A precasted piece of art
The Dream is a precast concrete sculpture over 20 m high, on the site of an old coal mine near St Helens in Lancashire, UK. It is a memorial to the miners who worked at the coal mine and takes the form of a young girl’s head.
The sculpture was created by world renowned Spanish artist Jaume Plensa. It consists of 13 layers of concrete, each 1.5 m high, with a final capping piece at the top. Each layer consists of four separate pieces, weighing an average of nine tonnes each. The total weight of the statue and the base is 373 tonnes. The cost was € 2.21 million.
Due to its exposed position, and wind speeds of up to
45 m/s, all the elements were connected together to form a single monolithic structure. Engineers Arup and Partners’ design required a connection force of 200 kN between adjacent elements, both...
