. He would be familiar with the oasis. Part of the nature of the oasis was water, of course, but it was also shade. I don’t know, I might just be demonstrating the virtue of dermatology. But the first thing that comes to mind is the immediate relief shade brings to the body.

ABN: I imagine you could abstract that into a sort of virtue of protection or mercy. You can understand intellectually that the sun is the source of everything and powers the whole planet. Yet you need a break from it every once in a while. You can’t spend all of your mind thinking about the source of everything.

MD: Right. It’s like God telling Moses that no one can see his face and live. There’s a little bit of that going on with the big star out there. It’s like it’s saying, “I’m good and benevolent and the giver of life – and get too much of me and you’re a dead man.” On the other hand, it’s usually pretty welcome in Antarctica. Or Chicago.

ABN: So let’s what would you say are the principles one might want to keep in mind in regards to the sun when working in a place like Phoenix?

MD: The first thing is to respect it. Respect its intensity. There is less an idea here of how you capture the sun than how you mitigate and tone it down.

One of the ideas with the big glass buildings of a place like Chicago is that they would be heat traps. In Phoenix, not so much. For probably about a third of a year you are trying to reduce the heat, for a third it’s fine, and then for a third you are trying to reduce it a little bit. So you are going for an architecture that brings shade, that brings comfort. You want to respect the stark beauty that the sun has brought to this place, but you want to tone it down or adapt it rather than just capture it.

ABN: And what would be the rules for shade?

MD: Create as much of it as possible in as many meaningful ways as you can, whether it’s through native vegetation or the built form – shade is your friend. Particularly with transversing spaces. We don’t just hang out on our front porches – we move places. We walk places. Shade is an essential part of that experience.

I took a walk through downtown Phoenix the other day and had to stand in the sun for a while with my briefcase while it was 110 degrees out. I thought, “This could get old pretty quick.” Shade is a bit of a missing element when it comes to our urban design here. That’s part of doing good buildings for this place.

ABN: You said “meaningful” – what are some other “meaningful” ways of providing shade?

MD: There’s not a lot of reason to hang out in west-facing buildings here. It’s just hard. Shading a building where there would never be a hospitable place for us to stand and talk is kind of a waste. On the other hand, when there is an obvious gathering place, you sometimes see these beautiful courtyards without any shade and you think, “Would I really want to stand out here?” We might want to stand out there and smoke in January or March, but not in any other time of the year.

Shade is always useful on the south side of buildings here. It’s not un-useful on the west side, but south light is good because it’s refractive and diffuse. So that’s often the place where it’s most meaningful to do it. When you see a guy go to a lot of trouble to put a lot of gobbledegook to shade a place where no one is going to stand, it seems sort of juvenile. Why would you spend the money if it’s not going to do anything useful there?

Another obvious point is that it gets really hot here, though we have pretty lovely weather for seven or eight months of the year. That sets up a bit of the indoor-outdoor living thing. Yesterday we had a high of 115 degrees. But right now I’m sitting on my patio and it’s 85 or 86 degrees – not uncomfortable.

We can have no clouds in the sky for three days, and that can be nice. But there is a type of sky we get in June or July that can be so bright it is almost harsh. It is not luminous or inviting, but more like a gigantic glowing steel umbrella over your head.

ABN: Are there any buildings that you think would be good “case studies” in this element of place?

MD: I have been thinking a lot about that in regards to a lot of the commercial office work that we do. A lot of what we’ve been putting up are these hermetically sealed boxes with lots of glass on them. There is a school of thought that says that is irresponsible because that glass lets in a lot of heat. Though candidly, these days that is mostly BS, since there are all kinds of glass coatings – there are kinds of double-insulated, laminated, clear glass that give you greater value than a shade screen.

When it comes to dealing with issues of the sun, one of my favorite commissions was a project I got about 20-plus years ago. I was designing a corporate headquarters for the Francishe Finance Corporation of America out in the desert north of Scottsdale. The client asked me to design an “Arizona” building for him. We agreed to do something on a two-story scale, about 60,000 square feet. What I did for that was to design a project that had a lot of deep over-hanging glass. The building itself used a lot of indigenous materials from the state of Arizona: sandstone, concrete, copper.

I think it did a couple of interesting things in regards to the sun. It created this sort of shade and shadow pattern that hovered over the flow of the desert. Another thing that we did, which we do with a lot of our buildings here, is that we created a lot of open breakout space. You know, in Chicago, you have things like the green roofs initiative where you are putting a lot of vegetation up there. But you’re not really hanging out there – you can only do that for about three months of the year. Here you can be outside for seven or eight months. So you have greater opportunities for  patios and decks with a bit of view. That’s also done out of a sort of respect for the mountains.

You bring daylight into the center of the building as well. We oriented the building to bring in as much light as possible, but diffuse light, not direct. In Chicago or the Pacific Northwest you may want as much light as possible. You think, “Please let me see the sun, I don’t see enough of it.” Out here, you get plenty of sun. You like the day and the warmth of it, but you don’t want it coming directly in your window when it can be so harsh and so bright. This building does a lot of that.

Previous Elements of Place discussion: “Enter a continuum of place” • Next in the Elements of Place: “Use water to welcome”

Top: Egyptian Pyramids at Giza image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Bottom: FFCA building in Scottsdale, Arizona; image courtesy The DAVIS Experience.