On the provisional end of the spectrum, these range from ad hoc screens of wood and plexiglas, or even tall potted plants, to more sophisticated plastic awnings and curtains. The more permanent solutions often involve high fences or glass wind screens, ranging in their degree of enclosure from single walls to fully enclosed solariums or atria. technology In outdoor spaces that are not particularly well-oriented or shielded from the wind, or when even the most well-adapted spaces face the chill of night or a particularly stiff breeze, there are always heat lamps. While these artificial suns are no substitute for the real thing, they do serve to extend the range and duration of suitable outdoor environments in the city. Similarly, outdoor fireplaces and wood-burning stoves provide a permanent heat source for an outside gathering. Despite its northwest orientation, this transitional space at Kate O’Briens is well protected from wind and gets good late afternoon sun. Glass and steel wind screens, tall curtains, and heat lamps turned this former loading dock into a sophisticated dining room at the upscale Jack Falstaff. Umbria deploys the most cursory of fabric wind screens under their awning. Several establishments on Claude Lane have installed these elaborate folding wind screens, which they combine with heat lamps to make outdoor dining comfortable in the evenings.
Few outside spaces fall neatly into just one or other of these categories; most adopt multiple strategies to deal with the shifting weather conditions of San Francisco. There has been a surge in the deployment of these strategies in recent years with the noticeable proliferation of outdoor gathering spaces in the city. Does this mean the weather actually getting better, or are we just getting better at adapting to it? Are the common practices that are used to adapt to being outside the result of a changing cultural attitude toward the weather, or are they a subconscious response to an actual change in weather patterns? Answering these questions is essential to understanding how cities and their citizens can adapt both physically and culturally to climate change. We can investigate both long-term planning and infrastructural solutions implemented by the state, and incremental behavioural shifts and provisional solutions produced by ordinary people themselves. The Bay Conservation and Development Commission has recently partnered with California College of the Arts in San Francisco to host an international competition to address a specific effect of climate change on the infrastructure and geography of the San Francisco Bay area. The Rising Tides competition is a call for ideas about how to respond to sea level rise, a dramatic consequence of climate change that threatens over half of the world’s population currently living in coastal or low-lying areas. For San Francisco, surrounded on three sides by water, this is a very real concern and one can imagine the massive changes to our infrastructure and urban geography that will be necessary to respond to this phenomenon. We can anticipate with a certain excitement the bold and dramatic architectural and infrastructural interventions that will be proposed for the competition and will no doubt be seduced by futuristic utopian
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On Site review 21: stormy weather
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