''Gift of the Wind'' is a large-scale public kinetic sculpture, by Susumu Shingu, located in

Porter Square Porter Square is a neighborhood in Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts, located around the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Somerville Avenue, between Harvard and Davis Squares. The Porter Square station serves both the MBTA Red Li ...

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

Massachusetts Massachusetts (Massachusett language, Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut assachusett writing systems, məhswatʃəwiːsət'' English: , ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is the most populous U.S. state, state in the New England ...

at the

Porter Porter may refer to: Companies * Porter Airlines, Canadian regional airline based in Toronto * Porter Chemical Company, a defunct U.S. toy manufacturer of chemistry sets * Porter Motor Company, defunct U.S. car manufacturer * H.K. Porter, Inc., ...

Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (abbreviated MBTA and known colloquially as "the T") is the public agency responsible for operating most public transportation services in Greater Boston, Massachusetts. The MBTA transit network in ...

subway and commuter rail station. The art work consists of a tall white pole with three red "wings" attached to the top that are "designed to shift in response to the movement of the wind, not only turning clockwise and counterclockwise, but tumbling over and over in various sequences."Arts on the Line:Porter Square MBTA Station
. Cambridge Arts Council. 2002. Accessed October 12, 2010 It is considered by some to be "Cambridge's most visible landmark".Ponte, Sophia

.

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

Department of Architecture. Accessed October 12, 2010

History

''Gift of the Wind'' was commissioned in 1983 and unveiled in 1985 as a part of the MBTA and the Cambridge Arts Council's Arts on the Line program. This first of its kind program was devised to bring art into the MBTA's planned Northwest Extension of the Red Line

subway station A metro station or subway station is a station for a rapid transit system, which as a whole is usually called a "metro" or "subway". A station provides a means for passengers to purchase tickets, board trains, and evacuate the system in the ...

s in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and became a model for similar drives for public art across the country. ''Gift of the Wind'' was one of 20 artworks created for this program, out of over 400 proposals submitted by artists for artworks spread out across five different newly created subway stations. The first 20 artworks, including this one, were completed with a total cost of $695,000

USD The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

, or one-half of one percent of the total construction cost of the Red Line Northwest Extension.Red Line Northwest Extension Pamphlet page 5
The Davis Square Tiles Project. Accessed October 10, 2010 Susumu Shingu designed and created his sculpture in tandem with

Cambridge Seven Associates Cambridge Seven Associates, Inc. (stylized as CambridgeSeven, and sometimes as C7A) is an American architecture firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Buildings designed by the firm have included academic, museum, exhibit, hospitality, transpo ...

, the designers of the Porter subway station, as they designed and constructed the station. Louis Bakanowsky, the founder of Cambridge Seven, stated, "(...) the challenge of modern sculpture is not the making of closed, volumetric objects. Instead, today's sculpture must deal with issues of space, movement and address a much wider set of references... his work willcreate a resonance between the viewer's own inner rhythms and those of the larger world of nature." ''Gift of the Wind'' was originally planned to extend down into the subway station proper. When the work rotated due to the wind, a link, through a "large light shaft" would make a selection of hammers strike chimes in the station. This concept was later abandoned. The sculpture required $40,000 of repairs in the 1990s.

References

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External links

Cambridge Arts Council
1985 sculptures Outdoor sculptures in Massachusetts Tourist attractions in Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge, Massachusetts Aluminum sculptures in Massachusetts Arts on the Line Steel sculptures in Massachusetts 1985 establishments in Massachusetts Kinetic sculptures in the United States Works about windmills