With our steel structure close to being done, my team and I needed to start thinking about ways to make the other teams’ lives and job more easier, along with an easy assembly of the structure during set up. The eye team needed areas where they were able to suspend and/or place their eyeballs on the structure that wouldn’t obstruct the lighting team’s vertical LED lighting or the nest wall team’s application of the walls. This is where guest artist Parker Jennings really came in handy for this particular leg of the project.

Parker came in with this idea of creating a web of crossbars on the outer parts of the structure made out of pencil rod. These crossbars would reinforce the structure and give the other teams areas to place their contributions to the nest. While this was a great idea, we were worried about the strength of the pencil rod up against the heavy duty materials and technology that would be put on it. We didn’t want to risk anything being damaged so we went back to the drawing board and came up with using flatbar.

The flatbar solved the same problem of not obstructing the lighting team’s LED strips and gave the eye team and nest wall team easier attachment points to the nest while reiinforcing the strength of the entire structure ten-fold.
To put the straight flatbar on the arched structure, our team bent the bar by hand by clamping an end to the structure, welding it in place, bending and clamping to another area, and repeating the process. At the end we used a grinder to separating the six arches from each other for easy assembly at the installation site.

With the structure done, we wanted to create some sweeps to the structure to add some depth to it, elevate the nest and make sure no one was able to get too close to all the fragile moving parts inside the nest. These sweeps also gave an area for our sandbags to weigh down the nest in case someone leaned into it.


With the structure completely finished, it’s safe to say that was one of the most challenging endeavors i’ve had, coming in with no skills working with steell. It was also one of the most fun projects I have worked on and the nest came out great as a whole and made over 60,000 people very happy. Through our ups and downs we reached success and i could not be happier with the final product.
