wind – Public Art and Architecture from Around the World

Firefly on the new SFPUC Building

Posted by Cindy on September 17, 2012

Sep 172012

525 Golden Gate Avenue
Civic Center

This is the new Public Utilities building in San Francisco. It is touted as one of the more “green buildings” built in the US. Four egg-beater-like wind turbines are on view behind a 200-foot-high, 22-foot-wide curtain of polycarbonate squares called Firefly.

Ned Kahn’s Firefly is a lattice of tens of thousands of five-inch-square, clear-polycarbonate panels that are hinged so that they can freely move in the wind. During the day, the ever-changing wind pressure profile on the building appears as undulating waves. At night, this movement is converted into light. As the wind presses the hinged panels inward a small embedded magnet connected to an electrical reed switch triggers the flickering of tiny LED lights. The lights are colored to mimic fireflies which are a threatened species due to their dependence on riparian ecosystems. The entire sculpture requires less energy than a 75-Watt light bulb.

An artist from Northern California, Kahn replicates the forms and forces of nature. Kahn combines science, art and technology to integrate natural, human, and artificial systems, and his specific works emphasise natural elements, such as water, fire, wind and sand; how these behave independently, and how they interact.

After graduating from college with an environmental studies degree, from 1982 to 1996 he designed educational exhibits at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. He apprenticed there to Frank Oppenheimer, the centre’s founder and brother of atomic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Ned Kahn presents projects both in scientific settings and in art contexts.

Wind Turbine taken from inside the building

Watching the Wind at the Randall Museum

Posted by Cindy on September 6, 2012

Sep 062012

Randall Museum
199 Museum Way
Castro

The plaque that accompanies the piece reads:

Charles Sowers is an artist whose practice links art and science. Here wind currents activate over 500 aluminum arrows to reveal the ever-changing ways the wind interacts with the building and its environment. “My work presents actual physical phenomena, often of striking visual beauty, that draw people into careful noticing and interaction”

This piece is from the Collection of the City and County of San Francisco commissioned by the SFAC for the Randall Museum Funded by the Public Utilities Company.

According to a February 21, 2012 S.F. Chronicle article

The new exhibit took four years to make, required dozens of prototypes and tests, and ultimately uses 612 individually balanced aluminum arrows spaced 1 foot apart on architectural facade material covering the side of a local museum.

I spent over a year-and-a-half designing and testing wind arrow designs,” he said. “I first prototyped arrow designs in paper. Then I made a prototype panel fitted with six different arrow designs and mounted it on-site for a year of testing.

“I also mounted arrows outside my apartment at Baker Beach, which was great for the intense wind. And I even held them outside my car window. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to mount them on the building.”

Sowers also spent considerable time hand-balancing each arrow, studying the possibilities using computer-aided drafting software. “Balance was a big part of the design,” he said. “Important, and tedious. I balanced every one, working in groups of 25 arrows. My shoulders ached.”
He also had to decide whether the “V” of the arrow’s wings should slope toward the wall or away. “I learned that the V sloping out caught the wind and made it vibrate or oscillate. It was not behaving correctly, so they are sloped inward.”

Sowers, who is 45 and earned his bachelor’s degree in anthropology at Oberlin College – where he studied physics early on – has long been fascinated with the tapestry of nature, whether the swirling of fog, the formation of ice, the unexpected rippling in a mud puddle, or the effects of water and wind on sand.

The Randall Museum was the inspiration of Josephine D. Randall. Ms. Randall received her Masters degree in zoology from Stanford University in 1910. By 1915, she had organized one of the first Girl Scout troops in the United States as well as one of the first Camp Fire Girl troops. She went on to become San Francisco’s first Superintendent of Recreation, a position she held for a quarter of a century. In 1948 she received an honorary Doctorate from the University of California. Under her direction, the San Francisco Recreation Department achieved national recognition as one of the most outstanding services of its kind.

One of Ms. Randall’s long-term goals was the establishment of a museum for children. In 1937 her vision came to fruition. Simply called the “Junior Museum,” it originally opened in the city’s old jail on Ocean Avenue. In 1947, Ms. Randall shepherded a $12,000,000 bond issue for recreation capital projects, including a new museum. In 1951, the museum opened in its current facilities on a 16-acre park over looking San Francisco Bay and was renamed the Josephine D. Randall Junior Museum in honor of its founder.