Home | Headlines | City | World | Sports | Showbiz | Today's Special | Editorial | Columns | Archive | About Us

wind-powered organ

VILAJUIGA (Spain)—A giant wind-powered organ dreamt up by surreal Spaniard Salvador Dali is finally due to resonate down a Catalan hilltop one hundred years after the artist’s birth. After extensive feasibility studies, engineers at the Ramon Llull University in Barcelona, northeastern Spain, have finally produced two prototypes. Wind-tunnel tests have proved positive.

“We’re going to build the first-ever surrealist organ!” said Josep Puig, spokesman for the three local entrepeneurs who got one million euros (1.2 million dollars) together to breathe life into the 20-year-old project. Dali, who died in 1989, first had the idea of a giant organ played by the wind at the end of the 1970s. He wanted the organ’s music to be heard by the people of the region of Ampurdan when the fierce tramontane wind blows from the north. Locals say the wind can drive people mad.

“Dali was obsessed by the tramontane. But his original idea came up against technical problems, such as the wind’s irregularity,” Puig explained. To get round this problem, a team of engineers perfected a revolutionary “wind accumulator”: the wind blows into the organ via a huge funnel, after which it is channeled past a pressure regulator and blasted out of the instrument’s 500 pipes.

As a result, the organist can play without worrying about the wind dropping as their crescendo approaches. The organ can also play itself at the whim of the tramontane, or use fans on calmer days. Either way, say the inventors, the sound is not going to be like any other organ you have heard.

Another challenge was finding somewhere to put the windy contraption, until the project’s backers bought the ruined 10th-century castle of Quermanco in the village of Vilajuiga, near Dali’s birthplace of Figueras.

Home | Headlines | City | World | Sports | Showbiz | Today's Special | Editorial | Columns | Archive | About Us