'In 2003, the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, designed by architect Frank Gehry, hit a similar stumbling block. '"The building was clad from head to toe, right down to the pavement, in stainless steel panels, and they would send the sun dazzling across the sidewalks to hotspots where people were. It was measured up to 60C (140F). '"Local people living there complained they were having to crank their air conditioning up to maximum to cool things down," he says. 'Blinding glare also affected drivers passing the building. 'After computer models and sensor equipment identified the panels causing the problem, *** they were sanded down *** to break up the sun's rays.' *** Good luck with that 'sanding down' effort. We're talking about 10 _octaves_ of infrared light, so the imperfections caused by the sanding have to be on the order of 1 mm to be effective. *** I think what Disney Hall really did was to eliminate the _visible_ evidence of the hotspot, but the heat is mostly still there. "Infrared (IR) light is electromagnetic radiation with longer wavelengths than those of visible light, extending from the nominal red edge of the visible spectrum at 700 nanometres (nm) to 1 mm." "Slightly more than half of the energy from the Sun arrives on Earth in the form of infrared radiation." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared At 10:31 AM 9/3/2013, Warren D Smith wrote:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23944679