Big Edge by Nancy Rubin

Nancy Rubins transforms industrial, manufactured objects—such as mattresses, appliances, boats—into the building blocks of her physically commanding monumental sculptures. This sculpture, for example, features numerous and varied canoes and rowboats, arranged around a large steel armature, like many leaves on the limb of a tree. Miyamoto provided structural design services for a large and irregular sculpture adjacent to a roadway. The design consisted of a development of performance-based design criteria, code-compliance, 3-D dynamic analysis, contractibility, completeness and quality. One of the most important tasks of the process is the communication of the response characteristics of the structure with the client. For structures where design response limits are not well defined in building codes, it is important to have limitations that satisfy the artist and engineer and be established and reliably quantified in the design process.