In my hometown neighborhood sits a house with a peculiar front yard. Enormous metal sculptures clutter the lawn: some swaying in the breeze like a wind vanes, while some lay on their sides too gargantuan to stand up.

A man named Starr Kempf designed and created the steel kinetic wind sculptures, displaying them across the country and outside his Colorado Springs home. His artwork typically took on the aesthetic of birds and weather vanes and would take years to execute. The sculptures are often futuristic looking and juxtapose fluent wind induced movement with a hardened industrial steel medium.

While many of the neighborhood’s residents love the quirky art house, many opposed the distraction. Neighbors complained about the 30 foot “eye sores” disrupting the aesthetic of the neighborhood. Kempf’s artistic aesthetic contradicted the neighborhood’s conservative, ageing look. As a result, he was forced to remove several of the sculptures from his property (current picture below).

The city of Colorado Springs alsp adopted some of Kempf’s larger artworks, displaying them downtown.