On older buildings, it’s not too uncommon to see the crowning touch of an ornamental weather vane — a rotation device which indicates the wind’s direction. But what happens when a bunch of weather vanes are put together on the same surface? That’s the question that American artist Charles Sowers answers with Windswept, a kinetic installation of 612 aluminium weather vanes placed on the facade of San Francisco’s Randall Museum — and revealing surprising results, as you can see in this video from Dezeen.
As you can see, the spinning blades don’t uniformly point in the same direction as one might expect, but rather show smaller diverse patterns and paths of the breeze. Says Sowers: ”Windswept seeks to transform a mundane and uninspired architectural façade (the blank wall of the theatre) into a large scale aesthetic/scientific instrument, to reveal information about the interaction between the site and the wind.”