shadowalk
Public Commission for the City of Indio, Jackson Street Shade Structures
Indio, California
Completed in 2025
Yellow zinc chromate plated steel, glass
Concept and design: Wes Heiss & Marek Walczak
Date palm drawings by students of Indio, Shadow Hills, and Amistad High Schools
Video and photography: David Potter
Derived from Indio’s history with date palms, this ¾ mile sculptural structure on Jackson St. provides valuable shade and connects the CV Link to the downtown. Local school children drew shadows of palms & we translated those drawings onto perforated shadow-casting panels. An undulating structure reflects the surrounding mountains.
The core of the design is a ‘Universal Connector‘. Only one connector is used for all the pavilions. The same node is used upside-down, turned 180 degrees, flipped, throughout the design.
A prototype of the universal connector.
At the open ends of the node we insert a cast colored glass ball.
A quarter-scale model of a canopy in our studio. You can also see laser-cut cardboard with the dot cutouts.
Student drawings on the left, dot pattern cut out of panels on the right.
Student drawings on the left, dot pattern cut out of panels on the right.
Working with high school students in Indio from 3 different schools, we asked them to draw palm trees, palm leaves in black and white to be used on the shade-structure.
The drawings were turned into dot-patterns that were laser-cut from the panels.
The disposition of the pavilions on Jackson St. which stretch on both sides of the street for 3/4 of a mile.
The various types and sizes of the pavilions.
Construction of column system
We created a website to drop off the images