Making connections: Original steel teaching sculpture gets a facelift
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.”
Evidently, it worked well as a teaching aid. After the installation of the original sculpture, they requested permission to use the plans and ultimately facilitated the deployment of modified versions of the design to more than 170 campuses worldwide. The plans are freely available to download from the AISC website.
UF civil and coastal Engineering students — or anyone working in materials, construction, structural and environmental engineering — likely are already acquainted with the sculpture. It includes most of the commonly found framing and connectors used in modern steel construction. Featuring a dizzying array of gussets, bolts, welds, beams, columns, braces and more, the sculpture provides a visual, real-world depiction of the principles used in steel construction.
In a November, sculpture-side meeting of his Analysis & Design in Steel class, Professor of Practice Taylor Rawlinson, Ph.D., P.E., asked students to identify the sculpture’s different types of structural members and connections as they circled the sculpture. Once identified, Rawlinson pressed students to discern the rationale for particular placements and design considerations (limit states).
Which force is the component designed to withstand? What are the stresses on the connection? With the structure in front of the student, the complex science and mathematics can often become more tangible and easier to understand.
And traveling across campus to an outdoor classroom is certainly more convenient than a field trip to a job site.
“The steel sculpture is an incredible teaching tool because it transforms abstract concepts into something tangible,” said Rawlinson. “After spending so much time with two-dimensional drawings in the classroom, students gain a whole new level of understanding when they can walk around a real three-dimensional structure, bridging the gap between theory and practice.”
For Rawlinson, the fact that the sculpture was first imagined at UF adds to students’ experience. “The legacy gives our students a sense of pride, knowing they’re learning from a resource that started at UF and has shaped engineering education internationally,” he explained.
Man of Steel
Duane Ellifritt was born in 1935 and grew up in West Virginia, ultimately earning his Ph.D. in structural engineering from the University of West Virginia in 1970. After stints at Oklahoma State University and the Metal Building Manufacturing Association, Ellifritt joined the UF faculty in 1984.
In an interview published in 2018 by AISC, he described the motivation behind creating the sculpture.
“I got frustrated in 1985,” Ellifritt said. “I was teaching steel, and when we taught connections, many students had a hard time visualizing a 3D connection. You can show them two or three views of it, but to show them the whole thing in their mind, they had trouble doing that. I was trying to think of ways that I could help them with that.”
Field trips were good, he noted, but they are not always available when you need one. And contractors are not always thrilled about students on job sites.
“My best solution,” Ellifritt said in the interview, “was to create a sculpture on campus with all the different connections and members commonly used, shown in full scale. I designed the sculpture, and it was fabricated in Ft. Lauderdale and erected in October 1986.”
After 26 years, UF’s “Man of Steel” retired in 2010 at the rank of professor emeritus. He died in 2018 at the age of 82.
While he spent his professional career in steel and structural engineering, Ellifritt was not simply an engineer. He was also a lifelong, passionate artist.
He began drawing at an early age, later working in watercolors and eventually specializing in an arcane 17th century form of painting. In fore-edge painting, the full artwork can only be seen by fanning open a hardcover book and viewing the edges. Again, the AISC has published a detailed biography with details about his artistic endeavors.
He may have been a man of steel, but Ellifritt certainly left behind a legacy of beauty and hands-on instruction.