Summertime

After an unusually beautiful May, June settled into Phoenix like a tidal wave of flaming hydrogen. You can almost smell the heat in the air- you inhale deeply, and the inside of your nose stings and burns. When you step outside of the shadows, into the direct 110 degree sunlight, there's the feeling all over your body of your skin tightening up as the pores open and the sweat rushes to block the openings. The dry, overwhelming heat almost feels like a cleansing fire, burning away everything and filling the world with brilliant white light. This powerful direct light also makes buildings look great- brilliantly defined surfaces textures and colors, the phenomenally crisp shadows. It's almost like a studio lamp on a sculpture.

I'm going to miss this brand of light and heat. I do enjoy the summertime here. There's no one outside on the streets, its the perfect season to sit in a shady porch with the misters, and let the afternoon while away while you enjoy a pitcher of Arizona Peach beer, or a local Hefewiesen with a slice of lemon. The blistering silences and dust make the world feel thin and unreal, like there are things in Phoenix that only awaken and stir when its too hot for people to be outside.

There's something that strikes me architecturally about the desert too. In nature, form is a slave of function, but it seems most striking and apparent in the desert, where plants and animals have surprising forms and adaptations to survive. And its elegant. There's so little resources, and the conditions are so extreme, everything is taken to its most simplistic level of survival. Regular trees lose too much moisture through their big leaves, so we have trees that have very coarse bark to shade the skin, and billions of tiny tiny leaves, or trees that have no leaves, but only green skins to capture the sunlight.