Standing 14 feet tall and serving no obvious purpose, the steel sculpture located outside Weil Hall is a jumble of beams, bolts, welds and supports fastened into a concrete pad.
Part of the revitalized Engineering Plaza — also home to the revamped Engineering Clock Tower — at the corner of Gale Lemerand and Stadium Road, the nondescript-looking structure was recently sandblasted and repainted (orange and blue, naturally).
But what is it, really?
It’s a teaching sculpture that went viral — on university campuses, anyway. The same design exists on more than 170 campuses worldwide, but it all started at UF.
The American Institute of Steel Construction’s (AISC) Steel Teaching Sculpture, installed in the mid-1980s, was designed to give students a new way of visualizing the complex 3-D connections involved in steel construction. It was dreamed up by the late University of Florida Structural Engineering Professor Emeritus Duane S. Ellifritt, Ph.D., aka UF’s “Man of Steel.”