Indio is a city in Southern California’s Coachella Valley. Located about 125 miles east of Los Angeles, the city is known for its agricultural production of dates. Last August, Indio launched a significant streetscape improvement initiative designed to enhance and beautify public spaces, reduce waste and debris, and improve walkability. The project was the vision of designer and visual artist Wes Heiss.

Spanning three-quarters of a mile, Heiss and his partner Marek Walczak designed Shadowalk, an 11,000-square-foot shade structure covering sidewalks in a redeveloping area of the city. These innovative shades provide aesthetic protection from the area’s intense heat.

“It’s extremely hot there—like 117 degrees the last time I was there,” says Heiss, associate professor of design in the department of art, architecture and design. “Because of budget constraints, we needed to design and engineer one modular system that could be produced in quantity and used all along the site. Indio is the date palm capital of the world, but it turns out date trees are really bad at providing shade. So, we thought it’d be interesting to crisscross those two ideas to solve this problem. Is there a way to use the idea of a tree providing shade and reimagine the local date trees as a good shade structure?”

Shadowalk was unveiled in December [latest update indicates completion is expected in February 2025] and was funded through Caltrans’ Clean California Local Grant Program. The undulating design reflects the nearby San Jacinto and Santa Rosa Mountains. Structurally, the layout was designed as a kit of parts, allowing the structure to adapt to sidewalks of varying lengths. The support structure is made of steel, plated with yellow zinc chromate for protection and durability.

At the core of the structure is the use of universal connectors, which allow a single connector to be used for all the pavilions. The same node can be positioned upside-down, turned 180 degrees, or flipped throughout the design to produce a seemingly random, undulating structure. Colored glass balls, inserted at the open ends of the nodes, reflect the city’s official colors.

Heiss and Walczak also engaged local teens, asking them to draw shadows of palms. These drawings were translated into laser-cut perforated panels that cast decorative palm tree patterns onto the sidewalks, further enhancing the area’s visual appeal.

“We always try to find ways to involve the community in the design of the piece because they are the ones who are going to see it every day,” Heiss says. “It’s about us trying to enable a group to own the piece. It might be in a number of small personal ways, or it might be something more obvious and significant, but from those contributions we always try to make something beautiful.”