Question of the Day — 13 Jun 2020

Can you tell what this sign/sculpture says? It’s at the southeast corner of Charleston and I-15. Drove by it going both east and west but couldn’t make it out. Seemed like a large permanent metal structure.

The giant blue metal sculpture is actually on the southwest corner of the Western Avenue intersection near the I-15 entrance ramp.

It's called "Found Font" and it's one of the pieces of art associated with Project Neon, the billion-dollar multi-year upgrade of I-15 and US 95 through the heart of Las Vegas. 

The design won a contest, so it was paid for the city of Las Vegas as a welcome sign. It weighs six tons, is 66-feet long and 17 feet high, and required a five-ton mobile crane with a 92-foot boom for installation.

It doesn't "say" anything, as you can see in the photo at the bottom of the answer. But it does allude to a Euler spiral, a curvature that changes linearly with its curve length (equal to the reciprocal of the radius). They're also widely used as transition curves in railroad and highway engineering for connecting and transitioning the geometry between a tangent and a circular curve.
 
None of which we particularly understand, but it sure sounds good.  
 

 


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