Project Sailshade
“Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun” according to the 1931 Noel Coward song and reinforced in the titling of Joe Cocker’s 1970 album of similar name. Noel Coward wrote the song while traveling from Hanoi to Saigon, so he had tropical heat on his mind. One of the great lines in the song refers to the “Noonday gun” in reference to the fact that in Hong Kong the noonday sun was so oppressive that the penal authorities felt it necessary to warn all prisoners that it was time to come in out of the sun when it reached its apex at midday. It was considered a marvel to all Southern Hemisphere inhabitants serving under the yoke of British colonial rule for several centuries that the English soldiers seemed to take pride in the view that they could conquer all, including the heat of the tropical sun at midday. No movie tells this tale better than Bridge Over the River Kwai when the senior British officer, Colonel Nicholson, played by Alec Guinness defies the Japanese, in the voice of Colonel Saito, who commands that all British officers must do manual labor alongside the Allied enlisted men. Nicholson stands for the righteousness of the British way (including the questionably just differentiation due to class structure). The heat of the midday tropical sun in the jungle between Thailand and Burma is the antagonist to Colonel Nicholson as much or more than the Japanese intransigence.
I have lived in the tropics for six years of my life in Venezuela and a small tropical valley in Costa Rica. I’ve travelled extensively all over the equatorial areas of Latin America and Africa, not to mention the arid sun’s anvil deserts of the Middle East. I’ve experienced the humid heat of Southeast Asia and the subcontinent of India. All this experience gives me great respect for that midday sun and makes me feel that it is, indeed, best left to mad dogs and, I suppose, Englishmen that insist they can take it. I, for one, will wear my wide-brim hat and only go out in an air conditioned vehicle during that time of day. I am getting lots of local experience this summer coming to these conclusions as every day is a bright sunshiny day from what I can tell so far.
The outdoor areas of my property consist of three areas, the first of which is the deck, where we have a large shaded palapa made of wood that we designed to match the Southwest look and feel of the house. I am sitting there right now as I write this with the help of my lap desk and it is lovely in its views (we have a glass deck railing) and in its breezes from the ocean to the West. The next is the garden barbecue patio near the hot tub. Between the Madagascar bottle tree and the boulders that frame the patio on the crest of this little hill outcropping, we have a barbecue counter that we use to serve our guests (this has come in especially handy in the Coronavirus outdoor social distancing program). Over that area, we have (compliments of Jeff’s engineering and installation) a lovely fanning palapa made of a combination of powder-coated steel and wood highlights that keep the whole area nicely shaded in the morning sun and nicely framed and lighted in the evening. The final outdoor area is the largest and it is the expanse of triple-width driveway that forms the top parking area fed by the uphill driveway and ending in the three-car detached garage adjacent to our house. While all sides of this reddish concrete surface are bounded by succulents and cacti, it is a large open expanse that takes on a tortilla flats hot surface look in the sunlight of midday. When you step out onto it from the front or side doors of the house, you feel like you should be wearing a shade hat to protect yourself from the scorching sun.
After six months of living here I think it is safe to say that while I put my Tesla and two motorcycles into the garage whenever not in use, Kim has gotten into the habit of leaving her Mercedes out in front of the garage. This is because garaging it has been difficult as we have used the garage as a work staging area and now a doggie stroller parking area, but it is mostly for convenience so she can jump in or out of the car with ease. All of our vehicles are white to acknowledge the power of the sun out here, but still, that Mercedes gets hot and dusty out there in the elements. It would be nice if we had that most common of California structures, a car port, to tuck the car under, but who wants to get into all that construction and break up the aesthetics of the house setting.
As I pondered this dilemma, my dreams of a white Sprinter van also danced in my head and I wondered where I would park that beast if I acquired one. As I mulled over the issue with Jeff, master palapa builder to the stars, he suggested we consider a sailshade tension installation covering the area in front of the garage. This would serve to give shade to the Mercedes, and it could also protect whatever Sprinter I finagle Kim in to letting me buy. It also has the benefit of being aesthetically appealing (these sail shades are zoomy-looking affairs that can bring in splashes of color and can add a touch of whimsy to an otherwise ordinary space out these on tortilla flats. I liked the idea and immediately tested it on architect sister Kathy and got a thumbs up and a few structural suggestions (Jeff is confident he can figure out all that mundane stuff and he has the palapa chops to prove it in two other places at my house). We are at the detail design and pricing stage of this little juggernaut and I may just have to use it to further justify my Sprinter acquisition.
When I started college in the Fall of ‘71, I had to take a Freshman writing course and got assigned an art history course held in the basement of Goldwin Smith Hall. Our first assignment was to analyze the space between the Uris and Olin Libraries, a space that we all walked through several times each day on our way to classes, lunch and back home to the dorms. Analyzing a space was a new challenge for me, but I understood the wisdom of it. It forced us to think “outside the box” as it were and to think three-dimensionally and in terms of “negative matter”. The exercise of writing about our thoughts was, of course, the purpose of the assignment, but I also felt that it helped me always appreciate the spaces within which I passed or lived. I think I got a D on that first paper, which is part of the “break them down so you can build them up right” program that Cornell liked to do to its Freshmen. I think I did a decent job of the analysis and the paper despite what the grade implies, but the best part of it is that it is one of the most memorable assignments I was given in college and I always harken back to it as I have once again with Project Sailshade. Soon we will not have to go out onto tortilla flats with the mad dogs and Englishmen, but will simply sail out into our shaded vehicles instead.