When I heard that Burn Unit was going to be in town, I knew we had to do some UoA tasking.

One (locally) famous work of art is Alexander Calder's "Big Sail" and "Little Sail" pair, which are at MIT. Locals call the larger sculpture, which stands 40 ft tall, the Great Sail. There is a story that it was commissioned to solve a little problem posed by the Green Building. This building, which is not actually green, is the tallest building in Cambridge because it has the maximum allowed number of floors (18) and stands on 2-story tall stilts. On extra breezy days, a wind tunnel effect causes the revolving doors set in the stilts to spin wildly. The Great Sail breaks the wind enough that you can get in and out of the doors. The Little Sail is an 8 ft tall intermediate artist's model. As these two sculptures are already a pair reproduced in different scales, they seemed like a good choice for this task. This art smiles.

It was a dark and stormy night when Burn Unit came to town, but we nevertheless headed to MIT. Coincidentally, we found that the students had created two larger-than-life sized games on campus. A giant game of Scrabble was up on the Media Lab building, and a huge Settlers of Catan game was on the dot. (The dot is a round grassy area surrounded by pavement stones between the Green Building and the Great Sail.)
We experienced the Great Sail from a variety of angles, and then went to the Little Sail. Surprise! It was gone, leaving only the plaque in the ground. We deployed our sleuthing skills (involving my husband and the Internet) to discover that the Little Sail had been moved into the lobby of the Media Lab Building, which was locked for the night. We lurked around until we could convince someone entering the building to let us in, and then experienced the Little Sail. You can get a much better feel for the art at this scale. Looking at the Great Sail is like feeling an elephant, in that you can only see glimpses of a face at a time. The Little Sail is a completely human scale.

Having experienced the art at two scales, we set to work reproducing it.

I returned to the Media Lab Building with a sketch pad and drew the components of the sculpture for later reproduction. Then, I took scissors, paper, and tape and eyeballed the art to put together a rough prototype in 3D to go along with the sketches. Comparing the prototype scale model with the Great Sail, it looks like the build-your-own sail system produces decent reproductions.

The sculpture is primarily made from sheets of flat metal. Working from my sketches and the rough prototype, I drew up a pattern and instructions for a model two orders of magnitude smaller than the Great Sail. I have included the pattern below so that everyone at SF0, MIT and elsewhere can make their own Tiny Sail. I've made at least 10 of them so far and given them away to MIT alums.

But one tip: if you try this with cookie dough, you will need a better adhesive than royal icing.


Burn Unit took it upon himself to make a more scalable version of the Great Sail model rongo rongo had established. Among the files for this proof are illustrator files with the sail components as vector graphics. This means you can take your own sail model to the far reaches of big or small. Push it to the limit! Pictures of the Micro Sail are forthcoming, but the assembly has proven to be fairly difficult. Tweezers may need to get involved.