Last year, the city of Phoenix began using art installations to provide heat relief. We’re now learning more about the cooling effects of these structures.
¡Sombra! Experiments in Shade began last summer at Phoenix parks with a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. The pieces are at various public sites, like Sunnyslope Park and Steele Indian School Park.
The city says installations have lowered surface temperatures by an average of 30 to 40 degrees.
Carrie Brown is the interim director at the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture.
“So what we would do is we go out to each structure, we went out to each one multiple times and we would take a surface temperature in the sun outside of the shade and then take that underneath the shade canopy in the shade and to see what the difference was.
Just how cool depends on the materials used and their longevity in the heat.
“One of the things that we learned was that certain materials had a really great effect on the cooling of the site. Others still had a good effect, but maybe not as strong. But also, we were looking at what was going to hold up in the desert environment," she said.
Brown says cooling effect measurements were done through a partnership with the Office of Heat Response and Mitigation and a mobile weather station from Arizona State University known as MaRTy.
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