AR2: Albert Paley

     Imagine an enormous sculpture that's over three stories tall, 130 feet long, and 8 feet wide all made out of cor-ten weathered steel. How would you feel standing next to this massive sculpture? It's obvious that you would feel little, but if I told you that it depicts a variety of animals from the very large to the endangered you would realize how little man could be in this world. This sculpture is called "Animals Always" by Albert Paley, and began its life on paper. Using Scan2CAD, Paley studios were able to take their existing scanned raster sketches and patterns and convert them to a vector file making it suitable for editing in CAD programs (CADinfo, May 25, 2006). The images were ready for scaling, which allowed Paley to create a scaled version of Animals Always out of cardboard. After some tweaking the fabrication process was ready to bring this project to life in a massive scale with over 60 animals and some exotic vegetation. According to Albert Paley, it took three and a half years of designing, and eight months of fabrication to complete Animals Always (Sarah E. Lentini, Metropolitan, 2010, P. 6-9). Animals Always can be seen at the St. Louis Zoo in Missouri.

  

I believe that Animals Always is a statement about our planet. The sculpture’s Cor-Ten weathered steel give the nature of age and the reminder of extinction. In the sculpture, the animals stand with pride in their habitat as they observe the visitors upon entering the zoo. The scale of the animals and the vegetation builds up at its center, allowing the viewer to feel the intensity of nature, which speaks in its presence, and will be a constant reminder for generations.