In November 2014, the Colgate Campus saw the installation of a sculpture by DeWitt Godfrey in the courtyard between Ho Science Center and Olin Hall. The sculpture is named Odin. It took about a week of work on the site just to move the sculpture into place. Framing to hold the pieces during assembly was constructed and then removed. A ceremony to celebrate the sculpture is planned for late April 2015.
This sculpture came out of a project funded by the Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute lead by DeWitt Godfrey, Department of Art & Art History; Tom Tucker, Department of Mathematics; Tomaz Pisanski, University of Ljubljiana; and Daniel Bosia, Expedition Engineering, U.K. The work was described by the artist in an announcement to the campus as follows:
“Odin” is the culmination of a Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute funded project, Mathematical Methodologies for Art and Design. Our team of principal investigators– myself, artist; Thomas Tucker and Tomaz Pisanski, mathematicians; Daniel Bosia, architect and engineer (joined by students, alumni and community members) engaged mathematical, computational and structural questions with theoretical, virtual and practical components. Design concepts were prototyped and tested and the physical manifestations were fed back into the virtual models to model more accurately the physical realities of the prototypes. The resulting structure would be otherwise impossible to conceive and fabricate without this collaborative process and digital tools.
The sculpture consists of a surface of compound curvature, packed with approximately 240 individual weathering steel conical sections (frustums) When finished it will be 40’ in diameter and nearly 20’ tall, filling and bisecting the courtyard formed at the intersection of the Ho Science Center and Olin Hall.
