My wife and I are on a mission to visit all the oversized local landmarks throughout Minnesota. This blog chronicles those visits and covers other related topics.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Giant Molecules and a Tin Man

May 31, 2009 - Minneapolis, MN

Giant Molecular Structure

We both had been itching to get out and see some more Big Stuff and this Sunday turned out to be a great day for it. We headed out to the University of Minnesota to find our latest additions to our collection.

The East Bank of the Minneapolis campus has two such Big Stuff sculptures. The first is a new addition to the university. Located on Washington Avenue in front of the Molecular & Cellular Biology building is a 30 foot tall, 10,000 pound molecule sculpture. It was created by artist Amy Toscani and installed in the fall of 2008. It's not a real molecule, but rather an artistic one based on science. There's some more info and quotes from the artist here.

Platonic Figure

The other sculpture is a large tin man looking thing by the Mechanical Engineering building and is only a couple hundred yards north of the molecules. It is apparently called Platonic Figure and was made in 2001 by Andrew Leicester. It's made out of steel with limestone bases. You can send it as an E-postcard!

2 comments:

Postcardy said...

Do you know if there is a real postcard of the Tin Man (or of the Giant Molecules)?

Unknown said...

I don't, sorry. I just happened to find that e-postcard while trying to research the tin man.