Boiler-Plate Beauty

Alexander Calder, 67, loves to play with space. In the 1930s he invented the mobile, that flying trapeze of multi colored disks adangle which made sculpture fly. Now he makes stabiles, which, as the name implies, build up from the ground to defy gravity. Cars can drive under his largest stabile, a 59-ft.-tall giant in the festival city of Spoleto, Italy.

His second-largest stabile found an even more appropriate site. Last week Calder's 40-ft.-high The Big Sail (see opposite page) was dedicated at Boston's Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Calder is a graduate engineer of Stevens Institute of Technology, class of 1919, and his adventures in cantilevers and tensions prove it. His new stabile has only one curved surface out of many; yet it presents a fluid silhouette of restless arabesques.

Standing before M.I.T. Grad I. M. Pei's radar-domed earth science building, Calder's sculpture has both primitive power and modern grace. Its presence is courtesy of Eugene McDermott, a director of Texas Instruments Inc., who was a college classmate of Calder. But the selection came only after a number of sculptors--including David Smith, Richard Lippold and Jean Arp --were considered. Scholars at M.I.T. tested the Calder design in a wind tunnel, then they buried beneath it a time capsule that included a Betty Crocker cookbook, a Sears, Roebuck catalogue, 1964 coins, M.I.T. memorabilia, and a copy of TIME.

M.I.T. students seem to like this new acquisition, though as one said, "It looks like an exploding artichoke." Other wits want to turn it into a giant electromagnet. The university intends to keep a careful eye out for pranksters: the student body is famed for its technological wizardry, once welded a trolley to its tracks while it picked up passengers. The ironworkers who put up the Calder had a more practical approach. Said one: "It's no different than putting up a boiler. We like the old man."

The Big Sail was forged in France in 35 pieces. Its 27-ton bulk took a ton and a half of nuts and bolts to hold it together and a four-ton concrete foundation. At present, it is the largest Calder in the Western Hemisphere. But not for long. The silver-haired tinker is already at work on a 65-ft.-high by 94-ft-wide stabile in unpainted stainless steel, to be set on an island in the St. Lawrence in time for the 1967 Montreal World's Fair. Its name: Man.

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