Q-BA-MAZE

Big Fish Marble Run on Holiday Display

The Big Fish marble run first appeared at the Walker Art Center last March, spent the summer months at the Milwaukee Art Museum on the shores of Lake Michigan and will now be on display for strolling Holiday shoppers in the window of the Air Traffic store in Rosedale Mall in Minnesota.

If you get a chance to stop by, make sure to look in the fish's mouth -- this view reveals the skeletal armature of cross-bracing composed solely of Q-BA-MAZE cubes.

Note: The Big Fish is made from Q-BA-MAZE cubes only and has travelled from Minneapolis to Milwaukee and back. No glue. This is a testament to the quality of the inter-locking Q-BA-MAZE joinery.

Fish Sculpture at the Walker Art Center

A group of students, architects and sculptors got together recently to plan this Q-BA-MAZE installation at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Over the course of an intense weekend of activity, the vague idea of making a fish resulted in this giant fish at the head of a growing school of smaller Q-BA-MAZE fish. (Construction plans for some of these fish are available on the plans page of the Q-BA-MAZE website).

Here is a night shot of the fish. It is tucked under this cantilevered ceiling of a recent addition to the Walker by architects Herzog and DeMeuron. (Notice the size of the fish compared to the guy doing calisthenics outside!)

Matt Peiken created this video blog for the Walker.

We had 10,000 cubes on hand for the installation and around 5,000 ended up in the big fish. Each of the vertical stripes of color in the fish is a separate section. This division made it easier to break the project into separate tasks. On our main installation evening, seven people arrived and worked on the fish simultaneously.

The curve of the fish is made by having each section of the marble run slightly rotated with respect to its neighboring sections. The tail and fins are all just a single cube wide and held together just with the Q-BA-MAZE joinery. There is no glue in this construction. It is composed solely of the three types of Q-BA-MAZE cubes.