90 Days Over 100
Installation detail
2010
Atherton│Keener, Architecture + Art
Photo: Bill Timmerman. © Atherton│Keener Courtesy SMoCA

Phoenix and Scottsdale are located in Arizona's aptly named Valley of the Sun, where summers have always been hot, and grow increasingly so as continued building escalates the heat sink effect of concrete and tarmac. Summer here is not the lazy holiday of the north, but rather an inverse winter that seems interminably long to those who do not escape to cooler climes. Architects Jay Atherton and Cy Keener's installation titled "90 Days Over 100" is a durational meditation on the effects of building in the desert, to both the environment and those who inhabit it, using the museum's cooling system and skylights as opposed elements to demonstrate the intensity of the sun and the extreme amount of energy needed to counter it in the built environment. Sited in a darkened room are two curved plywood walls that span the 40-feet length and reach 20 feet to the ceiling. At the top a skylight has been reduced to a small 2-feet square of light underneath, on which a plate of clear plastic holds a spray of ice cubes, which melt and flow down the Tyvek covered interior sides of the walls in capillary action to drip into wood troughs located above the floor. The room's shape recalls an ice cave or architectural vulva, with the illusion enhanced by the extreme darkness, lit dimly from above and enhanced throughout with fiber optic cables. The occasional sound of dripping water is elusive, heard under the rumbling of the building's air conditioning system, which has been freed from the museum's acoustical insulation in the installation room.

The project is extremely ambiguous in its effect. The room demands patience to experience, the trailing water and slight puddles only seen at certain angles, the drips only heard now and then. For the viewer who does slow down enough to allow her eyes to adjust to the dark, the room offers a respite to the searing heat outside and celebrates as much as questions our use of electric-powered cooling. The ribbed plywood walls are not only functional, but also highly decorative. There is also an element of perhaps unintended humor, as the melting ice cubes, which are replaced daily, bring to mind not so much the ice caves of the arctic, but the ice tossed at shift's end in the restaurants and bars that define Scottsdale to many visitors, and offer rare employment to those resident in the city. This is not simply didactic art, but speculative architecture.