Ned Kahn '82 (CANR) knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life the minute he walked into the San Francisco science museum known as the Exploratorium.

That was in 1982, when Kahn, fresh out of the University of Connecticut with a degree in environmental studies, was bouncing around the country, looking for inspiration and a place to start his career. But until he landed at the doorstep of famed physicist and Exploratorium founder Frank Oppenheimer, Kahn wasn't quite sure what sort of career he wanted to start.

Photos: Ned Kahn Studios

"Infalling Cloud" Exploratorium San Francisco, California

That changed when he saw what Oppenheimer was trying to do: make visible the typically invisible, secret ways of the natural world.

The encounter launched Kahn into a career as an artist and exhibit builder, one of the most successful in the country. He has had major commissions all over the world, and last year, Kahn was one of 24 individuals named as a fellow of the MacArthur Foundation, receiving the $500,000 no-strings-attached "genius award," as the fellowships are popularly known.

Kahn lives with his wife and two young children in a big country house amid the vineyards of northern California's wine country, just outside the bucolic town of Sebastopol, located just north of San Francisco. He spends most of his time in two large studio buildings full of metalworking equipment, including a massive, 1942 milling machine that he uses to fashion prototypes of his artwork.

Kahn's work includes an array of large-scale public art pieces at locations such as the Civic Center Plaza in Arlington, Va.; Founders Court in Seattle; the San Francisco International Airport and Yahoo's headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif.

All of them, in one way or another, derive their power and beauty from natural phenomena — the subtle shifts from chaos to order as sand piles blow in the wind; the movement of special suspensions of granular material, which can behave as a solid but liquefy when vibrated; the spontaneous birth of a vortex in a medium of fog; the play of light reflected onto waves by thousands of small mirrors, moving as though choreographe d in a breeze.

The displays have mesmerized thousands of people who find themselves forced to linger on their way to a meeting or to catch a plane.

"Duales Systems Pavilion" EXPO 2000 Hannover, Germany

Kahn created some of his best-known works at the Exploratorium, many of which serve as the museum's signature attractions: "Tornado," in which little twisters set themselves up in swirling fog; "Chaotic Pendulum," a kind of loose-jointed stick figure of metal arms and legs, which spin about in unpredictable ways; and "Aeolian Landscape," where sand dunes rise and fall with the twist of a knob hooked to a fan.

"They're artworks," says Linda Dackman, an Exploratorium public affairs officer who has known Kahn from his early days there. "They're beautiful. And they're fascinating for different reasons. One reason is that these are in some ways miniature landscapes where these giant forces of nature are on display. It's like you get to stand outside and look in at them, which gives you an omniscient view, a god's-eye view, of how nature works."

Kahn is a plain-speaking, engaging sort who loves nothing more than to play around with the odd little toys he has accumulated since first meeting Oppenheimer. When he finds himself becoming fascinated with the way something bends or dangles in the wind, it may become a prototype of his next creation. Some of his latest pieces may take a crew of 15 people a year to fabricate all the parts.

"I play around," he says, "and look for something that reveals the complicated behavior of things."

Just then he was playing around with sandwiches of air between sheets of glass and dry powdery materials that take on fluid properties. In another corner he had a collection of glass beads in a clear plastic container. In another model, water climbed up the outside of a sphere, trapped inside a bigger sphere.

One of his young sons wandered in, just home from school, and quietly began sketching at a sunlit, upper-floor desk. On the wall was a poster of dust devils. Out the window, there were rows of grapes on a hillside, dotted with shiny pieces of foil, tied to the arbors to scare off birds.

The whole scene might have been a Kahn creation — unpredictable comings and goings, gameplaying, well-ordered patterns amid chaotic flashes of light.

"Everything I do is somehow involved in nature," Kahn says. "There are natural systems and there are man-made systems. These things I do are somewhere in between."

At UConn, Kahn started as a botany major and then tried psychology. Environmental studies was his final choice, Kahn says, because it was a broad enough area of study to encompass not just the botany and psychology but also architecture and sculpture. He says his parents thought, "What's he doing?"

It turned out he was doing something much the same as a lot of scientists — investigating nature — only with an aesthetic aim in mind. Scientists who have worked with him say Kahn is a marvelous investigator.

"Turbulent Orb" at New York's World Financial Center. The two foot diameter glass vessel is filled with swirling blue liquid resembling the Earth when viewed from space.

He is captivated by clouds, waves and fire. He says his heart goes out to people who spend their days working and living inside "concrete places," driving back and forth in "metal cars," who may not get to appreciate too often the everyday miracle of an ocean breeze.

"The wind has amazing, intricate structure to it, an amazing assortment of textures," he says. "My whole life, summed up, is a matter of seeing something beautiful like that, really taking it in. Then when I have indulged in that for a while, I think someone else has to see this too ... Then I talk someone into putting it on the side of a building."

It's really not as simple as he makes it sound. It took him a year of trial-and-error experimentation to get the bugs out of "Tornado," for instance.

"He perseveres," says Exploratorium staff physicist Thomas Humphries, who worked alongside Kahn starting in 1984.

"He just never gives up. He was going to make that tornado, for sure, so he tried new enclosures, new tracers, until finally it did work."

Kahn is no Ivory Tower art professor. He works with his hands, along with assistant Todd Barricklow, and spends a lot of time in physics labs, huddled with scientists trying to lay bare the same phenomena that interest the artist. Whereas one may be seeking to reveal the equations underlying some complex property, "Ned also wants to do some revealing, in a different way," Humphries says.

"It's about really witnessing and capturing some of these effects," he adds. "Ned is so good at exposing the fundamental, the essence of behaviors, and scientists of course are also looking for the essence of things, too. It's an inspiration, and even a help, for scientists."

Art experts say Kahn is unusual, perhaps unique, in the way he straddles the worlds of science and art — captivated by turbulence and chaos theory, perhaps, but one who may use a lake surface or a wall as his palate, allowing color to come in by accident, depending on what the sky feels like doing.

Jennifer Dowley, president of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation in Great Barrington, Mass., got to know Kahn when she was executive director of the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, where Kahn landed in 1987 as an artist-in-residence.

That was one of his first ventures outside the Exploratorium, a critical step that led to the mature phase of his career as an independent artist. Despite all his fame and success since then, Dowley says the thing she recalls most about Kahn is his "shy and sly smile."

"It's as if he were thinking about something but also enjoying his time talking to you. With Ned there was always this sense of observing. He's self-deprecating, and very personable but he's also scanning all the time," she says.

In his own mind, Kahn is consumed by things such as onions and voids and spirals and plants bending in the wind — odd but natural things, many of which change all the time in ways no scientific formula can completely capture.

Sometimes it may take a Ned Kahn piece to capture it. Modest as he is, Kahn insisted that when it works best, it's just because the artist steps aside, allowing some element of nature itself — "Something other than me," he says — to do most of the intricate composing.