We Have Never Been Solar

“Like most things in the world, we were born in the shadows. Our task was first described by Tim Horvath as the discipline of shadows. But something has changed in the world, and it’s the circumstances of the day that have forced us to come out of the dark. The Department of Umbrology emerges out of the need to respond to the climatic mutations of the present.

With Copernicus and Galileo, modernity put the Sun at the centre. After this heliocentric turn, we usually attribute to the sun the ability to give life, but what do we do when it damages us or puts us at risk, such as in atmospheric conditions of extreme heat? But we have never been solar: Our life on Earth could be read as a long interspecies story of how the living have learned to protect from its irradiation. The atmosphere itself, with its complex circulation of air, the seas and river banks or the iridescent tapestry of clouds and forests are nothing but a patchy system, with local expressions, of ways of capturing, regulating, dissipating or blocking the sun’s rays and, of course, of generating shade.

Although both shadows and shades are an old acquaintance of us, growing ecological concerns have pushed administrations and design professionals to recover them as a daily environmental relationship with the sun as it goes through our daily habitats. What’s more, despite the fact that it is usually considered a secondary product of the sun, its negative version, what if shades were the very condition of habitability? For this reason, it has gained great importance in different contemporary technical solutions to face conditions of extreme heat: municipal shading plans, bioclimatic itineraries or shade infrastructures. This is requiring to re-enliven old knowledge and techniques, as well as speculating and creating new solutions to mitigate and adapt to the increasing heat.

In times like this, we also need to address the nature-cultural life of shadows, whether already existing or designed. In a heated present, where the ability to shelter from the scorching sun is a poorly distributed good, vindicating the knowledge and generative practices of shades may be crucial to re-learning to live as earthly beings. That is the task of the ‘Department of Umbrology‘ in our urban territories: to come out of the shadows, to study shade, working «on shadows, from shadows.”