Denver – CBD: CCC – I See What You Mean
wallyg has added a photo to the pool:
I See What You Mean, supersized sculpture of a blue bear by Lawrence Argent, was installed along the 14th Street Side of the Colorado Convention Center as part of Denver's Percent for Art Program on June 23, 2005. Originally commissioned in 2002, the 40-foot high, 10,000 pound sculpture, was constructed of molded polymer concrete and steel at a cost of $424,400.
The bear evolved from a small plastic children's toy, scanned with a with a three-dimensional laser-scanning device from Cyberware Inc. The Cyberware device converted the shape into a CAD file, which Argent repositioned using an animation program from Newtek, which transformed the 3-D hape into hundreds of thousands of tiny triangles, using about 400,000 reference points, and creating movement by changing the triangles' shapes. Argent reduced the file down to 4,000 or so triangles, which he then sent to a a design firm, which employed a fused deposition modeling (FDM) rapid-prototyping machine manufactured to create a small 3-D scale-model plastic maquette. Argent then hired architectural composite fabricator, Kreysler and Assoc., to fabricate the structure made up of thousands of faceted triangles of different sizes. The components were created in California and transported to Denver on four trucks. During installation it suffered an abrasion on its left haunch while being hoisted off its back by a crane. The scratch was painted over.