AISC presented members of the project team of the Antony Gormley Sculpture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with the 2017 IDEAS2 Award for excellence in structural steel design during a ceremony conducted at the sculpture on Friday.
Designed by British sculptor Antony Gormley, the work, called CHORD, is a large winding form made of 33 irregular polyhedra installed in a 12-ft by 12-ft stairwell of the university’s mathematics building. The sculpture—which is 56 ft high, weighs 1,800 lb and is comprised of 541 stainless steel balls connected by 905 specially formed duplex stainless steel rods—was created in six sections at Summit Metal Fabricators’ (SMF) Salem, N.H., shop (an AISC member and certified fabricator and erector), then carefully transported to Cambridge and installed.
“The viewer’s eye is slowly drawn upward, piece by piece, until the enormity of the full sculpture is realized,” commented David G. Allen, space and facilities manager with the United States District Court for the Southern District of California, and the owner juror for the competition.
For more on this project and all of this year’s IDEAS2 award winners, see “2017 IDEAS2 Awards” in our May issue.