An Evening with Sam Bloch and Germane Barnes

***Please note: This event will take place at the Books & Books in Coral Gables at 265 Aragon Ave. Tickets are FREE and books will be available for purchase at the event. Can't make the event or want your copy early?

An extraordinary investigation into shade, this “compelling . . . conversation-starter draws examples from history, city-planning and social policy” (NPR) to change the way we think about a critical natural resource that should be available to all.

On a 90-degree day in Los Angeles, bus riders across the city line up behind the shadows cast by street signs and telephone poles, looking for a little relief from the sun’s glaring heat. Every summer such scenes play out in cities across the United States, and as Sam Bloch argues, we ignore the benefits of shade at our own peril. Heatwaves are now the country’s deadliest natural disasters with victims concentrated in poorer, less shady areas. Public health, mental health, and crime statistics are worse in neighborhoods without it. For some, finding shade is a matter of life and death.

Shade was once a staple of human civilization. In Mesopotamia and Northern Africa, cities were built densely so that courtyards and public passageways were in shadow in the heat of the day, with cool breezes flowing freely. The Greeks famously philosophized in shady agoras. Even today, in Spain’s sunny Seville, political careers are imperiled when leaders fail to put out the public shades that hang above sidewalks in time for summer heat.

So what happened in the U.S.? The arrival of air conditioning and the dominance of cars took away the impetus to enshrine shade into our rapidly growing cities. Though a few heroic planners, engineers, and architects developed shady designs for efficiency and comfort, the removal of shade trees in favor of wider roads and underinvestment in public spaces created a society where citizens retreat to their own cooled spaces, if they can—increasingly taxing the energy grid—or face dangerous heat outdoors.

Shade examines the key role that shade plays not only in protecting human health and enhancing urban life, but also looks toward the ways that innovative architects, city leaders, and climate entrepreneurs are looking to revive it to protect vulnerable people—and maybe even save the planet. Ambitious and far-reaching, Shade helps us see a crucially important subject in a new light.

Sam Bloch is an environmental journalist. Previously a staff writer at The Counter, he has written for L.A. Weekly, Places Journal, Slate, The New York Times, CityLab, and Landscape Architecture Magazine, among others. Bloch is a graduate of the Columbia Journalism School, and a former MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow and Emerson Collective Fellow. He is based in New York City.

Germane Barnes is a Chicago-born, Miami-based licensed architect, designer, and founding principal of Studio Barnes a research and design practice that investigates the connection between architecture and identity, examining architecture’s social and political agency through historical research and design speculation. He is also an Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Architecture Graduate Programs at the University of Miami. His work has recently been exhibited in the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, and the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial. He is a winner of the Architectural League Prize and is a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. His work has also been featured and acquired to the permanent collections of international institutions most notably San Francisco MoMA, LACMA, The New York Times, and The National Museum of African American History and Culture.

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