The wind is music in South San Francisco

It was originally called the Cabot, Cabot and Forbes Tower when it was constructed in 1967 at their industrial park. It was acquired by the city of South San Francisco in 1996 and now sits in the heart of the bioindustry area.

The artists responsible for the sculpture are Lucia and Aristides Demetrios. Aristides Burton Demetrios is the son of a classical sculptor who trained under a student of Rodin. His mother was an award-winning illustrator. Artistic talent was obviously in his blood. He graduated from Harvard, served in the Navy and then continued his study of art. His first major recognition was a design for a fountain on the Stanford University campus. He has since done major public art throughout the United States and the world. In more recent years he has done works for private collectors.

Lucia Eames was married to Demetrios at the time they built our sculpture. Her pedigree is equally distinguished. Her father was Charles Eames, noted for the Eames chair, among other things. He and his wife were architects and furniture designers of considerable fame. The Eames House — along with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendhat House, and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye — is considered by some as one of the world’s most significant modern residences.

Since building our Wind Harp, Lucia has taken back her maiden name and partnered with her daughter, Llisa Demetrios, and are metal artists of note. A son, Eames Demetrios, is a filmmaker, author and designer. They also run Eames Office as a continuation of their family heritage.

It turns out that wind harps, or Aeolian harps, are a whole genre of art. They originated in ancient Greece around 6 B.C. and were called Aeolian after the Greek god of the wind. The god Orpheus would recite poetry to the sound of the wind harps. They became most popular during the Renaissance era.

The construction of a wind harp involves the whole science of harmonic sound as well as just the artistic elements. The idea is to let nature’s rhythm create multi-layered music. There are even CDs of wind harp music. The music has inspired numerous poets over the years. Thoreau liked to sit near telegraph wires and listen to the wind play music through them.

Not all harps are in as monumental a scale as ours. Most are designed for private gardens. They are related to the wind chimes that are better known to us today. While all about the sound, little about them is in included in studies of music. The sound is random and not something composed.

One might expect that a work entitled Wind Harp to be a delicate thing with strings of wire to catch gentle breezes. This is not the case. Our Wind Harp appears to be a made of rusty steel I-beams welded into graceful arches. The shape and shadows change as the light shifts or the viewer moves about. It takes a fairly strong wind to make it sing, but this is not much of a problem at that spot next to the Bay.

Rediscovering the Peninsula appears in the Monday edition of the Daily Journal. For more information on this or related topics, visit the San Mateo County History Museum, 2200 Broadway, Redwood City.