Commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission for a permanent installation at the Randal Museum, Windswept, designed by Charles Sowers Studios, is a wind-driven kinetic facade that transforms a blank wall into an observational instrument that reveals the complex interactions between wind and environment. The design consists of 612 freely-rotating directional arrows, which serve as discrete data points indicating the direction of local flow within the larger phenomenon. More images and architects’ description after the break.
Wind gusts, rippling and swirling through the sculpture, visually reveal the complex and ever-changing ways the wind interacts with the building and the environment. I’m generally interested in creating instrumentation that allows us insight into normally invisible or unnoticed phenomena. The Randall site, like many in San Francisco, is characterized, to a great extent, by its relationship to the wind. Climatically, off-shore winds bring warm weather from the central valley while on-shore wind brings us our famous San Francisco chilly weather.
