{"id":42107,"date":"2025-12-09T16:07:50","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T21:07:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.eng.ufl.edu\/news\/?p=42107"},"modified":"2025-12-09T16:07:52","modified_gmt":"2025-12-09T21:07:52","slug":"making-connections-original-steel-teaching-sculpture-gets-a-facelift","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.eng.ufl.edu\/news\/engineering-education\/making-connections-original-steel-teaching-sculpture-gets-a-facelift\/","title":{"rendered":"Making connections: Original steel teaching sculpture gets a facelift"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Standing 14 feet tall and serving no obvious purpose, the steel sculpture&nbsp;located&nbsp;outside&nbsp;Weil Hall is a jumble of beams,&nbsp;bolts, welds&nbsp;and&nbsp;supports fastened into a concrete pad.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Part of the revitalized Engineering Plaza \u2014 also home to the&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/news.ufl.edu\/2025\/11\/uf-engineering-clock-tower\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">revamped Engineering Clock Tower<\/a>&nbsp;\u2014 at the corner of Gale Lemerand and Stadium&nbsp;Road,&nbsp;the nondescript-looking structure was recently sandblasted and repainted (orange and blue, naturally).&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But what is it, really?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s&nbsp;a teaching sculpture that went&nbsp;viral&nbsp;\u2014&nbsp;on university campuses, anyway.&nbsp;The same&nbsp;design&nbsp;exists on more than 170 campuses worldwide,&nbsp;but it all started at UF.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The American Institute of Steel Construction\u2019s&nbsp;(AISC)&nbsp;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&nbsp;the late&nbsp;University of Florida&nbsp;Structural Engineering Professor Emeritus Duane S.&nbsp;Ellifritt, Ph.D., aka UF\u2019s \u201cMan of Steel.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/news.ufl.edu\/2025\/12\/original-steel-teaching-sculpture-gets-a-facelift\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Read full story at news.ufl.edu<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Standing 14 feet tall and serving no obvious purpose, the steel sculpture\u00a0located\u00a0outside\u00a0Weil Hall is a jumble of beams,\u00a0bolts, welds\u00a0and\u00a0supports fastened into a concrete pad.\u00a0Part of the revitalized Engineering Plaza \u2014 also home to the\u00a0revamped Engineering Clock Tower\u00a0\u2014 at the corner of Gale Lemerand and Stadium\u00a0Road,\u00a0the nondescript-looking structure was recently sandblasted and repainted (orange and blue, naturally).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":42109,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"single-templates\/single-sidebar-none.php","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"featured_post":"off","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[25,57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-engineering-education","category-stories"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eng.ufl.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eng.ufl.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eng.ufl.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eng.ufl.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eng.ufl.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42107"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.eng.ufl.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42111,"href":"https:\/\/www.eng.ufl.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42107\/revisions\/42111"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eng.ufl.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eng.ufl.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eng.ufl.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eng.ufl.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}