A project that we worked on received a Lucy Moses award from the New York Landmarks Conservancy this year. It is not the smallest project we’ve worked on, although it is definitely at the small end of the spectrum; it is undeniably the cutest project we have ever worked on: the Nivola horses.
These chubby little guys were cast by the sculptor Constantino Nivola in 1963 to enhance a playground adjacent to public housing. Their condition gradually deteriorated and then they were removed from the playground. In the summer of 2023, we were invited by Mary Jablonski to join the team restoring the herd, and we jumped at the chance. (Note that I am actively restraining myself from using horse-related verbs as I write this.) Ellie Phetteplace, currently on a fellowship at the Getty Conservation Institute, was our project manager.
The structural problem was interesting: as the bases of solid concrete animal figures exposed to the sudden and occasionally extreme forces of children at play1 the legs carry some high stress. Nivola anticipated this and put rebar in the legs, but they hadn’t always prevented leg breaks.
The rebars were strange to analyze. Taken by themselves, they were strong enough, but too flexible to carry the loads properly; but they didn’t have enough embedment or anchorage to serve fully as part of a reinforced-concrete system. In the end, we analyzed them as a hybrid, assuming that the rebar had to take all the stress but the composite section was legit for stiffness.
Fun all around, a happy ending for the playground, and great work by the team.
- Seriously. Child-created live loads are less predictable and often greater than adult-created loads. ↩︎
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