By David Yeomans
/ CBS Chicago
A construction project on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology is beyond cool, it’s frozen solid. Faculty and students recently erected a colorful 12-foot tower out of snow and ice.
Architecture professor Antony Wood built it with some of his students who are getting masters’ degrees in the Tall Buildings and Vertical Urbanism program at Illinois Tech.
Instead of bricks, their creative building technique relied on snow, ice, and water balloons.
“It starts with water balloons. You get the water balloons. You put some food coloring in the water balloons, and then tie it, and you leave it out in the cold for two, three days,” Wood said.
After removing the colored blocks of ice from the water balloons, they essentially serve as the tower’s bricks, while snow and ice on the ground are then used to create a form of mortar.
“You put snow into the buckets and pour water on the snow, and that forms a mortar. That forms a mush. You put some mush on top of the block. You put another block, and it freezes together,” Wood said. “Until it thaws, that’s absolutely solid. You know, that’s going nowhere, and it’s a foot thick, because those blocks are 12-inch.”
To get up 12 feet, ladders wouldn’t do the trick; the crew needed construction equipment.
“A colleague of mine sent us a couple scaffolds and that’s how we got up to 12 foot,” Wood said.
Jyod Mankad got to top off the tower; not an easy task.
“One guy from inside who was putting all the blocks, adjusting the blocks,” he said. “It was very difficult.”
At night, the team lights up the tower for an even more spectacular look, but Wood said that’s not the best way to experience it.
“You should go inside. The best view is inside looking up,” he said.
From inside the tower, the colorful jewel-like blocks glisten with the blue sky at the top.
“I think it looks very beautiful,” Aida Alvarado said.
Wood said all his students get an A for their project.
“But I only get a B+,” Wood said, because he knocked his head on the tower’s igloo-like entrance when he was coming out.
With temperatures rising into the 40s this weekend, the tower has no chance of surviving much longer, and the team’s okay with that. Wood said he’s actually looking forward to the big melt.
“That’s a natural process,” Wood said. “The deconstruction of the ice tower can be as interesting as the construction.”
Some of the students who built the tower are from tropical or desert climates like Mexico, Iran, and India, so they’re not used to seeing snow and being out in the frigid cold. Temperatures were only in the single digits earlier this week when they built the tower.
“It took so many hours, and it was a lot more labor intensive. It was completely different, but it was a really fun experience,” Jumana Abuelreish, who was born and raised in Chicago, but whose family is Palestinian.
The students said they’re very proud of their project, especially after seeing many people coming by to take pictures.