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'Steel Sculpture' may not be art, but it's educational

Teaching civil engineers

It's debatable whether the Steel Sculpture near Trafton Science Center is aesthetically pleasing. But there's no debate about the educational value of its 48 types of connections for civil engineering students.

2006-11-29
By Dan Linehan, Free Press Staff Writer [published in The Free Press, Mankato, MN, 11/26/2006]

MANKATO — It's tough to debate the educational merit of the eight-foot tall, rust-orange contraption sitting next to the Trafton Science Center.

Its 48 types of connections — comprised of dozens of welds, rivets and other steel-sounding words — gives students in Minnesota State University's civil engineering program an encompassing example of real-world steel connections.

Karen Chou, a civil engineering professor, has used the structure as a class project

and plans to incorporate it into future lessons. She happily talks about the sheer connections, anchor bolts and other technical details of the 1-ton structure.

But another, more slippery, question is lurking. One that engineers might just as well skip.

"Well, art is in the eye of the beholder," she says, clearly not much interested by the question of whether the structure is also a sculpture.

When pressed about her personal opinion on the object's artistic merit, Chou said she really doesn't know, except to draw a parallel with another steel structure.

If they call the Mankato Piece a sculpture, "we call this a sculpture," she said with a short laugh.

She's all too happy to return to talks about how this piece, aptly named "Steel Sculpture," will help illustrate to her students the difference between computer designs and an actual building. But art department chair and sculpture professor James Johnson does have some thoughts.

"It's aesthetically terrible." Johnson said it's "inappropriate" to call it a sculpture because, well, it gets a bit complicated.

"It doesn't appear to have been created with any thought to the relationships of the different forms and how they might create a pleasing visual response in the user," he said.

By way of clarification, he said it looked as if a bunch of magnetic steel beams had been thrown in the air and had fallen down in a more or less random configuration.

"It was designed by an engineer and its primary purpose was to create something that illustrates different methods of putting these metal beams together," he said. That's contrasted with a work of art, which always seeks to evoke some reaction — and not necessarily always a pleasing one — from the viewer.

Johnson is quick to dispel any comparisons with the Mankato Piece, which he calls a "stunning sculpture." He sat on a committee to determine a new place for the Piece after it was moved to make way for the Hilton Garden Inn.

He says the Piece "was designed with concern for the impact of the forms," citing its huge twin diagonal beams as having a strong effect on a viewer.

But, as shown by Chou's artistic indifference, it's not about art. It's about giving students a way to capture all the different types of connections used in the steel industry in one example.

There are 135 just like it on campuses across the country. But this is the first, Chou said, to be built in Minnesota.

The first one was a 13- foot-tall model built in Florida about a decade ago. Since then, they've spread to so many other schools partly because the parts and labor are often donated by steel companies.

The MSU structure was built at no cost to the school by Central Minnesota Fabricating, Inc., and painted by Central Sandblasting, Inc., both of Willmar.

It will be dedicated Tuesday, about 18 months after it arrived at the university. While there may be no definitive, empirical answer to aesthetic questions, Johnson knows what would happen if one of his students was working on a (smaller) steel sculpture in his class.

"It wouldn't wind up like that."

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